Unless It Moves the Human Heart (4 page)

“What’s the function of the Happy Birthday song at the outset?” I ask. “Do the mice really wish Mr. Elephant a Happy Birthday?”

“They want more food,” says Ana. “They’re sucking up.”

“So the song of celebration is insincere,” says Jasmine.

“That’s what the story is about,” says Robert. “The mice are trapped by their own subservience.”

“Which means that working for the elephants has forced them to lose track of who they are,” says Inur.

“Or to remember who they are at the core,” says Nina. “Mice.”

We talk about this being an interesting and complicated idea. “But is it the idea that Donna promotes?” I ask. “The moral of her fable pales in comparison to this question of the self-manufactured traps of the servile mind, does it not?” I check Donna’s reaction to ascertain that she is attentive, not hurt. “Children’s fables are not complicated because they’re for children. Aesop’s fable of the lion, the fox, the jackal, and the wolf is simply about hogging, to mix animal metaphors. By the way, people say ‘the lion’s share’ to signify the larger portion, but in the fable the lion eats it all, everything. So the lion’s share, used properly, means everything. Don’t say you didn’t learn anything in this course.”

“Are you saying that a children’s fable aimed at adults has to be more complicated?” asks Veronique.

“More complicated, more interesting, more important. Do you know James Thurber’s animal fables?” They shake their heads. “Do you know James Thurber?” A couple of students say they’ve heard the name, but that’s about it.

“That’s the trouble with humor writing. It rarely holds over from one generation to the next. A hundred years ago, people found Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley hilarious and sharp. The same was true of Langston Hughes’s newspaper columns about Jesse B. Semple, the ‘Simple’ stories. Today, both characters are a yawn. Thurber was a wonderful writer, a major writer, but he’s practically disappeared.” I tell them about “The Owl Who Was God” and “The Wolves Who Ate All the Rabbits.” “Thurber’s fables were written about grown-up issues, and were put in children’s language to emphasize the importance of the ideas. It’s as if he was saying, Even a child can understand this. The owl fable is about the ease with which people are led by false prophets, and the wolves fable is about the Nazis. The wolves eat the rabbits, and then tell the world it’s none of its business, because the rabbits had become ‘an internal matter.’ ” I ask our author, “Donna, is your message of fending for oneself important enough to merit the use of the fable form?”

“It’s important,” she says. “But maybe you’re right. It’s a little easy.” I love it when students open up to criticism, and this particular criticism of mine is the hardest to take, because it applies to the intelligence of the work. Only someone who really wants to write better will respond as Donna does, and I think that her background in business—dealing with problems that have to be solved—helps.

“A fable for grown-ups must be about something they did not realize and could not learn in any better way.”

“But I like Donna’s story,” says Kristie. Many others nod in agreement.

“So do I. It’s just not as smart as it could be. In a form like this, you need to be as smart as you can be. Your mice might surprise you by how smart they can become, Donna. Characters do surprise you. Eudora Welty said that in
One Writer’s Beginnings
.”

“Yes,” says Inur. “But are those real surprises? Don’t they have to be in you before you let them out?”

“The surprise is that they’re in you. Amazing, preposterous things. Hemingway led a life of fights and blood sports. Welty led a sheltered life. Yet when it came to putting words on paper, Ernest was no wilder than Eudora.”

We come to Nina’s story, “A Taste of Plums,” which uses “Happy Birthday” as a dirge. “They’d never found her out,” it begins. “Not one of them had ever suspected what really happened, not even her father. She’d known they would not, for the simple reason that they’d all underestimated her; they’d failed to recognize the mind behind the protective disguise. And yet what had it been, that wonderful disguise of hers? It had been nothing more than a bodice and petticoat. Nothing more than that she was a girl.”

Her story is about Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, whose twin brother Hamnet is favored by the family, especially by the father, solely because Hamnet is male. At the twins’ birthday, it is Hamnet who is honored. Shakespeare ignores his daughter. So, carefully and deliberately, Judith plots to poison her brother using the very poison that her father was testing when he was writing
Romeo and Juliet
. Nina tells her story in a way that both pleases the class and raises a question. She gives it a surprise ending, concealing Shakespeare’s identity till the last line and making it seem a tale of more ordinary people living in a time when women were ignored.

“Why are surprise endings hard to pull off?” I ask the class.

“Because the surprise has to be worth it,” says Sven.

“Right you are. O. Henry, the king of the surprise-ending short story, only rarely succeeded—“The Gift of the Magi,” maybe one or two others—because the surprise ending wasn’t worth the trouble it took to reach it. Something was suddenly revealed, and you didn’t care.”

“But Nina’s surprise is worth the wait,” says Sven. Others agree.

“You bet it is, which is why the story is very good. But we have to ask ourselves, on Nina’s behalf—would the story be better if we knew Shakespeare’s identity from the start?”

I had mentioned the difference between anticipation and surprise before. Now, with a concrete example before us, I try to show that anticipation is more satisfying, because it allows a thought or a feeling to build in your mind, rather than assaulting you with a sudden twist. “Coleridge wrote about this when he was praising, of all people, Shakespeare. He said the power of
Hamlet
comes from the fact that we know Hamlet will die from the start, and when he does die finally, his death is much more moving.”

“Funny about plays like
Hamlet
,” says Nina, who has studied Shakespeare recently. Nina is one of the more well-read of the group, but she never shows off. “You know Hamlet will die every time you see the play, but somehow you hope he won’t.”

“So, Nina. What do you think? Would your story be better off spilling the beans at the outset?” She is mulling it over.

Most of Nina’s story is told in the first person. “Why choose one voice over another? First person, second, third?” They all come up with the obvious answers involving the scope of purview and information available to each of the voices. “But is there not some other advantage, particularly to the first-person voice that Nina uses?”

“Well,” says Jasmine, “we know that the narrator will survive the story—unless she’s already dead, like the narrator of
The Lovely Bones.
But logic dictates that the person telling us the story survives.”

“And what does that fact suggest? Ishmael survives, the woman in
Rebecca
survives, Pip survives, Nick Carraway survives. What do their stories have in common?”

After a moment: “They suggest that the people they are telling us about may not survive,” says Robert.

“Nice. We have no proof of this, but every time we are greeted by a first-person narrator who announces a story about someone else—the narrator of
The Good Soldier
, for instance—we can be fairly sure that the person whom the story is about will meet a bad end.”

“As in ‘The Laughing Man,’ ” says Sven.

“As in ‘The Laughing Man,’ since we know at the outset of Salinger’s story, merely by the way the boy tells the tale, that his hero’s heart will be broken.”

“Don’t you take a risk, writing in the first person?” says Ana. “Either you glorify yourself or you humiliate yourself. Either way, the reader dislikes it.”

“So you think every story should begin ‘Once upon a time.’ It’s an interesting point of view. I’d adopt it if I, and you, hadn’t read dozens of great stories told in the first person.”

“I guess it’s a matter of individual talent,” says Ana. “The strength of an individual voice.”

“What’s all this talk of ‘voice’?” asks Suzanne.

“You mean, ‘all this crap,’ don’t you?”

“If you insist. Yes. Crap. That’s all anyone talks about when they talk about writing. Voice. If, at my age, I don’t know my own voice, I’ll never know it.”

I tell her she’s right, that “voice” is merely the latest cliché to signify good writing. Its predecessor was “authority.” She is also right about linking self-knowledge to writing. “But instead of thinking of self-knowledge as idiosyncratic, try connecting it more to the task at hand. Subject matter determines voice. Voice should be selfless. Want to tell a tale in the voice of an idiot savant? Try
The Sound and the Fury
. Want to create an innocent learning morality? Put your glasses on Huckleberry Finn’s nose, but make sure the reader sees more of Huck’s nose than your glasses. Voice is the knowledge of what you want to say. After that, it becomes any voice that serves your purpose.”

“I find I don’t know what I mean to say till I start to write,” says Robert.

“You find that you don’t know what you
think
until you write it, too. You’ll be going along writing sentence after sentence about some slight received by a character, then you find yourself growing angrier on his behalf. Before you realize it, you’re in a rage, and the rage is what you felt from the start, though you had no sign of it until the words unearthed it. If we have to put it in terms of ‘voice,’ voice may be the imprisoned you, waiting to be paroled.”

“We write what we are,” says Nina.

“I think so. What we are, what we fear, what we love, what we believe, what we want the world to be.”

“Do you believe that?” Sven asks me. “That we write to change the world?”

“I do. If we look like we’re trying to change the world, the writing will sink from the weight of its own piety. But in the best of our work, the idealism is there, like trout below the surface of the water. Of course you want to try to change the world. You just don’t want to show your cards. But look at the world. Who would not want to change it? Books count. They disturb people. You never heard of a tyrant who wanted to burn the TV sets.”

I ask if they know who first wrote the line, “We are the world.” Naturally, they say Michael Jackson. “Uh-uh. It was a poet. Robert Penn Warren,” I tell them:

We are the world, and it is too late

to pretend we are children at dusk watching fireflies.

We must frame, then, more firmly the idea of good.

“What if readers don’t like the way you want to change the world?” asks George. “I know you don’t want to stoop to such a practical subject, but if you hope to change the world, you ought to have a few people on your side.”

“You’re a goner if you write for any standards but your own. Some will love your work. Some will hate it. Either way, you must simply go at it. You know Bill Russell, the great Boston Celtics center? He was the best player of his day, but he was black playing basketball in antiblack Boston, and his slightest error was always crushed under boos and catcalls. Russell’s daughter asked him, ‘Daddy, what do you think when they boo you like that?’ He said, ‘I never hear the boos because I never hear the cheers.’ Your vision, only your vision, matters.”

One of the pleasures of teaching writing courses is that you can encourage extravagant thoughts like this in your students. These are the thoughts that will be concealed in plain and modest sentences when they write. But before that artistic reduction occurs, you want your students to think big—to think big and write small. I don’t tell them that in so many words. But there’s no purpose to writing unless you believe in significant things—right over wrong, good over evil. Your writing may deal with the gray areas between the absolutes, and all the relativities that life requires. But you still need to acknowledge that the absolutes exist, and that you are on the side of the angels. I have never known a great writer who did not believe in decency and right action, however earnestly he or his characters strayed from it.

“Writing is the cure for the disease of living. Doing it may sometimes feel like an escape from the world, but at its best moments it is an act of rescue. Each of you has his own way of seeing into suffering and error. But you share the desire to save the world from its blights by going deeper into them until they lie exposed. You show up the imperfections of living for what they are. You hope to write them out of existence.”

“Say that again?” says Diana. “Not the whole thing. Just the part about writing being the cure for the disease of living.”

“You like that?” I ask foolishly.

“Not especially,” she says. “But you’re the only person I know who would dare talk like that.” More laughter at my expense.

“It seems that you’re saying a writer should write with moderation, but think grandiosely?” Ana asks.

“That’s it. Trust not the humble writer. Every one of us craves immortality. Every one of us harbors a special fear and hatred of dying, both for its finality and its solitude. A writer wants to continue to live among others, many others, and that may only be accomplished through his work. This is why all writers long to be loved by younger readers. The young will imitate them and re-create them over and over.”