LUC SANTE
Flesh and Bone
Keynote address delivered at the March 2016 William Paterson University Spring Writer's Conference
"Flesh and Bone"--the theme of this conference--distinguishes what we call "creative" writing from all the other kinds of writing. That is, the fleshiness and bloodiness of the writing is not merely what separates poetry and fiction from corporate reports and committee proceedings and doctoral dissertations in number theory, but it is also a good guide to how we distinguish among the many offerings in the nonfiction aisles. That quality of corporeality, of life as it is experienced by the fragile human body, is what makes reporting become journalism, for example, or critical writing or sports writing or political writing become literature. Naturally, that human factor is deep and many-layered, but it begins at the simplest level. It begins with language.
French newspapers have long had a feature that is pretty much unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. Somewhere on page two or three there will be a column of brief items that constitute what are called fait-divers, which can be translated as "assorted facts." These are news stories that are little more than anecdotes: generally minor crimes and local disasters and examples of grotesque misbehavior. Although no more than twenty-five words or so are budgeted for these items, there is actually quite a bit of latitude as to how that word-count will be spent. Even a horrendously affecting personal tragedy can be retailed in a way that makes it sound like a bookkeeping entry, such as this item from Le Matin in 1906: "In Brignoles, Mme. S., who had recently given birth, killed herself yesterday by jumping out the window, during a bout of fever." Soon after that item ran, however, the column was somewhat improbably taken over by Félix Fénéon, a mysterious and multi-faceted figure, who had already been among other things a pioneering art critic and the editor-in-chief of a number of important magazines, such as La Revue Blanche. Fénéon, who wrote the column for about six months, immediately changed the tone. "Again and again Mme. Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields." That was one of his items. Notice what's going on: Her emotions are approached from the inside, from the very start--"again and again" leading naturally to "exasperated"--and then when she finally cracks she doesn't just flee, she flees "across the fields," and the wording conveys an image of her diminishing form, framed by cornstalks. Here's another: "There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law's hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in." It was an awful thing for both Larrieux and his mother-in-law, of course, but Fénéon is anticipating the laws of the animated cartoon as they will be formulated several decades later. Larrieux gets a conk on the noggin, the mother-in-law lights up like a Christmas tree, and then the whole top of the frame comes down. The only things missing are a grand piano being crushed and then, after an infinitesimal pause, a single shoe dropping from the upper story.
Fénéon's news items are crafted like Swiss watches; they are miniatures in which every iota is calculated for maximum effect within a severely restricted set of bounds. While conveying the essence of the news item, he homes in on specific details, orders the sequence of the narrative, orders the words and phrases for both rhythm and delayed impact, hangs a tale sometimes on the choice of a single word, such as in this item: "The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned. The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three of them were spotted with a little blood." It's that "little" that is devastating. If he had written "three of the children were injured" it would take an effort on the reader's part to feel much, but the image of drops of blood on a laurel crown is indelible, and "a little blood" immediately suggests an understatement. It hurts. Perhaps his single best item is this one, which achieves the frozen perfection of an epigram: "On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more." What more could be said? You see the awful thing happen, as it were, before your eyes. Fénéon could be accused of heartlessness, of turning the misfortunes of some into entertainment for others, but consider that he causes the reader to feel something for those long-gone citizens who otherwise left behind little more than a tombstone and perhaps a dusty portrait somewhere. He has transferred their adversities directly to our emotions, triggering a recognition that is never less than profoundly human.
Of course, while reporting may aspire to journalism, writing can indeed sometimes get in the way of the facts, and that is perhaps not always the best thing for newspapers. Thomas Beer's 1926 biography of Stephen Crane is so vivid that it seems he simply made up large parts of it. If he can be trusted on this one detail, though, Crane at age 20 was fired from the New York Herald for getting the whole thing wrong. "He could not report. Apparently he did not even try to report. Of what use to any newspaper was an impression of impatient horses kicking 'grey ice of the gutter into silvery angles that hurtled and clicked on frozen stone' when the boy had been sent to get the facts of a large and important fire? The stamping horses hitched to the engine and the stolid movement of a young fireman stepping back from a falling wall, these things took his eye and went on paper. The name of the building's owner, its number on the street, and the question of its insurance simply wafted from the brain behind the plunging blue eyes. Nor could a city editor accept an interview with a prominent alderman when that dignitary, under charges of corruption, 'sat like a rural soup tureen in his chair and said "Aw!" sadly whenever ash from his cigar bounced on his vest of blood and black.'" Crane was no respecter of persons and couldn't remember the boring stuff--but at this remove, whose account of either of those events would you rather read? When I was a movie critic many years ago, it one day occurred to me that instead of trying to take notes in the dark, I could simply use my memory as a filter. Any line of dialogue sufficiently distinct to be quoted would also be sufficiently distinct for me to remember it after leaving the screening room. Accordingly, sufficient proof of the value of Crane's reportage for me is that I've remembered the click of those chunks of ice kicked against the curb by fire horses over the quarter century since the last time I read Beer's book.
Perhaps the decision to make description vivid is always a matter of choice. Maybe establishing too much in the way of concrete detail will get in the way of the story, or the voice, or the moral urgency of the subject. But sometimes a physical account is in fact the assignment, such as the one James Agee faced in 1949, when Life hired him to write about silent-movie comedians for an audience composed in large part of people who had never seen a silent movie, since the last silents had been made over twenty years earlier, revival houses were few, and television barely existed yet. His task, therefore, was to recreate those movies using nothing more than prose--using words to account for business that was bereft of words. "When a modern comedian gets hit on the head," he wrote, "the most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license, and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a kind of poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it--look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palm downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor, and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.
"Startled by a cop, this same comedian might grab his hatbrim with both hands and yank it down violently over his ears, jump high in the air, come to earth in a split violent enough to telescope his spine, spring thence into a coattail-flattening sprint and dwindle at rocket speed to the size of a gnat along the grand, forlorn perspective of some lazy back boulevard."
Notice how he does not simply describe, but replicate, using rhythm, phrase length, and the employment of unusual words--"cadenza," "tallow," "vortex," "nirvana"--which capture the reader's attention and delay it for an instant, freezing the action to permit its impact to sink in. Notice how "gnat" is the size of a gnat alongside the marble tombstone façades of "grand, forlorn perspective." Notice how his prose contains both the spectacle and the viewer, and very nearly the house orchestra into the bargain.
A writer with an equally broad range of effects was A. J. Liebling, who for thirty years covered street life, food, boxing, World War II, the press, and sundry other matters for the New Yorker. Foremost among his subjects was rascality, which he savored as a connoisseur. His 1961 book The Earl of Louisiana collects a series of pieces he wrote about Earl Long, who served as governor of Louisiana for three non-consecutive terms between 1939 and his death in 1960, and whose exploits included a liaison with the stripper Blaze Starr and, during his last term, committal to an insane asylum in Galveston, Texas, by order of his wife. He discovered that confinement did not legally impair his status as governor, let himself out of the institution, and resumed office. He was, that is to say, the sort of subject that providence every once in a while bestows upon a deserving writer, and Liebling's portrait fittingly marshals all his strengths in the service of three-dimensionality. Here he is watching Long deliver a speech in an obscure small town in the northern part of the state.
"Uncle Earl wore a jacket, shirt and tie, a pattern of statesmanlike conventionality, on a night when everybody off the platform was coatless and tieless. The tie itself was a quiet pattern of inkblots against an olive-and-pearl background, perhaps a souvenir Rorschach test from Galveston. The suit, a black job that dated from the days when he was fat and sassy, hung loosely about him as once it had upon a peg in the supermarket where the Governor liked to buy his clothes….
"It is difficult to report a speech by Uncle Earl chronologically, listing the thoughts in order of appearance. They chased one another on and off the stage like characters in a Shakespearean battle scene, full of alarums and sorties….
"The expressions on the Governor's face changed with the poetry of his thought, now benign, now mischievous, now indignant. Only the moist hazel eyes remained the same, fixed on a spot above and to the rear of the audience as if expecting momentarily the arrival of a posse…
''I was in Minneannapolis once, talking to the Governor of Minnesota, a great expert on insanity,' Uncle Earl said, 'and he told me an astonishing fact--there are ten times as many crazy people in Minnesota as in Louisiana. I suppose that is on account of the cold climate. They cannot go around in their shirt-sleeves all year around, go huntin' and fishin' in all seasons, as we do. We got a wonderful climate,' he said, and paused to wipe the sweat from his face with a handkerchief soaked in Coca-Cola, which he poured from a bottle out of a bucket of ice handed him by one of the lesser delegates on his ticket. The bugs soaring up at the edge of the lighted area and converging on the floodlights formed a haze as thick as a beaded curtain…
"When he had wet himself sufficiently, he drank the heeltap and set the bottle down. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked, dramatically, with the butt held between his thumb and middle finger and the other fingers raised, in the manner of a ventriloquist. While he smoked right-handed, he pulled out his handkerchief and blotted his wet face with his left.
"He sat unheeding of the rumpus raised by his adherents, like a player in a jazz band who has finished his solo, or a flashy halfback who poses on the bench while the defensive team is in. The candidates ranted and bellowed, putting across a few telling but familiar points….
"But the bored crowd stood fast, knowing that a whistle would blow and the star would throw off his blanket and come onto the field again to run rings around the forces of Mammon. Sure enough, after what seemed to me an endless succession of subordinate rant, the Governor threw away the last of a chain of cigarettes and shook his head like a man waking up on a park bench and remembering where he is. He got up and walked to the microphone so fast that the man using it had barely time to say, 'I thank you' before the Governor took it away from him."
It is a difficult piece to condense. Perhaps fifty percent of it is given over to quoting Long's remarks, and I have edited it to concentrate on Liebling's characterizations--which however ends up sacrificing the interplay of the amen corner and the odd heckler, the subplots involving political opponents and their numerous children, the understated drama of the event's racial dynamics--Long being noted as unusually open-minded regarding his African-American constituents. Nevertheless, you get an idea of the figure Long cuts--plainspoken, somewhat eccentric, calculating, a bit of a vaudevillian. You hear how Liebling paces his paragraphs to register the rhythm of the proceedings, alternately languid and hectic. You feel the heat and the bugs on your skin and you recoil from the sensation of bathing your face in sugar water. You are there, more fully than if you were watching a film of the event.
In my own work I tend more often than not to treat of the past, which is the greatest object of my fascination. That means that I write about history, although I don't consider myself a historian, and neither do historians. I don't begin with a thesis and don't reach a conclusion, and don't measure my ideas against those of others in the field. I'm more interested in trying to enter the past, generally with a stack of open questions in my hand. As G. M. Trevelyan put it, "The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions but now all gone, vanishing one after the other, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall be gone like ghosts at cockcrow." Any minute of the past is nearly impossible to apprehend, as any moment of the present is impossible to encompass in all its complexity and contradiction. The past can perhaps be gotten in broad strokes, but those are uncannily subject to revision--our ideas of what the ancient Greeks were like or what the French Revolution meant are regularly exploded and replaced by some contradictory idea, even if both are to equal degrees true and untrue. But that makes it all the more important, it seems to me, to try to catch, fleetingly and imperfectly, the strangeness of the past--its pastness.
And that means looking for the flesh and blood of the past. The past only has living witnesses going back maybe sixty or seventy years at any given time. And even if those witnesses lobby on behalf of their memories they do so quietly and are not given much amplification. We build our own idea of their past that stands in contrast, even if both are to perhaps unequal degress true and untrue. I can tell everybody I meet that Mad Men gets the 60s wrong, sometimes radically, but nobody is much interested in listening, and anyway I was a child at the time, so what do I know? So we go on thinking of the Victorians as starched and prudish, and the pirates of the Spanish Main as rough-humored and jaunty, and no one outside the academy gets much exercised about our misconceptions. But then sometimes you come across something that reveals a sliver of what the past was like, and for just an instant, maybe, you are looking at something actual. Consider for example that your ancestors before the twentieth century very likely had a courtship radius that extended only about two hours' walk from their village, at maximum--a difference that was dramatically abridged by the spread of the bicycle. Consider that for much of human history the workday was determined by light; that neighboring cities might not observe the same year; that few people had more than a rough idea of their own age. Consider that for many centuries the great majority of humans owned almost nothing. The objects that have come down to us and sit in museums represent the belongings of the rich and powerful--if they were not actually the property of the deity alone--so that few people ever got to see them up close and they are in no way representative of the common life of their age. That is why people who undergo so-called past-life regression inevitably turn out to have once been Cleopatra or King Arthur--because there is so little available upon which to hang more realistic identities.
Personally I tend to hang around the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where at least I can make use of a fairly large range of literary and visual witnesses. If I'm curious about what life was like in South Dakota in 1910 I can consult local newspapers, railroad timetables, circus itineraries, farmers' diaries, picture postcards, almanacs, seed catalogs, published sermons, legislative minutes, stereoscope slides, government land brochures, traveling salesmen's account books, school records, and letters East. Any of those items might let in a crack of light, and even the least of them will contribute to a general impression, if only by adding to the store of rough statistics. If I'm looking for evidence that is further enhanced by emotion, however, I look for good writers, and while it is far from impossible that there may be a few, or more than a few, among the diarists and letter-writers and newspaper columnists of South Dakota in 1910, I find most of my witnesses clustered around cities.
I recently published a book about Paris, specifically the Paris of the working and so-called dangerous classes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was abundantly served by my sources. Not only could I draw upon newspapers, postcards, song lyrics, police reports, pamphlets, and cartoons, but I had my pick of memoirs, travel essays, novels, and even poems, by some of the finest in the business. I would find myself reading novels the way I scrutinize photographs, looking at the background and edges of the action. There were great novelists of the period who were useless to me, either because they ignored the kind of people I was interested in, such as Proust, or because they focused on characters and their emotions in close-up, to the detriment of the setting and its color, such as Jules Vallès. But Balzac, Hugo, Zola were indispensible because they were reporters as much as they were psychologists or dramatists or composers of symphonies. Balzac, writing in 1830, described a now-vanished street called Rue du Tourniquet Saint-Jean, "the widest part of which was its issue into Rue de la Tixeranderie, where it was only five feet across. In rainy weather brackish waters bathed the feet of the old houses that lined the street, carrying along the garbage each household had deposited in a corner by a bollard. Since the ragpickers' carts couldn't get through, the inhabitants counted on rainstorms to cleanse their permanently muddy street--how could it have been clean? When in summer the sun beamed its rays straight down upon Paris, a sheet of gold, sharp as a saber blade, momentarily lit up the shadows of the street without being able to dry the permanent damp that dominated those black and silent houses from the ground floor to the second. The inhabitants, who in June lit their lamps at five in the afternoon, never blew them out at all in winter."
And Hugo, writing of the 1820s, described the southern part of the city: "Forty years ago, the solitary walker who ventured into the wasteland of the Salpêtrière and descended the Boulevard d'Italie came upon places where you could say that Paris had disappeared. It wasn't empty, since there were passers-by; it wasn't the country, since there were houses and streets; it wasn't the city, since the streets had ruts where grass grew, as on rural turnpikes; it wasn't a village, since the houses were too tall. What was it, then? It was an inhabited location where there was nobody, it was a deserted place where there was somebody; it was a boulevard in the big city, a street in Paris, that was wilder at night than a forest, gloomier in the day than a graveyard." And Zola, in the 1870s, describing a laundry: "Steam rose from the corners and spread a bluish veil across the room. Heavy droplets hung in the air, exuding a soapy, clammy, insipid odor; sometimes stronger whiffs of bleach predominated. At washboards on both sides of the center aisle were rows of women, their arms bare to the shoulders, their necks bare, their skirts drawn up showing colored socks and big lace-up shoes. They beat the washing furiously, laughed, tilted backward to yell a word through the din, leaned over their tubs, rough, ungainly, brutal, as soaked as if they'd been in a downpour, their skin reddened and steaming. Around and under them ran a great stream: buckets of water transported and dumped, cold-water faucets left wide open to piss from on high, splashes from the wash stations, drips from rinsed clothing, the puddles they trudged through leaking out in little streamlets on the slanted flagstones. And amid all the shouts, the rhythmic thumps, the murmuring sound of rain and that thunderstorm rumble stifled by the wet ceiling, the steam engine, over to the right, all white with fine dew, panted and snored unrelentingly, the dancing agitation of its flywheel seeming to guide the whole enormous racket."
For that matter, I found much of use in Francis Carco, a prolific early twentieth-century writer of novels that because of their genre status and melodrama are not quite considered fine art, but that nevertheless are both solidly written and consistently alive to their settings: Here he is on the far edge of the city in 1919, where the men on the street were "fugitive personalities whose eyes lit up and went out rapidly. In that sector where the plaster shanties, isolated among vacant lots, gave an oblique appearance to everything, they added to that impression…. The green shutters--a washed-out green--alternated with little shacks of a sickly yellow, their walls carved up with graffiti, and with the shuttered fronts of unfinished new houses, and when night fell the collection of things incomplete or already dead gave of a feeling of emptiness and weighty unease…. The flat roofs of banal houses cut a silhouette against the sky that was only occasionally relieved by small chimneys that looked like still-smoking cigarette butts someone had glued there."
Those are the kinds of descriptions that make the past jump to life. We can picture those scenes and hear them and even smell them. All of them display the foreignness of the past to full advantage. And yet they are not unintelligible. Far from it. We can call upon our own experiences of damp cellars and laundry odors and the fringes of cities to put matters into perspective, adapting our memories to fit the description, nearly always employing actual settings from our past, enlarging this detail and diminishing that one. Our memory is our greatest tool and resource. We employ it continuously in reading--there's an essay by Robert Benchley in which he walks down the street of his home town, recalling that he set the death of Patroclus on this street corner and the execution of Sydney Carton on that square. And we employ it just as much in writing, so that our memories, mutatis mutandis, merge into those of our readers. Some of this process is conscious and willed, but a great deal more is not. We may become aware, suddenly, of the fact that we are basing this character's speech patterns on those of Uncle Ned, or that the room we have in mind is one we only saw that one time in 1982, or we may never know the exact provenance of this turn of phrase or that shaft of light, but they all come from deep within, freighted with emotion that gives our sentences volume and force and speaks to the emotions of our readers. Toward the end of his short life, Stephen Crane summed up his calling in a letter to a younger colleague: "An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake."
"Flesh and Bone"--the theme of this conference--distinguishes what we call "creative" writing from all the other kinds of writing. That is, the fleshiness and bloodiness of the writing is not merely what separates poetry and fiction from corporate reports and committee proceedings and doctoral dissertations in number theory, but it is also a good guide to how we distinguish among the many offerings in the nonfiction aisles. That quality of corporeality, of life as it is experienced by the fragile human body, is what makes reporting become journalism, for example, or critical writing or sports writing or political writing become literature. Naturally, that human factor is deep and many-layered, but it begins at the simplest level. It begins with language.
French newspapers have long had a feature that is pretty much unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. Somewhere on page two or three there will be a column of brief items that constitute what are called fait-divers, which can be translated as "assorted facts." These are news stories that are little more than anecdotes: generally minor crimes and local disasters and examples of grotesque misbehavior. Although no more than twenty-five words or so are budgeted for these items, there is actually quite a bit of latitude as to how that word-count will be spent. Even a horrendously affecting personal tragedy can be retailed in a way that makes it sound like a bookkeeping entry, such as this item from Le Matin in 1906: "In Brignoles, Mme. S., who had recently given birth, killed herself yesterday by jumping out the window, during a bout of fever." Soon after that item ran, however, the column was somewhat improbably taken over by Félix Fénéon, a mysterious and multi-faceted figure, who had already been among other things a pioneering art critic and the editor-in-chief of a number of important magazines, such as La Revue Blanche. Fénéon, who wrote the column for about six months, immediately changed the tone. "Again and again Mme. Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields." That was one of his items. Notice what's going on: Her emotions are approached from the inside, from the very start--"again and again" leading naturally to "exasperated"--and then when she finally cracks she doesn't just flee, she flees "across the fields," and the wording conveys an image of her diminishing form, framed by cornstalks. Here's another: "There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law's hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in." It was an awful thing for both Larrieux and his mother-in-law, of course, but Fénéon is anticipating the laws of the animated cartoon as they will be formulated several decades later. Larrieux gets a conk on the noggin, the mother-in-law lights up like a Christmas tree, and then the whole top of the frame comes down. The only things missing are a grand piano being crushed and then, after an infinitesimal pause, a single shoe dropping from the upper story.
Fénéon's news items are crafted like Swiss watches; they are miniatures in which every iota is calculated for maximum effect within a severely restricted set of bounds. While conveying the essence of the news item, he homes in on specific details, orders the sequence of the narrative, orders the words and phrases for both rhythm and delayed impact, hangs a tale sometimes on the choice of a single word, such as in this item: "The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned. The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three of them were spotted with a little blood." It's that "little" that is devastating. If he had written "three of the children were injured" it would take an effort on the reader's part to feel much, but the image of drops of blood on a laurel crown is indelible, and "a little blood" immediately suggests an understatement. It hurts. Perhaps his single best item is this one, which achieves the frozen perfection of an epigram: "On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more." What more could be said? You see the awful thing happen, as it were, before your eyes. Fénéon could be accused of heartlessness, of turning the misfortunes of some into entertainment for others, but consider that he causes the reader to feel something for those long-gone citizens who otherwise left behind little more than a tombstone and perhaps a dusty portrait somewhere. He has transferred their adversities directly to our emotions, triggering a recognition that is never less than profoundly human.
Of course, while reporting may aspire to journalism, writing can indeed sometimes get in the way of the facts, and that is perhaps not always the best thing for newspapers. Thomas Beer's 1926 biography of Stephen Crane is so vivid that it seems he simply made up large parts of it. If he can be trusted on this one detail, though, Crane at age 20 was fired from the New York Herald for getting the whole thing wrong. "He could not report. Apparently he did not even try to report. Of what use to any newspaper was an impression of impatient horses kicking 'grey ice of the gutter into silvery angles that hurtled and clicked on frozen stone' when the boy had been sent to get the facts of a large and important fire? The stamping horses hitched to the engine and the stolid movement of a young fireman stepping back from a falling wall, these things took his eye and went on paper. The name of the building's owner, its number on the street, and the question of its insurance simply wafted from the brain behind the plunging blue eyes. Nor could a city editor accept an interview with a prominent alderman when that dignitary, under charges of corruption, 'sat like a rural soup tureen in his chair and said "Aw!" sadly whenever ash from his cigar bounced on his vest of blood and black.'" Crane was no respecter of persons and couldn't remember the boring stuff--but at this remove, whose account of either of those events would you rather read? When I was a movie critic many years ago, it one day occurred to me that instead of trying to take notes in the dark, I could simply use my memory as a filter. Any line of dialogue sufficiently distinct to be quoted would also be sufficiently distinct for me to remember it after leaving the screening room. Accordingly, sufficient proof of the value of Crane's reportage for me is that I've remembered the click of those chunks of ice kicked against the curb by fire horses over the quarter century since the last time I read Beer's book.
Perhaps the decision to make description vivid is always a matter of choice. Maybe establishing too much in the way of concrete detail will get in the way of the story, or the voice, or the moral urgency of the subject. But sometimes a physical account is in fact the assignment, such as the one James Agee faced in 1949, when Life hired him to write about silent-movie comedians for an audience composed in large part of people who had never seen a silent movie, since the last silents had been made over twenty years earlier, revival houses were few, and television barely existed yet. His task, therefore, was to recreate those movies using nothing more than prose--using words to account for business that was bereft of words. "When a modern comedian gets hit on the head," he wrote, "the most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license, and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a kind of poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it--look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palm downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor, and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.
"Startled by a cop, this same comedian might grab his hatbrim with both hands and yank it down violently over his ears, jump high in the air, come to earth in a split violent enough to telescope his spine, spring thence into a coattail-flattening sprint and dwindle at rocket speed to the size of a gnat along the grand, forlorn perspective of some lazy back boulevard."
Notice how he does not simply describe, but replicate, using rhythm, phrase length, and the employment of unusual words--"cadenza," "tallow," "vortex," "nirvana"--which capture the reader's attention and delay it for an instant, freezing the action to permit its impact to sink in. Notice how "gnat" is the size of a gnat alongside the marble tombstone façades of "grand, forlorn perspective." Notice how his prose contains both the spectacle and the viewer, and very nearly the house orchestra into the bargain.
A writer with an equally broad range of effects was A. J. Liebling, who for thirty years covered street life, food, boxing, World War II, the press, and sundry other matters for the New Yorker. Foremost among his subjects was rascality, which he savored as a connoisseur. His 1961 book The Earl of Louisiana collects a series of pieces he wrote about Earl Long, who served as governor of Louisiana for three non-consecutive terms between 1939 and his death in 1960, and whose exploits included a liaison with the stripper Blaze Starr and, during his last term, committal to an insane asylum in Galveston, Texas, by order of his wife. He discovered that confinement did not legally impair his status as governor, let himself out of the institution, and resumed office. He was, that is to say, the sort of subject that providence every once in a while bestows upon a deserving writer, and Liebling's portrait fittingly marshals all his strengths in the service of three-dimensionality. Here he is watching Long deliver a speech in an obscure small town in the northern part of the state.
"Uncle Earl wore a jacket, shirt and tie, a pattern of statesmanlike conventionality, on a night when everybody off the platform was coatless and tieless. The tie itself was a quiet pattern of inkblots against an olive-and-pearl background, perhaps a souvenir Rorschach test from Galveston. The suit, a black job that dated from the days when he was fat and sassy, hung loosely about him as once it had upon a peg in the supermarket where the Governor liked to buy his clothes….
"It is difficult to report a speech by Uncle Earl chronologically, listing the thoughts in order of appearance. They chased one another on and off the stage like characters in a Shakespearean battle scene, full of alarums and sorties….
"The expressions on the Governor's face changed with the poetry of his thought, now benign, now mischievous, now indignant. Only the moist hazel eyes remained the same, fixed on a spot above and to the rear of the audience as if expecting momentarily the arrival of a posse…
''I was in Minneannapolis once, talking to the Governor of Minnesota, a great expert on insanity,' Uncle Earl said, 'and he told me an astonishing fact--there are ten times as many crazy people in Minnesota as in Louisiana. I suppose that is on account of the cold climate. They cannot go around in their shirt-sleeves all year around, go huntin' and fishin' in all seasons, as we do. We got a wonderful climate,' he said, and paused to wipe the sweat from his face with a handkerchief soaked in Coca-Cola, which he poured from a bottle out of a bucket of ice handed him by one of the lesser delegates on his ticket. The bugs soaring up at the edge of the lighted area and converging on the floodlights formed a haze as thick as a beaded curtain…
"When he had wet himself sufficiently, he drank the heeltap and set the bottle down. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked, dramatically, with the butt held between his thumb and middle finger and the other fingers raised, in the manner of a ventriloquist. While he smoked right-handed, he pulled out his handkerchief and blotted his wet face with his left.
"He sat unheeding of the rumpus raised by his adherents, like a player in a jazz band who has finished his solo, or a flashy halfback who poses on the bench while the defensive team is in. The candidates ranted and bellowed, putting across a few telling but familiar points….
"But the bored crowd stood fast, knowing that a whistle would blow and the star would throw off his blanket and come onto the field again to run rings around the forces of Mammon. Sure enough, after what seemed to me an endless succession of subordinate rant, the Governor threw away the last of a chain of cigarettes and shook his head like a man waking up on a park bench and remembering where he is. He got up and walked to the microphone so fast that the man using it had barely time to say, 'I thank you' before the Governor took it away from him."
It is a difficult piece to condense. Perhaps fifty percent of it is given over to quoting Long's remarks, and I have edited it to concentrate on Liebling's characterizations--which however ends up sacrificing the interplay of the amen corner and the odd heckler, the subplots involving political opponents and their numerous children, the understated drama of the event's racial dynamics--Long being noted as unusually open-minded regarding his African-American constituents. Nevertheless, you get an idea of the figure Long cuts--plainspoken, somewhat eccentric, calculating, a bit of a vaudevillian. You hear how Liebling paces his paragraphs to register the rhythm of the proceedings, alternately languid and hectic. You feel the heat and the bugs on your skin and you recoil from the sensation of bathing your face in sugar water. You are there, more fully than if you were watching a film of the event.
In my own work I tend more often than not to treat of the past, which is the greatest object of my fascination. That means that I write about history, although I don't consider myself a historian, and neither do historians. I don't begin with a thesis and don't reach a conclusion, and don't measure my ideas against those of others in the field. I'm more interested in trying to enter the past, generally with a stack of open questions in my hand. As G. M. Trevelyan put it, "The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions but now all gone, vanishing one after the other, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall be gone like ghosts at cockcrow." Any minute of the past is nearly impossible to apprehend, as any moment of the present is impossible to encompass in all its complexity and contradiction. The past can perhaps be gotten in broad strokes, but those are uncannily subject to revision--our ideas of what the ancient Greeks were like or what the French Revolution meant are regularly exploded and replaced by some contradictory idea, even if both are to equal degrees true and untrue. But that makes it all the more important, it seems to me, to try to catch, fleetingly and imperfectly, the strangeness of the past--its pastness.
And that means looking for the flesh and blood of the past. The past only has living witnesses going back maybe sixty or seventy years at any given time. And even if those witnesses lobby on behalf of their memories they do so quietly and are not given much amplification. We build our own idea of their past that stands in contrast, even if both are to perhaps unequal degress true and untrue. I can tell everybody I meet that Mad Men gets the 60s wrong, sometimes radically, but nobody is much interested in listening, and anyway I was a child at the time, so what do I know? So we go on thinking of the Victorians as starched and prudish, and the pirates of the Spanish Main as rough-humored and jaunty, and no one outside the academy gets much exercised about our misconceptions. But then sometimes you come across something that reveals a sliver of what the past was like, and for just an instant, maybe, you are looking at something actual. Consider for example that your ancestors before the twentieth century very likely had a courtship radius that extended only about two hours' walk from their village, at maximum--a difference that was dramatically abridged by the spread of the bicycle. Consider that for much of human history the workday was determined by light; that neighboring cities might not observe the same year; that few people had more than a rough idea of their own age. Consider that for many centuries the great majority of humans owned almost nothing. The objects that have come down to us and sit in museums represent the belongings of the rich and powerful--if they were not actually the property of the deity alone--so that few people ever got to see them up close and they are in no way representative of the common life of their age. That is why people who undergo so-called past-life regression inevitably turn out to have once been Cleopatra or King Arthur--because there is so little available upon which to hang more realistic identities.
Personally I tend to hang around the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where at least I can make use of a fairly large range of literary and visual witnesses. If I'm curious about what life was like in South Dakota in 1910 I can consult local newspapers, railroad timetables, circus itineraries, farmers' diaries, picture postcards, almanacs, seed catalogs, published sermons, legislative minutes, stereoscope slides, government land brochures, traveling salesmen's account books, school records, and letters East. Any of those items might let in a crack of light, and even the least of them will contribute to a general impression, if only by adding to the store of rough statistics. If I'm looking for evidence that is further enhanced by emotion, however, I look for good writers, and while it is far from impossible that there may be a few, or more than a few, among the diarists and letter-writers and newspaper columnists of South Dakota in 1910, I find most of my witnesses clustered around cities.
I recently published a book about Paris, specifically the Paris of the working and so-called dangerous classes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was abundantly served by my sources. Not only could I draw upon newspapers, postcards, song lyrics, police reports, pamphlets, and cartoons, but I had my pick of memoirs, travel essays, novels, and even poems, by some of the finest in the business. I would find myself reading novels the way I scrutinize photographs, looking at the background and edges of the action. There were great novelists of the period who were useless to me, either because they ignored the kind of people I was interested in, such as Proust, or because they focused on characters and their emotions in close-up, to the detriment of the setting and its color, such as Jules Vallès. But Balzac, Hugo, Zola were indispensible because they were reporters as much as they were psychologists or dramatists or composers of symphonies. Balzac, writing in 1830, described a now-vanished street called Rue du Tourniquet Saint-Jean, "the widest part of which was its issue into Rue de la Tixeranderie, where it was only five feet across. In rainy weather brackish waters bathed the feet of the old houses that lined the street, carrying along the garbage each household had deposited in a corner by a bollard. Since the ragpickers' carts couldn't get through, the inhabitants counted on rainstorms to cleanse their permanently muddy street--how could it have been clean? When in summer the sun beamed its rays straight down upon Paris, a sheet of gold, sharp as a saber blade, momentarily lit up the shadows of the street without being able to dry the permanent damp that dominated those black and silent houses from the ground floor to the second. The inhabitants, who in June lit their lamps at five in the afternoon, never blew them out at all in winter."
And Hugo, writing of the 1820s, described the southern part of the city: "Forty years ago, the solitary walker who ventured into the wasteland of the Salpêtrière and descended the Boulevard d'Italie came upon places where you could say that Paris had disappeared. It wasn't empty, since there were passers-by; it wasn't the country, since there were houses and streets; it wasn't the city, since the streets had ruts where grass grew, as on rural turnpikes; it wasn't a village, since the houses were too tall. What was it, then? It was an inhabited location where there was nobody, it was a deserted place where there was somebody; it was a boulevard in the big city, a street in Paris, that was wilder at night than a forest, gloomier in the day than a graveyard." And Zola, in the 1870s, describing a laundry: "Steam rose from the corners and spread a bluish veil across the room. Heavy droplets hung in the air, exuding a soapy, clammy, insipid odor; sometimes stronger whiffs of bleach predominated. At washboards on both sides of the center aisle were rows of women, their arms bare to the shoulders, their necks bare, their skirts drawn up showing colored socks and big lace-up shoes. They beat the washing furiously, laughed, tilted backward to yell a word through the din, leaned over their tubs, rough, ungainly, brutal, as soaked as if they'd been in a downpour, their skin reddened and steaming. Around and under them ran a great stream: buckets of water transported and dumped, cold-water faucets left wide open to piss from on high, splashes from the wash stations, drips from rinsed clothing, the puddles they trudged through leaking out in little streamlets on the slanted flagstones. And amid all the shouts, the rhythmic thumps, the murmuring sound of rain and that thunderstorm rumble stifled by the wet ceiling, the steam engine, over to the right, all white with fine dew, panted and snored unrelentingly, the dancing agitation of its flywheel seeming to guide the whole enormous racket."
For that matter, I found much of use in Francis Carco, a prolific early twentieth-century writer of novels that because of their genre status and melodrama are not quite considered fine art, but that nevertheless are both solidly written and consistently alive to their settings: Here he is on the far edge of the city in 1919, where the men on the street were "fugitive personalities whose eyes lit up and went out rapidly. In that sector where the plaster shanties, isolated among vacant lots, gave an oblique appearance to everything, they added to that impression…. The green shutters--a washed-out green--alternated with little shacks of a sickly yellow, their walls carved up with graffiti, and with the shuttered fronts of unfinished new houses, and when night fell the collection of things incomplete or already dead gave of a feeling of emptiness and weighty unease…. The flat roofs of banal houses cut a silhouette against the sky that was only occasionally relieved by small chimneys that looked like still-smoking cigarette butts someone had glued there."
Those are the kinds of descriptions that make the past jump to life. We can picture those scenes and hear them and even smell them. All of them display the foreignness of the past to full advantage. And yet they are not unintelligible. Far from it. We can call upon our own experiences of damp cellars and laundry odors and the fringes of cities to put matters into perspective, adapting our memories to fit the description, nearly always employing actual settings from our past, enlarging this detail and diminishing that one. Our memory is our greatest tool and resource. We employ it continuously in reading--there's an essay by Robert Benchley in which he walks down the street of his home town, recalling that he set the death of Patroclus on this street corner and the execution of Sydney Carton on that square. And we employ it just as much in writing, so that our memories, mutatis mutandis, merge into those of our readers. Some of this process is conscious and willed, but a great deal more is not. We may become aware, suddenly, of the fact that we are basing this character's speech patterns on those of Uncle Ned, or that the room we have in mind is one we only saw that one time in 1982, or we may never know the exact provenance of this turn of phrase or that shaft of light, but they all come from deep within, freighted with emotion that gives our sentences volume and force and speaks to the emotions of our readers. Toward the end of his short life, Stephen Crane summed up his calling in a letter to a younger colleague: "An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake."
Luc Sante was born 1954 in Verviers, Belgium. His family emigrated to the United States several times between 1959 and 1963 and settled in first Summit and then New Providence, New Jersey. After college, he clerked at the Strand Bookstore, assisted a photographer specializing in author portraits, was employed by the New York Review of Books first in the mailroom, then as assistant to the much-missed Barbara Epstein. Later Sante worked as proofreader at Sports Illustrated. He taught at Columbia U. School of the Arts, then the New School, then, since fall 1999, Bard College, in writing and the history of photography. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Cultural Award from the Belgian-American Chamber of Commerce, a Grammy (for album notes), an American Scholar Award for Best Literary Criticism, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships. MacDowell Colony fellow once so far. He has a translation in progress of The Thief by Georges Darien (1897). Also Pierre Mac Orlan’s essays on photography. Also Léo Malet’s Life Is a Toilet (1947) and is beginning work on a biography of Lou Reed. Someday he will get back to the semiderelict hulk of his fiction.
