Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, Distinguishing Between a Short Story and a Novel)

“A short story is like taking a small boat to sea and traveling along the coast. You can hear the sounds and see the lights of shore. A novel is like taking a ship straight out into the ocean until there is no land in sight.” —American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and essayist Chris Offutt quoted by Bradley Sides and Chapter16.org, “Human Drama: Q&A With Novelist Chris Offutt,” Pursuit Magazine, July 21, 2023

Quote of the Day (John Banville, on the Novel’s ‘Peculiar Contract’ With the Reader)

“One of the oddest aspects of the novel is the peculiar contract that it forges — how wonderfully ambiguous is the English language — between itself and the reader. Why are they believed, these cunningly fashioned lies? Sancho Panza, Emma Bovary, Leopold Bloom, these artefacts, conjured out of words, can seem more real to us than the person sitting opposite us at the breakfast table. What could be stranger? We are all children, longing for a story at bedtime, happy to suspend our disbelief for the sake of the fun.”— Irish novelist-memoirist John Banville, “Where Great Novels Come From,” The Financial Times, Sept. 2-3, 2023

Photo of John Banville taken May 10, 2019, by Jindrich Nosek (NoJin).

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on the Novel’s ‘Highest Merit’)

“The highest merit which a novel can have consists in perfect delineation of character.” ― English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), An Autobiography (1882)

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on Why Reading a Novel is a ‘Difficult and Complex Art’)

“To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist – the great artist – gives you.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “How Should One Read a Book?,” originally delivered as a lecture at Hayes Court Common School, Kent, England, Jan. 30, 1926, reprinted as a book in 2020

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on How the Days in Our Lives Are Not Equal)

“[I]n our life the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different ‘speeds.’ There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann’s Way, Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time, translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913-1927)

This past weekend marked the 150^th birthday of Marcel Proust, and before the time passed by irrevocably, I really had to take note of it here.

I would not change my basic opinion of the French novelist expressed in this blog post from eight years ago. But the age of COVID-19 has certainly deepened my appreciation for the achievement on which his reputation rests: the seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, the result of his massive outburst of “involuntary memory.”

What other major novelist could have not merely survived our pandemic, but thrived? At the height of his powers, Hemingway would have gone crazy without the chance to fish, hunt big game, ski, watch bullfights, or simply drink at cafes. Dickens, unable to tramp the streets of London, would have felt cooped up inside with his wife and kids. Balzac would have bemoaned all those hours not spent in Parisian salons, soaking up social manners. Even Henry James would have withered if he couldn’t have taken afternoon teas with friends.

But Proust? He would have been made for this situation. Asthmatic, he would have been even more determined to shut out the world than he had been when he got down to work in his cork-lined apartment. Though it’s almost impossible to imagine, he might conceivably have produced even more than the 4,000-plus pages and nearly 1.3 million words of his magnum opus. There would have been nothing to distract him from his geyser of memory.

If there is any limit to the devotion of Proust fans, I have yet to discover it. Consider these examples: 

*The presence of multiple blogs paying tribute to him: “182 Days of Marcel Proust,” a journal about reading In Search of Lost Time at the rate of at least ten pages a day; “Proust for All,” with French and English posts; and “Reading Proust for Fun.”

*A book-length analysis of his life and art that functions as a kind of literary self-help manual: Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life; and,

*In a fictional example of this last title, the decision by the title character in Larry McMurtry’s Duane's Depressed (the concluding volume of his “Last Picture Show” Trilogy) to follow his lesbian psychologist’s prescription for his late middle-age melancholy: read Proust. (A remarkable plot development, considering that Duane’s reading to this point in his life has been limited.)

What also fascinates me about Proust is how he represents not just a kind of Mount Everest for readers, but also for filmmakers. For a medium that consists fundamentally of moving pictures, In Search of Lost Time can be a stark challenge: long on leisurely description and rumination, short on dialogue and plot.

But that hasn’t stopped screenwriters and directors from dreaming about bringing the novelist to screens big and small. In 1984, Volker Schlöndorff directed Swann in Love, with Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and the director himself taking a crack at Swann’s Way. Raúl Ruiz adapted Time Regained (1999), based on the last novel in the series; and Chantal Akerman's The Captive (2000) focused on the fifth volume, The Prisoner.

Both Luchino Visconsi and Joseph Losey were forced to abandon their plans to adapt In Search of Lost Time when they could not secure enough financing. But in Losey’s case, all was not lost.

In 1978, his collaborator, Harold Pinter, published the unproduced screenplay. Had it been filmed, it would have clocked in at about four hours—pushing the boundaries of visual narrative, just as Proust had stretched what future writers could do with the novel.

(See Peter Bradshaw’s 2013 essay in the British newspaper The Guardian on “the troubled history of Proust on film.”)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Living the Lives of His Characters)

“When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Riviera, I make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, Ed Whelan, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.”— American humorist and actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “How I Create,” in The Best of Robert Benchley: 72 Timeless Stories of Wit, Wisdom and Whimsy (1983)

Quote of the Day (Penelope Fitzgerald, on Writing Biographies vs. Novels)

“On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.”—British novelist-biographer Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), in a 1987 letter to her American publisher, Chris Carduff, in So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (2008)

In one sense, I agree with Ms. Fitzgerald (who chronicled the lives of her father and three uncles in The Knox Family): For the biographer, it may be enormously difficult to spend years researching and writing about a figure you despise (or come to despise, as Lawrence Thompson did while producing his three-volume life of Robert Frost).

But in another sense, I must take issue with her. For readers, learning about a hateful figure—particularly one possessing power—is crucial in ensuring that the influence of such people is never wielded again.

Even for people in between—more complicated types, like Ernest Hemingway—putting distasteful details in the full context of their lives and times can demonstrate why their work matters and endures, despite their considerable personal failings.

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on the Human ‘Wish to be Told a Story’)

“The simplest function of the novel is the tale, but only someone who has never tried it thinks that the discovery and relation of a tale is simple work. The wish to be told a story never dies in the human heart, and great storytellers enjoy a long life that more subtle writers sometimes envy.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), “Reading,” from The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1997)

Quote of the Day (William Trevor, on the Short Story as ‘An Explosion of Truth’)

“If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.” —Irish short-story master William Trevor (1928-2016), interviewed by Mira Stout for “William Trevor, The Art of Fiction No. 108,” The Paris Review (Spring 1989)

Quote of the Day (Saul Bellow, on the Novel’s True and False Impressions)

“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.” —American novelist Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Nobel Prize lecture, Dec. 12, 1976

The Bronte Bicentennial: Celebrating a Romantic Rebel

Young writers are continually told to “write what you know.” Novelist Charlotte Bronte—born 200 years ago this week in England—seems to have learned the lesson on her own without hearing the advice from anyone else. She certainly left enough clues in her fiction of an intense identification with her most famous heroine, Jane Eyre.

It started with the very name of the place the young governess comes to work: Thornfield Hall. Although critics have noted the religious symbolism of the estate’s name (the “thorns and thistles” inflected by God as Adam’s punishment for sin, Christ’s “crown of thorns” to expiate it), its also echoes Bronte’s birthplace: Thornton, in Yorkshire.

Jane’s work as a teacher and governess was even more strongly rooted in Charlotte’s experience. You can practically hear the voice of the character in her author’s complaint that a governess “is not considered as a living and rational being.”

Moreover, the novel’s atmosphere of madness, deprivation and death could not have been communicated so vividly except by someone all too familiar with these elements in her own household. The madness was supplied by younger brother Branwell, who grew into a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict. The deprivation came from her family’s shabby gentility, a condition resulting from her father’s status as a country curate of modest means. Death was the ever-present, unshakable companion of her family: Charlotte’s mother died when the girl was five; her two older sisters died within a month of each other when Charlotte was only nine; and Branwell and her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, died within nine months by the time she reached her early thirties. Charlotte, who lived the longest of the children, died at age 37, succumbing to complications from childbirth.

All the more striking, then, that with such limited time, Charlotte, Emily and Anne produced such striking—and deeply individual—works. (See my prior post on how the trio adopted male pseudonyms—Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, respectively—to circumvent the sexist book reviewers of her time.)

Jane Eyre is both wish-fulfillment fantasy and cri de couer, a novel of romance and rebellion. At the same time it encouraged female readers with its vision of a heroine easily the intellectual match of any male, it presented a magnetic but troubled hero who could have been cast from the same mold as Lord Byron: i.e., “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in Lady Caroline Lamb’s famous phrase about the poet.

Despite herself, Jane is drawn to the mysterious, remote Rochester and is absolutely sure, despite his cynicism, black moods and injunction to go nowhere near the attic, that he is the man for her. Bronte was working within a template, created in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, of a young woman who ends up reforming a problematic, elusive male. Well into the 20^th and 21^st centuries, female readers and viewers continued to see dashing, darkly handsome males (e.g., Rhett Butler, Mr. Big of Sex and the City) and glimpse The Husband Within.

I am absolutely convinced that, had Mel Gibson’s adman really wanted to figure out What Women Want, he could have done a focus group of the devoted readers of Charlotte Bronte’s classic and determined the answer with far fewer complications than in the film.  

At the same time it expresses full desire for a deep, body-and-soul love (Jane turns down a proposal from the upright but bloodless minister St. John Rivers but marries her tormented but passionate employer), the novel insists on dignity and autonomy, both for mistreated girls and women exploited in the service of affluent families. As Bronte’s recent biographer Claire Harman noted in an article in this past weekend’s Financial Times, the novel profoundly disturbed the Victorian political and literary establishment with its bitter denunciations of class distinctions.

Charles Dickens had already rocked that establishment to the core with Oliver Twist, one of the first—perhaps even the first—novels with a child as the main character. But Charlotte Bronte did two things that even Dickens, venturesome as he was, hadn’t thought of: she made the orphan a female and wrote the novel in the orphan's own voice. (Six years later, Dickens adopted Bronte’s innovations in Bleak House, but most readers would agree that, despite its deserved high status in British literature, his heroine, Esther Summerson, is no match for Jane’s vibrancy.)

Jane Eyre may endure for the simplest of reasons: it grabs the reader by the neck on its first pages and never lets go. It effortlessly fuses setting (a raw winter day at the emotionally cold home of Jane’s guardian, Mrs. Reed), characterization (Jane’s “consciousness of my physical inferiority” to Mrs. Reed’ children), and action (her withdrawal to the library, then Mrs. Reed’s punishment: confining her to “the red room”).  From the start, she is an underdog whom we want to win. By the end, Charlotte Bronte convinces us that she deserves to, as well.

(Portrait of Charlotte Bronte ca. 1839 by J. H. Thompson)

Quote of the Day (Gillian Flynn, on Her Failed Attempt to Read Great Books)

“Several years back (and by several, I probably mean 12), I decided to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in chronological order. I thought it’d force me to read some books I already should have read (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 winner) and also read some more obscure novels I never would have picked up otherwise (the truly lovely Early Autumn, by Louis Bromfield, 1927). Alas, I have stalled out on Honey in the Horn, by H. L. Davis (1936). I find it physically impossible to pick up this book, and over the past few years, it has been demoted from the top of my night stand, to the shelf below my night stand, where it gathers dust and resents my neglect. It’s not the book’s fault. I just can’t get past the title — Honey in the Horn? — and its rather ominous meaning: ‘from a line in a square-dancing tune.’ Shiver. Someday the guilt will break me.” —Gone Girl novelist Gillian Flynn, on books she is embarrassed not to have read yet, in a “By the Book” interview, The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2014