To the extent that Tolstoy rocks

LONG SILENCE here, on account of the prevailing mayhem and generally busy nature of daily life. The biggest news of all: we are now six here at the humble manse, much to our delight. Little D1D2 was born two weeks ago today. At 4, D1D1 is old enough to appreciate being a big sister. She’s into it. She pronounces the new arrival “a cutie,” and “adorable.”

I’m doing some motorcycle wrenching and working hard to clear the decks, meet all professional and personal obligations so I can get back on the road by the middle of May. I hope to head out with no other thought beyond working on the rewrite of my novel manuscript.

Destination: the Arctic Ocean. Maybe in the Northwest Territories at Tuktoyaktuk, maybe in Alaska at Deadhorse. Maybe both. But I never know where I’m going until I get there. Might just as likely end up in Mexico.

I call it a rewrite; it’s more accurate to say I’m starting over, calling my first 140,000 words a warm-up exercise. My friend these 40 years, Lawrence K. Stanley, Oxford D.Phil., all-around learned gent, head of the writing program at Brown, etcetera, etcetera, he read the manuscript and urged me not to write a page turner. If all you’re doing is appealing to the reader’s curiosity about what happens next, that’s not much of a book, says the Perfesser. He plans to keep beating me over the head until I write literature.

We detour now to the southern hemisphere, where Son-in-Law #2 (SL2) snapped this pic of D2 holding up the whole world.

They hiked up Fitz Roy, explored Tierra del Fuego… Yes, yes, I know: let the record show that one of the kids and her husband got to Patagonia before the graybeard did.

You know all about the star-crossed efforts ol’ CCjon and I made to ship our motorcycles to Colombia and ride south to the bottom of the world. After three years of one roadblock after another, my interest dimmed. Three months ago, CCjon made a solo attempt to get there. He rode from Houston to Miami, turned his motorcycle over to an air-freight handler, got it through customs, crated for transport, then he walks outside and gets hit by a car.

He’s still wracked up. Been on a motorcycle only once since January, and paid for it. Kinda makes you wonder what South America had in store for us. I’m told if you’re inclined to travel the hinterland you’ll find the region offers quite an interesting variety of ways for you to turn into bones somewhere.

Back to Dr. Stanley and me, how we’re going back and forth on what kind of book I should be trying to write.

He dumped a considerable tonnage of reading on me: urged me to study what the great writers wrote about writing. And not just the usual suspects that I’d already perused on my own— Hemingway, Faulkner, John Gardner on theory—but E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, Gertrude Stein and so on.

The Perfesser’s a deep-dive guy on text. He gets down into the syntax to see how a better-than-average novelist achieves the uninterrupted-dream effect. After a year of back and forth on this, I find I have the vocabulary now and can actually understand what the Perfesser’s saying. This is both gratifying and alarming.

Case in point: He gave me something to read by another theoretical brainiac like himself, Richard Ohmann, a piece from 1966. As Ohmann would have it, “… each writer tends to exploit deep linguistic resources in characteristic ways—that his style, in other words, rests on syntactic options within sentences—and that these syntactic preferences correlate with habits of meaning that tell us something about his mode of conceiving experience.”

Well yeah, so… right away I’m thinking exactly what you’re thinking.

I write to the Perfesser and say: “He suggests that syntactic structure is mainly a matter of style, a habit the writer acquires, not something the writer can vary much from chapter to chapter, or even narrative to narrative. Or am I misreading this?”

Here’s what comes back:

“Not misreading as much as generalizing too broadly: style rests on syntactic options is the inversion of your statement.  Syntactic structure is there, is universal, but human language is recursive (not a term Ohmann uses; that comes into circulation a bit later than 1966) and what he pays attention to are the options a writer chooses and constructs (exercises, experiments with) (“habits of meaning” isn’t for Ohmann the same as habituated defaults, but recognizable patterns that make Conrad distinct from Joyce and all other writers) structurally—and the equally critical his mode of conceiving experience or the awareness he creates. It’s very much about what the writer constructs out of deep structure that determines the mindfulness of the specific text. So it can—and often must—change, sometimes from chapter to chapter, narrative to narrative, book to book. Subtle, perhaps: the key is working closely with exactly what a text says and avoiding paraphrases that risk reducing that exactness to a commonplace.”

Ah! Got it, Perfesser.

Now… this is not to suggest that after I think I know what he knows that’s worth knowing, I’m going to be Tolstoy.

But, you must admit, he does kinda look like a biker…

Tony DePaul, March 30, 2019, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA