Young Zeck

Plowing the verses

Man's eye — The male gaze suggests a man’s focus on sex if not intimacy.

I wrote the other day about starting a poem, called “Side View,” about the male gaze. And today I would like to suggest how I’ve made progress on the poem and how my example might be of use to you.

The first thing I realized, on looking at the draft this morning, was the question of selection. Most of what I had put in was pretty decent, but I had left out an essential bit of narrative that would clarify where I was going with my idea. It was not enough to mention, in quick passing, in the first stanza that the setting was a “group bike ride.” More of the social setting was required, so this new first stanza:

Twelve, thirteen of us pedal country roads
through the short late summer evening.
We bike for beer and show up après ride
at the Natural State Brewing Company.
In fact, we enjoy each other’s company.

The idea here is to give more of a social, and sociable, context. Before we get to the male gaze, that is, we must set the stage. The bike ride is not an intimate occasion between speaker and girl. They are at first just nameless parts of a group. The ride is pleasant, and then some. There’s a hint of shortening days, shortening pleasures, for such rides as these can’t last much longer than the fair weather of summer.

Now is the time, once the stage is set, I realized, to acknowledge the free-floating eros in the air, but it’s one that the speaker is not particularly participating in:

There’s romance in riding and in flirting
too, chattering, hoisting bumpers up,
though tonight I abstain, the leader, desiring
to lose a few pounds, could be, and pounding
down desires definitely. I look at the dozen
others over there, specifically the girl
I’ve often gazed at, old man that I am,
with more than a little lust in my heart,
not that I can do anything about it now,
her figure the hourglass they talk about
when they talk about figures, minute
after minute, hour after hour, full breasts,
tight derrière, the lovely hills and declivities
my fingers would so love to ride.

This stanza is still rough, it strikes me now, though I went through four or five iterations of it this morning. That’s nothing. The idea is to keep on working, playing with the text till you get it right, as right and tight as you can make it (even in a world where bodies can’t be made so tight, or kept so tight, over time).

Selection is one criterion, as I say, and syntax another. Here, in the second stanza, I have chosen, or been chosen by (it’s habit now), parallel word structure, so that riding, flirting, chattering, hoisting, desiring, pounding run together and give each other a propulsive bump. Yes, these are the rhythms of life, that constant onward push of what we’re doing, or wanting to do; desiring, or accomplishing; and this forward movement drives us here, in the poem, from the start of one line to the end, and then the start again.

As critics have pointed out, making verse is a matter of moving from one side of a line to another. It’s like plowing: you move along the row and make a furrow, from one side to the other; then you turn, you reverse direction, and begin again.

This kind of consciousness of making poetry stresses movement — out and back, verse and reverse, a continuous movement and counter-movement, a dance, could be, in the dark, for when we begin we may have no very clear idea of where we’re going, unless we’re trying out a regular meter or verse form like a sonnet. May have no idea of fences, or wires, or signposts, or boundaries. We just start plowing, and see where the movement leads us.

I might note here, as you no doubt have already, that this subject matter is a delicate one these days. We males anyway (old males, old white males) do not usually talk about it in mixed audiences, not in the #metoo age. Yet not to talk about it, frankly, even ferociously, puts us on the defensive, which all in all is not a good position to start from — and leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of criticisms both inside and out.

So I just plow ahead, trying out ideas, images, sounds, figuring what I might keep and what I must throw out in the next draft. And trying not to think too hard of audience or the exact words I need.

The right words will find the right audience, finally.

Here I wonder if the play on “pounds” and “pounding / down desires” works. Too cute? Are the words too much alike or too close together? Have I not waited long enough to put them together? Have I lacked syntactic patience?

But I like the image of the hourglass figure, as the revised poem begins with the image of fading light. It’s not just the old man who is fading, inexorably, but the young woman too, but everyone, all bikers, all readers who are along for the ride, who participate in this flirtation of failing light.

This draft concludes with a third stanza:

Off to the side, I sit apart, away from the beer
and platitudes, not drinking, seeing not merely
the plenitude of the figure of a girl I do not know,
but the dark hair flowing to the shoulders, olive
skin, aquiline nose, full lips, outline it could be
of the essential and vanishing, and as for desire
isn’t it also nice not to be drinking beer
or thinking only pleasure.

There are the sound echoes again: beer, desire, pleasure. And then platitudes, plenitude. We may grouse at English for being pretty uninflected and so not encouraging the kind of common, fertile rhymes and repetitions found in other languages. But once we get our motors going, we should find that sounds arise, like bees in a hive, and the humming proceeds without much of a conscious push. (Don’t strive at first for the bon mot or right word. Just let the sounds come. Hum along. Be less than conscious and more than a little cool.)

And, as I said in the last blog regarding the first draft, the process of sublimation is doing its work. The body, fully apparent here, is doing its business of yielding to the spirit. The body, like the daylight, is fading. The mind is playing the arpeggios of fading light.

More on Homer and Henry James

No, I don’t believe the two gents knew each other, though both were masterful story tellers. (They lived 3,000 years apart.)

In my last entry I broached the subject of finding a story, citing Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay about his troubles moving from a narrative of events to a genuine story. I mentioned his teaching of Homer’s Odyssey, and I brought up Henry James, who wrote many novels and critical essays collected under the title The Art of Fiction.

In his essay Mendelsohn mentions good advice from a mentor, which was actually contained in and demonstrated by the Odyssey. Homer does not stick to a straightforward chronology at every point, but darts back into the past (flashback) and anticipates the future (flashforward). This in fact, then, was what Mendelsohn did with his bloated and listless manuscript of some 600 pages: made the class he taught on the Odyssey the central narrative and tucked into it temporal dislocations on caring for his dying father and taking a cruise that retraced Odysseus’s voyage.

The story emerged out of the bushels of facts. It was a kind of metastory, in fact, a story about being lost and finding one’s way. Just as Odysseus voyaged for years to return home from the Trojan War, so Mendelsohn scrambled to find a home in the heart of his materials.

You might find something of the same struggle going on in Henry James’s fiction, though he covers his tracks pretty well. I’m thinking here of the care he lavishes on his female characters, especially the protagonists, in novels like The Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel Archer moves from America to Europe and is seduced into a loveless marriage by a man interested only in her money.

I’ve suggested that James’s interest in female characters is characteristic of his large moral imagination. But it’s also founded, I think, on self-interest.

It’s long been know that James, who never married, had homoerotic proclivities. He was so refined, so domesticated, in fact, that he could have passed, without too much trouble, as a woman. Mark Twain famously, or infamously, called him “Henrietta James.” T. S. Eliot, more accurately and charitably, opined that James “had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” no ideology or stereotype disturb it. When he created characters, he went deep, plunged into hearts and minds, and emerged with characters that enlarge our appreciation of life’s moral puzzles and quandaries.

Portrait of a Lady cover — Penguin’s rendition of James’s Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

One of the central leitmotifs of James’s fiction is renunciation. The characters only want what they cannot have, though their desires are not the outsize or outrageous stuff of popular fiction. Isabel Archer wants only a happy marriage … and then happiness for her husband’s illegitimate daughter, Pansy. When she discovers the incorrigible evil in her husband, there is no going back. She renounces herself, or her own chance at happiness, in order to serve others, especially the younger, more innocent self, the daughter.

An article by Colm Tóibín details how “Henry James’s Family Tried to Keep Him in the Closet.” Yes, he had written many “ardent” letters to young men, stuff that would scandalize eminent and obscure Victorians alike. James’s heirs squelched these letters, but the same impulses shown in the letters appear also in the fiction, though in disguised form: his admiration for the fine minds and individual moralities of many female characters, the capacities of men like Lambert Strether, the title character of The Ambassadors, to learn and grow. (Strether is sent to fetch home to New England a wayward son, with a French mistress, but he comes to see that it’s puritan New England and the New World which is corrupt, not the Old World.)

James could not express his ardent desires directly, but he found in writing, both private letters and public letters (that is, literature), a way to announce and renounce who he was and who, under different circumstances, he might have been.

For fiction writers, facts are one thing, finally. But the story, the overarching idea and meaning behind all facts and events, is something else entirely, something grander and more enduring.

Finding a story

If you’re telling stories, you have a fund of experience to draw on. Don’t we all? Nearly all of us tell stories, and jokes, in daily life. We regale and assail each other with such stories. We while away the time, which otherwise might bore us out of our minds. We stake an advantage. We perform.

But what to do with these stories if we would tell them in print?

I should say rather than stories, it’s narratives we all have, sequences of events that happen to us and around us and sometimes way out there in the family of man. And we may have sequelae, also: outcomes whether healthy or not that are moral, physical, psychological. They may be punch-lines in a joke or a sad or hilarious coda to a story. But how do we get these narratives to add up and make sense and march on in print?

There’s a very good hint provided in a recent essay by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books. He talks about the long research journey he undertook to write about how the Holocaust wiped out the Jews in a town once in Poland, now Ukraine, in which his ancestors lived. And how, once he published that book, he was depressed and paralyzed and floundered for another project.

Mendelsohn is a writer of factual accounts and analyses. After a hiatus of several years he was able to reach out past the Holocaust back into ancient Greek history and find a subject in Homer’s Odyssey. He wrote hundreds of pages of narrative in three parts, based on a classroom (in which he had taught the Odyssey), a ship which recreated Odysseus’s route home, and a hospital in which his father, who’d taken Mendelsohn’s course in the Odyssey, lay dying.

He gave the script to an old friend and mentor, and got this reaction:

The first part, the account of the seminar, was interesting, he observed—after a small silence during which I absorbed his criticism—but, in his opinion, the problem was that once you reach the end of that part, once you come to the end of the Odyssey course, you didn’t want to keep reading. You don’t want to get through the whole semester and then have to go on a cruise, he said, at which I weakly protested, But that’s how it happened. I don’t care how it happened, he returned; this isn’t about fact, this is about a story. You need to find a way to plant the cruise and the hospital within the narrative of the seminar. Use flashbacks, use flash-forwards, don’t worry about chronology. Make it up, if you have to! You just have to find a way.

When he said the word way, I couldn’t repress an embarrassed start of recognition. The phrase “find a way” allowed me, first of all, to understand retroactively the nature of the creative and spiritual crisis I had undergone after finishing my previous book. I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem. The literal meaning of aporia is “a lack of a path,” or “no-way.” I hadn’t been able to leave my apartment; I couldn’t think of a new project. I was, in the Greek way of thinking, pathless—the adjective, as it happens, that in the Odyssey is used to describe the sea, the terrifying blank nothingness from which Odysseus must extricate himself, literally and figuratively, in order to reclaim his identity and find his way home.

Now you or I may not be writing a book. But whether we’re rendering a narrative orally or writing it out, we have to concern ourselves at some point with the central, essential story: where are we going with all these details? what do we want our audience to feel and understand?

If we don’t know these matters well at some level, we may well mess up a joke — or a written essay, article, or book. You know how that works? You go through the details of a joke, and then realize you’re leaving something out or putting something in that shouldn’t be there — you’re messing it up (again), aren’t you?

Some people, of course, are inveterate and practiced jokers. They know how to tell a joke or perhaps play a trick, and everyone is convinced. Most of us, however, have to work on our capers and find out, however we can, what is the essential story. There’s a struggle between our conscious and unconscious faculties. We want to control the narrative, but must let the chthonic powers play.

This sort of struggle may have underlain Henry James’s idea of the story “germ.” He writes in his notebooks about how he would overhear a story told at dinner and take its essence, the germ, home with him, only the germ, the central point, as he saw it, and then work it up on his own into his own story.

Once he had his suggestion … he hastened to close his ears to the rest of the story lest clumsy Life should take his seminal idea away. When the artist is too close to the reality he wants to describe, his imagination is no longer stimulated and therefore ceases to work. — “James on Art and the Novel”

James’s MO may or may not work for you, but the gist of this story of the Master is that he let his imagination play, have free rein, roam beyond the confines of the tale he had heard. Of course, James like his brother, the philosopher William James, had a great moral imagination. He was able to create characters and tell their stories with a profound human empathy. Many of the stories, like The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square and The Aspern Papers, have to do with cold-hearted, amoral men who cheat women out of love, or money, or full personal development. After a while, I would think, such a concern, or motif, a central part of his own character, would be part of the germ, naturally, of many of his tales.

So how do you find a story, telling the facts, such as they are, and developing the meaning of the facts — the solid, essential story which experience, the gift horse, has presented you? Surely, you can’t spend too long looking it in the mouth? Giddyup, you gotta ride experience’s suggestions.