Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 17

Theodore Dreiser and Carl Reiner. If you don’t see it, I don’t know what to tell you:

Zora Neale Hurston and Queen Latifah: the cheekbones, the nose, the smile, the eyes… it’s all there:

Vladimir Nabokov and Alfred Hitchcock are not a bad match:

Neither are Alexander Solzhenytsin and Edward Norton Jr.:

And when I look at this picture of Charles Dickens all I hear is Vincent Schiavelli screaming for me to get off his train:

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.

First Line Friday: Stage Directions

Here’s another way to open your novel: Just start throwing stage directions around. Don’t worry about giving us a verb- just start naming stuff. Describe things. Give us a flavor for the stage set.

Take the opening of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy . I read the first three or four “sentences” of this book and couldn’t find a verb that addresses any of the subjects anywhere .

“Dusk- of a summer night.

“And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants- such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.

“And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six,-a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant-looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers. And with him a awoman perhaps five years his junior, taller, not so broad, but solid….”

It’s kind of a strange effect. You feel less like a reader than you feel like a studio executive getting pitched a new movie concept. But it doesn’t have to describe setting, this kind of opening can just as easily show you what’s inside the narrator’s brain, like this classic first line from Nabokov’s Lolita :

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Nabokov’s done this elsewhere, of course. Here is the opener from Bend Sinister :

“An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”

What do you think? Do stage directions work for you? Or do you just want the author to get on with the story?

William Faulkner, Geneologist

INTERVIEWER

Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER

I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What's wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier's Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that's how I became a writer.

INTERVIEWER

You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard him as a writer?

FAULKNER

He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.