On Writing, Pt. 1

"I saw him only for a moment, and that was years ago. Boston had been beaten by the White Sox. It was a night game, and when it was over, as the crowd, including myself and my friends, pushed with that suppressed Occidental panic up the aisles toward the exit ramps, he, like the heavy pebble of gold that is not washed from the pan, was revealed, sitting alone, immobile and smiling, among the green seats. He was an old Chinese man, solidly fat, like a Chevrolet dealer, and he wore faded black trousers and a white shirt whose sleeves were rolled up. He sat with one arm up on the back on the seat beside him and smiled out toward the field, where the ground crew was unfurling the tarp across the foreshortened clay diamond and the outfield under the arc lights looked as brilliant and flat as a pool-table felt. And it flashed upon me, as I glimpsed this man sitting alone and unperturbed among the drained seats, that here was the happy man, the man of unceasing and effortless blessing. I thought then to write a novel, an immense book, about him, recounting his every move, his every meal, every play, pitch, and hesitation of every ball game he attended, the number of every house he passed as he walked Boston's three-decker slums, the exact position and shape of every cracked and flaking spot on the doorways, the precise sheen and rust of every floriate and convoluted fancy of ironwork that drifted by his legs, the chalk marks, the bricks (purple-tinted, ochre-smeared red), the constellations of lint and stain in his tiny bachelor's room (green walls, painted pipes coughing with steam, telephone wiring stapled along the baseboard), the never precisely duplicated curl of the smoke off his rice, the strokes of sound composing the hatchings of noise at his back, every stifled cry, every sizzle of a defective neon-sign connection, every distant plane and train, every roller-skate scratch, everything: all set sequentially down with the bald simplicity of a litany, thousands upon thousands of pages, ecstatically uneventful, divinely and defiantly dull.

"But we would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins. We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves. From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm." John Updike, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" from The Early Stories: 1953-1975

First of all, show me a more beautiful writer than John Updike, besides maybe G. G. Marquez and Pynchon at his most sentimental. I'm serious. Second, John Updike writes in first person, so can you. Third, how accurate. This story is extremely good, I think; it's a triptych of stories he never wrote, the first regarding this man, the second his grandmother, which I found very moving, and the third a group of men washed ashore an uninhabited Polynesian island, only to perish. I heard a quote a few months ago, I don't remember exactly where, but it was something along the lines of, "We're all writing Ulysses inside us all day, but what comes out is so much less." I feel like it may have been from a collection of Saul Bellow's correspondence. Anyway, it's true. The gap between what we harbor within our own minds and what we communicate is so frighteningly obtuse. I think it's easy for a writer to become enraptured by the task of pinning this gap down and raping it for information, details, (bountiful, pristine, details). But then what would be the point? Well, when you are actually writing Ulysses, or if your prose is as lyrical as Updike's, I guess you can just get away with it, and that's the point. But for the rest of us, tailoring becomes a tedious skill. Figuring out what you want to say. Weeding through the best possible ways to say it. And the ultimate dissatisfaction, nine times out of ten.

What a divine description of this moment, though. This moment that every writer experiences, all too often: the way the sun shines on that one day when that woman stands in the doorway to her building with her two obedient dalmatians; the image of that man in the wheelchair and that man sitting beside him on the grass on the hill, just the two of them silently watching the sun set; that house-cat running solitary through the immense, pastoral landscape in the middle of the night; that one bus in the city whose insides glow blue and cast azure shadows over its strange, nighttime inhabitants; the way the earth looks on that day when that blizzard hits and the roads bears no markings and there is no visible difference between the land and the sky, a muted horizon, and it is so silent too. Dozens of these fragments, stashed away in some dusty cavern of the brain's filing system, decidedly unexplored. You can't write about everything.

I think every writer starting out should be handed a copy of Updike's early stories; he's the master of detail, for real. Going through my copy, I find lines annotated that I can't even recall reading. There are smears from tear drops, ash stains, big blotchy pen marks from the days when I respected my books less. But when I think about reading them, I just remember them having this profound impact on the way I thought about writing. They are really solid. He knows what he's doing.