"let fly with the secret pleasure of a bedwetter"

“My bladder was beginning to be insistent, too, and though I was armed with my Policeman’s Friend and would have ordinarily have let fly with the secret pleasure of a bedwetter, I couldn’t see myself pissing down a tube with a lady standing six feet from me.”

—    From Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose

The internet is surprisingly short on information about the “Policeman’s Friend” apparatus that Stegner’s narrator is describing above, but I imagine it’s a close cousin of the Stadium Pal "accessory" described by David Sedaris below. Another reason to love curmudeonly ol’ Lyman Ward:

What's a Marmon?

Glad you asked:

Everything about that behemoth was an anachronism—hand choke, starter button on the floor, a switch instead of a key, a hinged hood that lifted up on both sides, a chrome radiator cap in the form of a naked lady who leaned into the wind. Sid unscrewed the lady, stuck his finger down the pipe, and screwed her back on. He lifted one side of the hood and found the dipstick and pulled it out and carried it to the light and squinted at it and brought it back. With one foot he flattened the folding luggage rack on the running board, opened the door, and climbed in. Squinting down into the shadow, he pulled out the choke. I heard his foot pump the throttle three times.

“Hail Mary full of grease,” he said, and stepped on the starter.

A subterranean grinding, heavy and hoarse. I could imagine pistons the size of gallon jugs trying to move in the cylinders. Sid took his foot off the starter, adjusted the choke, and stepped down again. The grinding resumed, went on patiently for a good minute, grew slower, weakened. Another tired half turn—uh-RUG!—and on the last juice from the battery she coughed, raced, faded, caught again, and was running.

“Ha!” Sid said. He sat nursing her, easing the choke in until she talked to us comfortable. Looking in under the propped hood I could see that the engine was not twelve in line, as I had always half believed, but a V-16. It would have pulled a fire truck. At every stroke a stream of gasoline as thick as my finger must be pulsing through the carburetor. She panted at us in the whiskey-and-emphysema whisper of an Edith Wharton dowager. “Dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar,” the Marmon said.

—from Crossing to Safety , by Wallace Stegner

Dr. Breed told me that Dr. Hoenikker, as a very young man, had simply abandoned his car in Ilium traffic one morning.

“The police, trying to find out what was holding up traffic,” he said, “found Felix’s car in the middle of everything, its motor running, a cigar burning in the ash tray, fresh flowers in the vases . . .”

“Vases?”

“It was a Marmon, about the size of a switch engine. It had little cut-glass vases on the doorposts, and Felix’s wife used to put fresh flowers in the vases every morning. And there that car was in the middle of traffic.”

“Like the Marie Celeste ,” I suggested.

—from Cat’s Cradle , by Kurt Vonnegut

What They Were Reading: Wallace Stegner

From a 1974 interview between James Day and “Wally” Stegner. The whole thing is fascinating, but the really good stuff starts at about the 22 minute mark:

STEGNER: I think probably there’s no point in teaching people who don’t have a noticeable gift. Often there’s no point in teaching people who do  have a noticeable gift, if they don’t have those qualities of character, or neurosis or whatever it is that keep them at it. If they can be stopped, they’ll stop.

DAY: What is the gift?

STEGNER: The gift is partly of the senses, I think. It’s basically a gift of the senses, a gift of observing and also, I suppose this is William James’ doctrine, the gift of quick association so that one thing suggests another and things go together to become something new and ahead. I’m not a psychologist and you’d better not follow my formula, but I think it has to do with senses in the first instance. And then it has to do with the gift of words. A lot of writers have been writers of some consequence, however, without the gift of words-Dreiser being one. He just comes over you like a tank leaving his tread tracks in your lawn, and he clanks and grinds and so on, but he does tear up your lawn alright. And he never wrote a good sentence in his life. Not a one, I think.

DAY: So how do you measure good fiction then?

STEGNER: I think the measure should be nothing that one person defines. I can tell you the kind of fiction that I like. That’s about the best I can do, and the kind of fiction that I like is a kind of fiction which is not only perceptive, and which has people in it who are plausible people, and which has some relation to real life.

DAY: It’s important to you that it do relate to real people.

STEGNER: Oh yes, I’m a realist. I never get over that. I told you I was a nineteenth century character. I don’t know what it’s about unless it’s about real life. I don’t see any point in turning real life upside down, unless what you’re doing gives you a better look at real life, like looking at a view through your spraddled legs. That’s alright. I don’t mind that. But the ultimate thing is that illusion of reality, and some kind of commentary on reality. So I would guess that anybody who has something to say about reality, who can say it in memorable ways is going to appeal to me. And sometimes they get away with it even if they can’t say it in memorable ways. If they have, as Dreiser had, every gift of the novelist, except the verbal gift. He’s a great feeler. He knows how people feel in certain situations, and he is structurally, a man who can build bridges that reach from here to there. They go from bank to bank. But I guess if I were picking the kinds of people that I like best, what is good fiction, I would pick people like Checkov, Conrad, Turgenev. I seem to be very Slavic about it. Those are the people I’d take to my desert island if I had to take some three.

Review: Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

I really enjoyed this one.

We’ve talked about the sentence level writing here. It’s clever, it’s funny, and for an aspiring writer of my tastes, anyway, Stegner’s prose just hurts so  good. He’ll blow my mind with an amazingly simple simile or description (“the sun lay on my back like a poultice”) that both makes the reading a pleasure, and simultaneously crushes my hopes of ever having a shred of his talent. He’s one of the few writers about whom I think we should make a much bigger deal.

Stegner was among the first graduates of the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he founded the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, teaching authors like Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Gordon Lish and Larry McMurtry. The man’s got a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and yet you never hear the name of this ‘Dean of Western Writers’. As a westerner myself, I guess I feel a special affinity for him. Plus, we went to the same high school (see also Barr, Roseanne, class of ’70). Go Leopards! So there’s that.

Anyway, the book is littered with literary references— from the Bible, from the classics, from history, from novels and poems, of which I probably only grasp about 40%. But that 40% makes me feel awfully smart, and the remaining 60 just makes me want to read more. But what he really does that amazes me, is create interesting stories out of everyday lives and experiences. His narrator even addresses this issue in the text:

“There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the  promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”

Without all the lurid crap that populates so much of literary fiction, he still stitches together a story about things that truly matter: marriage, friendship, family, work, adversity, history, etc.

There was  one stretch where a whole lot of backstory was jammed uncomfortably into a few pages of dialogue, but that’s about the only fault I can find with the book. You should check it out- it was his swan song, afterall:

Nabokov's Tree Test

There is a famous account, perhaps apocryphal, of a visit made by a student to Vladimir Nabokov’s office at Cornell. The student declares to the writer his  great desire to be a writer, too, at which point:

Nabokov looks up from his reading he points to a tree outside his office window.

'What kind of tree is that?' he asks the student.

'What?'

'What is the name of that tree?' asks Nabokov. 'The one outside my window.'

'I don't know,'says the student.

'You'll never be a writer.' says Nabokov.

The Nabokov test was born. This conversation, whether or not it actually took place, came to mind the other night as I read this passage from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety :

“A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees—sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine.”

It would appear that, despite any other failings he has as a writer, Mr. Stegner passes the Nabokov test with flying colors.

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

At the suggestion of the one and only Tucker McCann, I am working my way through Wallace Stegner’s last novel, Crossing to Safety .  And, as happened the last time I picked up a Stegnerian opus, I am loving the pants off his writing style. Here are a handful of highlights from the first hundred pages or so. All emphasis is mine—they’re just the lines and phrases that really buttered my toast:

“Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar, too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.”

“Dew has soaked everything. I could wash my hands in the ferns, and when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders.”

“I am sitting with my back to the window. On the bed table is a tumbler of water that I set there for Sally last night. The sun, coming in flat, knocks a prismatic oval out of the tumbler and lays it on the ceiling.”

“The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop of canvas.”

“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”

“Between the taking of a cinnamon toast and tea she let drop bits of information that my mind scurried to gather up and plaster against the wall for future use, like a Bengali woman gathering wet cow dung for fuel.”

“Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty.”

“The view is spreading, bronzed, conventionalized like a Grant Wood landscape. The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other sides of hills.”

—"Near Sundown", by Grant Wood 

My life story- in ten authors or less

Like Wallace Thurman and Neal Cassady, I was born in Salt Lake City.

I went to the same high school as another Wallace, Wallace Stegner.  (and Roseanne Barr as a matter of fact. High School Musical was filmed there-yep, okay. I’ll stop.)

Like both Wallaces, I went on to the University of Utah. And like Thurman, I was a pre-med student while there.

Like Pearl Buck, I spent time abroad as a missionary.

Like Harper Lee I was once an airline reservations agent. Unlike Harper Lee, I didn’t have friends who funded a one-year sabbatical so that I could finally write my lasting literary masterpiece.

Which is why I’m a marketing slave in corporate America, which kind of makes be like Kurt Vonnegut, who worked as a PR man at GE before exploding onto the literary scene.

Like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Mitchell, I now live in central Georgia. (But yikes, unlike  those illustrious southern belles, I hope to live past their average 46 year lifespan. Perhaps Erskine Caldwell, who was born just 20 miles away and lived to age 83, bodes a little better for me.)

What about you? Who shares your biography?

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism

In case you hadn’t noticed, the publishing world is ga-ga over E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that was born as an erotica fan-fiction derivative of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

Take a moment to soak up that sentence, by the way, because it’s likely the last time we’ll touch on either of those series in this space. But it should work wonders on the search engines, and it does give us a timely segue into the juicy topic of plagiarism. Yes, that’s right- not even the high-brow world of classic literature is immune to charges of literary larceny. Consider the following:

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is said to have ripped off two 1920s sci-fi novels (The City of the Sun & The Honeymoon Trip of Mr. Hamilton) by Polish author Mieczyslaw Smolarski. I don’t speak Polish, but in the Slavic language I do  speak, “smola” means bad luck. Based on the relative fame and success of mssrs Huxley and Smolarski, I’d say the Polish author was appropriately named.

Oscar Wilde privately admitted to lifting from J.K. Huysman’s A Rebours, telling fellow author Max Beerbohm “Of course I plagiarize. It’s the privilege of the appreciative man.” That’s a bit like telling someone “Of course I stole your shirt. I liked it very much. You’re a man of fine taste, sir.”

Wallace Stegner found himself embroiled in a plagiarism scandal when his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose  was criticized by descendents of Mary Hallock Foote, a woman whose letters and memoirs inspired the novel and were mixed with Stegner’s original narrative to create it. In this case, I think I stand with Stegner, since he’s operating in a bit of a grey area. For one thing, he was working with one of Foote’s descendents, who gave him permission to do what he did. For another, he offered to let her read the full manuscript, which she refused. Now, were some of the excerpts a little longer than he originally promised? Sure. But they’re also the weakest part of the book, as I’ve observed here.

Here’s one final example, brought to our attention by Readthe100. It’s one I’ll pass on to you without judgment. (In other words, I’d love to hear what you, the readers, think about it):

Did T.S. Eliot bogart “The Wasteland” from, well… “The Wasteland?”

Review: Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

One of the best books I read last year was Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus Angle of Repose. But even though I loved the writing and appreciated the rare western setting (I may live in the South, but I was born, and will probably always think of myself as, a westerner) I’ve avoided reviewing the book here because I came out of the read with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I absolutely loved the curmudgeonly narrator, retired historian Lyman Ward. Under the guise of this crotchety old invalid, Stegner shares interesting views on history and hippies, and on the tricky marriage and family relationships that almost all of us can identify with. He’s able to weave two tales together- the disastrous modern-day failure of Ward’s own marriage and the improbable survival of his Victorian grandparents’ union on the Western frontier. It is a book that has important things to say, and one that will cause the reader to reflect on his or her own life. I loved the book, but there was one fly in the ointment: I couldn’t stand the main character by the end of the book.

I won’t throw out any spoilers, but the gist of my gripe is that the narrator’s grandmother, and the main subject of the book, begins to grate on me about half way through the story. There’s no question she’s asked to put up with more than her fair share of trials as her engineer husband tries to eke out a meager existence in the rough-and-tumble mining communities all across North America. But the self-righteousness and regret that comes to dominate her world-view really took a toll on my ability to care about her. She increasingly looks down her nose at her husband, and rues the day she ever cut ties with the East-coast salons where she feels she really belongs.

I have a hunch that Stegner spotted the problem, as well, and he looked for a way to tip the scales back in her favor. This would explain why her engineer husband suddenly develops a drinking problem just pages before she commits her most egregious marital crimes. I have to say, though, that this extra justification just didn’t work for me. Had he focused on the more sympathetic character of the husband, and told the same story through his eyes, I might have liked this great book even more.

Still, Stegner’s commentary on marriage and what makes it work will be well worth your time. As his narrator says about his grandparents towards the end of the book:

“What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.”

I highly recommend the book despite my misgivings about Susan Burling Ward as an unlikeable character. After all, I suppose we can still learn a thing or two from people who annoy us. Check it out:

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

I’ve talked about what makes a line of prose jump off the page at me here. I don’t necessarily make highlights as I read, but I’ll dog-ear a page for future reference if something catches my eye. Below is a smattering of such lines from Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. All emphasis is mine:

"Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report...

"Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! went the cushioning air. BOOM!  BOOM BOOM BOOM!BOOM!"

"She watched me with something like horror. I could feel her eyes on my back, and hear her breathing, and whenever I wheeled around in my chair and caught her eyes, they skittered away in desperate search for something they might have been looking at."

"A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone."

"Standing by the gateway he moved the sweating servants with an eyebrow, directed them with half-inch movements of his head."

"He hung from her breast like a ripe fruit ready to fall. His eyes were closed, then open, then closed again... She hated the thought that he must become a separate, uncomfortable metabolism cursed with effort and choice."

What about you? What’s the best line you’ve come across in your recent reading?