History vs non-fiction

In preparation for an approaching holiday I borrowed two books from the public library: James Boyce's Van Diemen's Land, and Nicholas Shakespeare's In Tasmania. The first is a fairly substantial history in the traditional mold, with the requisite scholarly apparatus and a focus on the early period of convict settlement. The second is what would now be classified as literary non-fiction, with a more nebulous attachment to history, a kinship with travel writing, and good dose of memoir.

While I like the idea of literary non-fiction a lot, and I think experimentation with the form has produced some rich and luminous writing, I lost the thread of Shakespeare's book very early on, and then lost the will to find it. So much splicing of history with genealogy with anecdote, jumping back and forth between the present, the recent past and the remote past, often on the same page, with no attempt to stitch the patches together, left me bewildered, struck not so much with any sense of Tasmania's history or present life as with a sense of Shakespeare's defiance of convention. The writing, for me anyway, was too obviously its own object. By contrast, Boyce's book is logical and meticulous, but still manages to be vivid and compelling reading. He tells an unembellished but fascinating tale of Tasmania's earliest European occupants, creating an engaging mix of material and intellectual history that finds its own place in historical discourse.

Generally the idea of amplifying, personalising, beautifying, liberating non-fiction from some of its constraints is a good one and has been a constructive force, particularly in academic writing. Leaving behind the conventions of a false objectivity and a falsely impersonal tone, and pushing over some of the fences that kept out experience and lyricism has only been good for non-fiction writing. But a few recent examples - to Shakespeare I would add Rebecca Skloot and Judith Shulevitz, and there are probably others - have I think gone slightly too far. Their lush, rambling accounts, personalised to the point of idiosyncracy, so radically domesticate their subjects that little remains of that public significance which made them worthy of non-fiction in the first place. Successful literary non-fiction depends on bringing emotion, experience and aestheticism into public conversations, rather than taking public subjects home.

And you, my father

This, not because he sits on any sad height today, but because it's one of his favourites.  Happy Father's Day, Pa.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Juvenilia

I can't resist posting a poem I received this week from a small girl I know. Her teacher told her it was too short; I wonder if William Carlos Williams had the same trouble at school? She wrote it for my fridge, on which I wouldn't want a poem any longer. It's called “Spring,” and it's written in deliciously curly letters. Enjoy.

Spring

graceful. colourful

dreaming, singing, growing

a magical time

lovely

This inconstant stay

I rejoice immoderately in the coming of Spring. A change that is also a return; what CS Lewis describes as “that union of change and permanence that we call rhythm.”

I also notice my astonishment at the passage of time, at the turn of seasons that seems swifter every year.  Human being is being in time; we know no other. Yet we are also innately at odds with time.  The poets are full of this anomaly. Marvell’s rueful ‘Had we but world enough and time...’ Shakespeare’s sense of time’s inexorable march, its bending sickle, its fell hand, its war with us. Moses, a man who lived one hundred and twenty years, forty of them tending sheep in Midian, another forty wandering, still found life bafflingly brief. In spite of long years of exile and futility, he could write that human life is “like grass which sprouts anew. In the morning it flourishes and sprouts anew; Toward evening it fades and withers away [...] soon it is gone and we fly away.”

If the arc of time is short, the character of time is blessed. Time is part of the created order: there was evening and morning, the first day. At the third hour, the sixth, the ninth. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy. Eugene Peterson says he grew up thinking end time was the only sacred time. He learned later that all time is sacred, is created. The encompassing rhythms of weeks, lunar months, years “call forth regularities of spring births, summer growth, autumn harvest, winter sleep. Creation time is rhythmic. We are immersed in rhythms.” Hearing the beat and cadence of these rhythms makes us “internalise orderliness and connectedness and resonance.”

So the passage of time, if quick, is also life and breath to us. We know no other. Galileo found it lovely: “It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable, by reason of so many and so different alterations, mutations, generations &c which are incessantly made therein; and if without being subject to any alteration, it had been all one vast heap of sand, a mass of Jasper...wherein nothing had ever grown, altered, or changed, I should have esteemed it a lump...full of idleness...superfluous, and as if it had never been in nature...a dead creature.”

So time that makes us mutable makes us beautiful. It is time that brings spring at the death of winter, that marries change and permanence. Time that carries us round the sun, more swiftly every year. Time, which takes and kills all we know as life, is life as we know it.

New habits

Somewhat to my surprise, our Friday night film was Die Hard: With a Vengeance, number three in the quadrilogy. Mostly I find action movies preposterously silly, and this one was no exception. Trains, trucks, cars, and copters all competing for the nearest miss, the biggest explosion, the most uncreditable survival. A villain with a strong German accent and a Nazi strut, replete with blonde crewcutted henchmen, needed only a cat to stroke while plotting his wildly implausible bombs-and-bulldozers heist to make him indistinguishable from Dr Evil. Yet genius though he was, he was no match for John McClane's unique dumbass/badass/wiseass wit.

I confess to enjoying the performances of Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson very much. Their panicky, rancourous banter while trying to solve absurd puzzles before bombs explode was often hilarious, and Jackson especially had a lot of fun with his angry black man rhetoric. Both have an excellent comic sensibility and here it was not totally overwhelmed by the film's otherwise earnest delivery of seat-gripping tension.

I think what I didn't like about it, and probably why I don't like most action movies, is not so much the destruction or outrageous improbabilities but the story-telling. The way the story is told suggests no very complimentary estimate of the viewer's intellect. I guessed the internal monologue of this film's ideal viewer would sound something like this:

"Wow, look at that! I can't believe he's going to do that! He did it! Wow! That's unbelievable. He's crazy. Woah, look what he's doing now! No way! Now it looks like he's going to jump off that thing...Don't do it! It's really going to hurt! He did it! He jumped off that thing and landed really hard on that other thing! Ouch! That must have really hurt! I can't believe he's still alive. Hang on, who's this guy? He's not saying much, but we keep seeing him. Now he's saying something. Yep, he's really important. Thought he must be. What's happening now? Oh no, they're going to crash! They crashed! Ouch! That's amazing. I can't believe they're still alive."

By the end of the film that's pretty much exactly how my internal monologue sounded. Somewhat to my surprise.