Why is it that, when writing emails, otherwise literate people seem to equate the salutations ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi’ or chummy ‘Hey’ with the adjective ‘Dear’? Salutations are not adjectives.
We still sometimes write, ‘Dear Ana, How are you?’ No comma divides the adjective ‘dear’ and its noun, while a comma after a noun in the vocative case is also correct. So far so good.
In novels and other diversions, we read such things as, ‘Hello, Ana. How are you?’ That comma is needed to separate a salutation from a noun in the vocative (et pedantic cetera). Its absence constitutes an error.
Yet now, highly educated folks, including teachers of writing at the college level, think nothing of firing off with ‘Hello Ana’, ‘Hi Ana’ etc. as though salutations were adjectives. By that logic, we should now write elsewhere as required, ‘Meet my hello friend, Ana’. Or even, ‘Meet my hi friend, Ana.’ Thereby risking all sorts of confusion.
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We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves say on the starving sod;
They had fallen from an ash, and were grey.
So begins Thomas Hardy’s brief, extraordinary poem, “Neutral Tones”, which uses plain language to such arresting effect. I was fifteen or so when I first read it. That ‘chidden of God’ chilled me then in a thrilling way, and has ever since. Not because I believe in ‘God’*, but due to the eerie atmosphere that ancient Angl0-Saxon ‘chidden of’ evokes. Here, Hardy’s vocabulary favors Germanic etymologies that cast an archetypal Nordic wintriness: the thin, minatory light of that sinister white sun.Of course, infinitely astonishing English enjoys strong Latinate parentage too. Sinister and minatory are pure children of hot-blooded Rome.
The back-cover blurb of Human Child, states that “Language plays co-protagonist: the narrator’s prose glitters with exquisitely woven evocations and words selected for their musical resonance and their amplest connotations.” Having long written poetry, I set out to attempt prose, suspecting that boredom might stall me early on. Much novel writing appears to consist, perhaps necessarily, of plodding through the flat detail that moves the ‘story’ forward. Many authors of fine literature manage this very skillfully, indeed beautifully. My interest, however, was in exploring and exploiting to the limit (my limit at least) the exuberant possibilities of English. Of at least equal importance to me with theme, philosophy and character psychology are the music and color of the language per language. For example, on page one, Amy, protagonist and narrator of Human Child, hints at the event on which this novel hinges: “Would that iniquity might be so glib unpicked: snip it, grip it, strip it out! Would that I’d lived with a keener sense of consequence. That stitch deliberately let slip would prove as ruinous as any knife rip.” I worship English for permitting such intoxicating combinations. Later, evoking her performance as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Amy recalls: “In the front row hovered Arthur, apparition-wan and weakly leering as I plied my plastic asps.” One hears the hiss as if those asps were real.
I understand those who find Human Child toughish going. A beach read, it is not! The reader must be willing to make the effort to meet the text, to agree or disagree, at times to wrestle with its cacophonies and complexities. This in an era when many who even read at all any more seek passive entertainment. Many, but not all. And those I thank.
Here is the rest of Hardy’s poem:
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing…
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with greyish leaves.
That ‘wrings with wrong’ is killer, isn’t it?
*IMO, a supremely deleterious superstition and delusional personification of cosmic phenomena that man may never understand and would do best not to fret over with such frequently nefarious consequence.
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During the writing of ‘Human Child’ and since its publication, I have been frequently startled by the assumption of many—some of whom have and some of whom haven’t read it—that the novel must be autobiographical. Several kind and puzzled readers have inquired how such a calm-seeming person could produce such a dark drama. There seems to be a rather widespread belief that fiction is a thinly disguised rehash of its authors’ experience and experiences. This may sometimes—perhaps even often—be true, to a greater or lesser extent. I would, however, suggest that it ought not be assumed, and that fiction writers deserve to be credited, after all, with a fair degree of imagination, and the ability—in some cases, even the need—to create realities that differ considerably from their own.
The correspondences between author and character are apt to be rather complex and far from literal. Was Shakespeare a Scottish lord who murdered his king in order to seize the throne? Was he a teenager from Verona who died for love? No. But he was a supremely gifted human being, able to think deeply about the lives and sufferings of others, and to spin this material into the most stunning theatre (and a pox on all the sensationalistic ‘Anonymous’ nonsense!) As far as the ‘facts’ of Amy Webb’s life and personality go, ‘Human Child’ is Amy’s autobiography, not mine, and amen to that! At some point in the writing, her character, in order to maintain its consistency and coherency, began to demand certain types of scenes, descriptions, predicaments that I then had to invent, based on imagination and observation rather than direct experience. The proverbial hats out of which these elements were dragged lay buried in the deepest reaches of some very old and cobweb-rich closets.
In some sense, one has no choice but to write about what one knows, as the old adage goes. Like many old adages, however, it only goes so far, and perhaps applies most particularly to writers of non-fiction. I tend to think that fiction writers at least may do well to write in order to discover what they do not know. Or to discover what they do not yet know that they know. After all, ultimately, whatever a person writes can only ‘come’ in some sense, from that person: an interest in certain themes, in certain psychological and philosophical realizations and directions…
I did not ‘know’ Amy, when I sat down to write her story. In a real way, I wrote Human Child in order to know and understand her. I was interested in depicting Ireland, a perhaps more nuanced Ireland than overromanticizing outsiders sometimes tend to imagine. I wanted to describe a human being shunned from birth by her society and by her family, and to study the effect of that harshness on her spirit. I was born female, Irish, catholic. Amy was born female, Anglo-Irish-Amerindian, Protestant. A very different departure point though in the same city. The reasons Amy is spurned are not the usual reasons Irishwomen have traditionally suffered as much as, if not more than, and certainly longer than, women in the relatively narrow subset of twentieth century ‘Western’ cultures. Yet what human ‘child’ may not ask the question, ‘How can one not be what one is, or be what one is not?’ Concerning the ‘plot’, I knew from the start that, in addition to this issue, I wanted to explore in my own way the ancient theme of headlong passion, as well as the horror of false accusation. I had a general sense that the end would have to be tragic, but no idea at first how things would play out.
Of course, many incidental elements of ‘Human Child’ are drawn from my experience: for example, the Dublin setting. Amy’s Dublin—in both the geographical and the cultural sense—is profoundly familiar to me. I spent the first twenty-two years of my life in that milieu (had I stayed longer, I would have died of psychological strangulation. But that’s another story, and I did get away). The New Mexico I portray is one I have either directly experienced or can extrapolate from that experience. The same goes for the descriptions of Normandy and Brittany where I once spent some time. French culture and other regions of France were a huge part of my childhood.
Furthermore, as mentioned in an earlier blog, the marvellous Clodagh has much in her of Bridget, the bighearted, bright-tempered woman who raised me. The very peripheral—not to say insignificant—Peter Gerrity was a real person, though he spelt his name Geraghty. I wrote him in as a tribute to his beautiful qualities. I too attended Trinity College, and several of Amy’s opinions about its denizens and practices reflect my own. Like Amy’s, my grandmother was French, and taught me her native tongue. But she was a very warm and loving person, unlike Mamie Denise. I share Amy’s love of language—especially English—and of Shakespeare, as well as her (most unfashionable!) dislike of Paris. Yet, unlike unfortunate Amy, I have never taken French men in the least bit seriously, Oh, là là, and, Mon dieu!
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“I really don’t know.” Is my usual first answer when people ask where I get my ideas for writing fiction. This may sound disingenuous. Yet it’s true.
“You mean you don’t plan everything in advance–plot, characters, action? You don’t sketch it all out?” I’m afraid not. I just find myself writing. ‘…I grope along through fog…’ says Amy, writing out her tale in Human Child. Especially at first, my experience is quite similar. Nothing mystical here. Just words that want out. The words come first with me. The connotations, the elemental music of the language. I get pretty intoxicated on that. This probably stems from having started out many years ago writing poetry. Very soon after the first impulses of language, come the characters, defined not so much by the events in their lives as by their philosophical preoccupations. Which are essentially mine. The first draft produces what one might regard as a big unruly blob of ‘matter’ (clay perhaps?) that I then go back and shape and shape and shape: adding, deleting, adding back in. At the final stages, it feels as though I’m going over everything with a tiny paint-brush, each word a precise stroke. Fairly early on, the plot emerges, mainly as a vehicle for the development of the characters and the underlying ideas.
For example, the ‘plot’ of Human Child hinges on a horror of wrongful accusation and the terrible damage this can cause (on this, see also my previous post). This is a theme that haunts me. I’m also very interested in Amy’s fundamental question: How can one not be what one is, or be what one is not? I think this goes to the root of human experience and suffering. Current research in neurobiology tends to confirm that each of us pretty much is the brain he/she is born with. Current notions of ‘morality’ may yet yield to chemical explanation (hopefully not to the point where reductionism kills all mystery). It’s becoming more and more evident that we are to a great extent pre-determined. Although not, I believe, by any godlike meta-agent. Anyway, I find this possibility both thrilling and terrifying. I also believe that, except on a very micro scale (cat shouts to be let out; well-trained cat owner dutifully opens door; whereupon cat may or may not deign to exit), events in the universe (including what passes for cause-and-effect relationships), are random. ‘It was meant to happen’, people will often say wishfully of some occurrence beyond human ability to foresee or control–frequently a disaster or disagreeable happening of some kind, or some silver lining that happens to manifest. I don’t believe in this sort of causality, though I do understand its potential consolations: the sense that even catastrophe has some positive underlying purpose. Math is also of some comfort in this regard 🙂
Anyway. These are the kinds of ideas I write novels in order to explore. Via a random sort of approach to be sure. So far, each story’s ending has revealed itself pretty quickly. How I’m going to get there suggests itself as I go. On good days! I guess that’s a big part of the fun.
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I created this blog to treat of literary matters. Yesterday’s egregious killing of Troy Davis has caused me to make an exception.
Execution of guilty and innocent alike is murder. I think we ought to start using that stark and far more truthful term. Georgia murdered Troy Davis. Despite overwhelming doubt about his guilt, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to intercede on his behalf. Not one single Justice dissented.
I believe that the word ‘execution’, with its air of state sanction and justification, represents a modern-day form of human sacrifice, radical though this term may seem and difficult for some to stomach. If your reflex here is shock and mental swerve away, I suggest you think deeply about it. To stomach the truth! Perhaps we can at least henceforth skip the self-gratifying euphemisms and start calling ‘state-sanctioned killing’ murder. I urge the many devoted death-penalty abolitionists to do so from now on.
I suggest that in many such cases, and if one is able to attain it, the only real closure may come through forgiveness. Not all can manage forgiveness for the killing of a loved one; it is, no doubt, a long and difficult process. I do not mock the family of the slain McPhail. Their pain must have been, and will no doubt continue to be, immense. But I do object most strenuously to all the media-assisted spouting about the ‘need for closure’. This closure business has become all the rage in instant-gratification America. Closure at any cost. Even the cost of sacrificing a probably innocent man’s life? An innocent victim, an innocent sacrifice. A downright murder. Do we no longer have any capacity for ambiguity? For living without closure, if no closure there be without grotesque forcing of it? Are we as a society that weak, that spoiled, in every sense of the word? If the maximum penalty were life in prison, then, as soon as the sentence was passed, the wronged families could start their process of closure, leading eventually perhaps to forgiveness and inner peace. As the Troy Davis case demonstrates, it often takes decades for the death penalty to be carried out. Hence, if the killing of the offender is thought of as the point when closure may begin, the people concerned have to wait all this time, suspended in a kind of ghastly limbo, with no chance for closure in sight, while feelings harden and fester instead of moving towards resolution.
The United States is the only Western country that has not abolished this kind of retributive murder. The Europeans think we are barbarians. Who knew we had that much in common after all with Iran, China and other frequent recipients of our self-congratulatory spouting about ‘human rights’. Witness, at a recent GOP presidential debate, the repellent, repulsive–does a strong enough term exist?–the bloodthirsty cheering by the audience for Rick Perry’s revolting stand on the death penalty. There’s a real danger that this man might become our president. Last time around, over 50 million people voted in effect for Sara Palin.
Whether achieved by murdering the guilty or by murdering somebody whose guilt remains gravely in doubt, ‘closure’ is revenge. Retributive justice. Which is no justice at all worthy of an advanced nation, much less the nation many of whose citizens claim is the greatest in the world! The retributive murder of individuals by the state is primitive, barbaric, abhorrent. Human sacrifice.
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After a year’s absence, Amy Webb, the main character of Human Child, returns to Ireland. She says, “My soul’s hunger drove me back to the sleet of Ireland, to the soft wool and the violet moods of the hills, to the mendicant wind, the changeling sky, shapeshifter sea and faerie field.”
What does Amy mean by ‘faerie field’?
As a very young child, I spent many summer weeks in the Irish countryside, with the family of Bridget Allen, the woman who lived in my parents’ house in Dublin, and raised me. There’s quite a bit of Bridget in Amy’s great friend, Clodagh. Anyway, in that cottage in County Westmeath, there was no electricity or running water. Just firelight and a scant candle to light you to bed, and the pump up the road. I still recall the sweet cold taste of that water. In the evening, stuffed with tea and lavishly-buttered soda bread, we’d gather around the cooking hearth and I’d listen agog to stories about the fierce heroes of ancient legend, and maybe some tensely-whispered gossip about Mrs. So-and-So ‘down the road’. Our silhouettes loomed huge and dark, though the fire glowed friendly gold on our faces and hands. Behind our backs, deep shadows flickered. In the morning, the placid fields were filled with massive white mushrooms. We’d gather them eagerly, and gobble them down, fried up with bacon. On fine afternoons, we’d go on picnics. There was always much discussion then about where to sit so as not to disturb the Faeries. These very religious country people seemed even more afraid of the Faeries than of Lucifer, whom they referred to as ‘de Divil’.
The Faeries of Irish folklore are far from ‘fairies’ of the Tinkerbell variety; they are fierce nature spirits who live in hawthorn bushes. They tend to ignore human beings, until some unfortunate annoys them. Then they take revenge. For a mild punishment they may stuff the offender’s bed with thorns. If really angry, the faeries may steal the person’s child away forever.
The title of my novel, Human Child, comes from The Stolen Child, a very beautiful poem (see below) by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. This poem relates how the Faeries are indeed about to steal a child away into their lovely realm where it will live forever happily, spared the inevitable hardships and miseries, as well as the peculiar joys, of its human destiny. The poet implies this question: is it better for a human being thus to escape ‘destiny’, or to stay and live life, however difficult, to its natural end?
WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
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Michael Woodruff, the publisher of Orange Avenue Books and author of the fine collection of short fictions titled This Is The Moon, and his artist wife, Della, held a book-signing party for Human Child at his Albuquerque residence on September 10. Many dear friends attended, along with a number of people I was pleased to meet for the first time. The reading took place in the back yard, on a fine night under a big moon. In the background were grape vines laden with sweet fruit, while further back some neighbor dogs were barking what I can only imagine was their approval. It was an immense pleasure, and, yes, a great honor, to be given this opportunity to share something of my work with such an enthusiastic audience, and to chat about it afterwards.
It means a great deal indeed that somebody with Mike’s literary savvy and accomplishments should so wholeheartedly endorse my work.
Much as I loved the occasion and basked in the attention, it wasn’t–and isn’t–about me reading, but ever and always about the book being read.
See below photos of the event, by my husband and fan extraordinaire, Bruce Shortz.
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Holding the books in our hands
I keep hearing that ‘nobody reads literary fiction any more’. Or that if anyone does, it’s on Kindle or Nook or iPad.
Last night, I was invited to attend the monthly meeting of a local book club, at which my novel, Human Child, was the featured reading. Seven women and myself sat together for a couple of hours and discussed the book. Everybody had read it, held her copy in her hands, felt passionately about it and had terrific insights, observations and questions. Several were eager to urge their friends to purchase and read Human Child. It was a very moving experience for an author. I feel encouraged and very grateful.
These women–and men and women like them in book clubs all over the country–read at least one fiction book per month.
When I travel, I can’t take along my bed, or all the shoes and clothes I possess. I can’t take more than a few beloved books. As I age, even these have become more difficult to lug along. So, hoping that a comfortable bed awaits me out there, I pack a few lightweight garments and, yes, my Kindle. It’s a terrific substitute, a valid parallel option. (Admittedly, I usually cheat and also pop a couple of slender volumes into the bag.) When I’m home, however, I want the real thing. The actual book whose weight and substance I can feel in my hands, the friend whose familiar aspect comforts me when I glance at its worn edges on the shelf.
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It’s an amazing thing really. To sit alone in a room for several hours every day, for several years, passionately engaged in a private and mysterious activity that feels at times more than a little odd. The characters of what will ultimately become a novel announce themselves, with their all issues and quirks and desires and imperfections, and demand most insistently to be led through the twin labyrinths of their story and of the writer’s mind, and out into the world.
When Human Child, my first novel and book one of the trilogy The Woman Who Had No Voice, was finally published, I didn’t necessarily expect anybody to read it, though I hoped that a few might. I certainly didn’t expect anybody to like it. Several months later, not only have a lot of people read it but quite a number seem to have liked it very much.
That is a very great honor indeed.
PURCHASE HUMAN CHILD
Purchase Human Child for $15.00 plus $4.00 shipping and handling. All proceeds go to the Ana Mara Research Fund.
LINKS
- 10000 Cranes Studio My Web Guy
- adobe walls poetry anthology
- adventures in poetry
- alice james books
- american comparative literature association
- apogee press
- barque press
- black ocean
- Bonnie Rocubo
- british comparative literature association
- carcanet press
- coffee house press
- comparative literature association of india
- council of literary magazines and presses
- country valley press
- eastern washington university press
- enitharmon press
- futurepoem books
- granary books
- her circle
- heyfixie cycling and construction whizz
- jacket magazine
- Kate Horsley Author, raconteur
- kelsey street press
- literary academic discussion groups
- litline
- lost horse press
- marietta leis, artist
- obscure publications
- omnidawn publishing
- Orange Avenue Books Literati Publisher
- pighog press
- publishing Ireland
- reality street editions
- salmon poetry
- salt publishing
- silenced press
- southwest writers
- the american literature association
- the modern review
- the owl press
- Thelma Giomi
- zephyr press