Saying what needs to be said

Robert Frost said a liberal is a man too broad minded to take his own side in a quarrel. Last Thursday night President Obama (finally) took his own side and gave the speech many have been waiting to hear. Still bending toward compromise, it was punchy, simple, and stirring. He stood up for ordinary America against the interests of the rich and influential, and argued (finally) from America's history against the anti-government feeling that has only swelled since the mid-terms. Simplifying pro-government reasoning, he argued that while individualism has its strengths, there are some things we can only do together. It was a breath of air for anyone who's been watching the GOP suck the oxygen out of US politics.

Unavoidably, the speech participates in the very politics it was trying to circumvent, and doubtless the pundits of both sides will have their way with it. One of the criticisms already levelled, by Maureen Dowd, is that talking doesn't solve anything. She wrote in the NY Times that Obama is suffering from the “speech illusion”: the idea that he can come down from the mountaintop, read the teleprompter, cast his magic spell, and ascend the mountain while everyone scurries to do his bidding. I think in the case of Obama, coming down from the mountaintop to deliver a fiery speech is exactly what he can do, exactly what he should do.

While generally all talk and no action is political failure, sometimes there is virtue in simply saying what needs to be said. Saying what those who have no voice have been saying unheard, and saying it loud. Obama's jobs bill has yet to go through, but his words mattered. Words can restore dignity, sometimes via indignation. They can break rhetorical cycles, gauge or change the public mood, set people on a fresh course. Obama has a unique capacity to do just that. Kevin Rudd (an infinitely less gifted speaker) was blistered by those who thought his apology to the stolen generations was a meaningless gesture, adrift from action. Watching the faces of the Indigenous people massed outside Parliament House that day, I couldn't believe the words weren't important in themselves. Words that acknowledged the past, made a space for grief to be aired, made real the sufferings that had for so long lain unsung. Words reify experience; they set it down indelibly in the long records of human life. As Shakespeare knew, and Obama trusts, words can make and unmake worlds.

This afternoon was the colour of water

For Sunday's anniversary, this poem by America's Amy Lowell: “September, 1918.”

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

To-day I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world.

The end/s of fiction

In the same interview I cited some posts back, Tobias Wolff scoffs at the idea, sometimes advanced in writing classes, that there are only seven stories, some of which have already been “used up.” There are as many stories, he says, as there are ways to imagine them; these, by implication, being pretty close to infinite.

Ned Beauman at The Millions is not convinced.  He suggests new writers can be paralysed not only by old stories, but also by used up ways to tell them. “There’s a remark somewhere by (I think) Martin Amis about how all young writers have to confront the fact that there just aren’t many new ways left to describe an autumn sky or a pretty girl. It’s like peak oil for lyricism.”

I have to disagree with Beauman, and possibly with Amis (if it was him). There are infinite ways to describe an autumn sky or a pretty girl. There will be no peak oil for lyricism because lyricism is another word for poetry and poetry is another word for making. How can there be an end to making? A limit to the number of things made?  Lyrics are a resource not external but endemic to the human mind. You might as well say there can be no new inventions, no developments in medicine or physics or genetics. Lyricism springs eternal in the human breast.

In fact what I love most about prose fiction is not the story, whether it's old or new, but the texture and detail of the prose, the ingenuities of language that describe the world in ways I couldn't have. Even a bad book turns up some new phrase, some new way of seeing or being, crystallised in two or three words. The best books do this on every page. It's why, though we know the story back to front, we go back to them.

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