Writers Who Aren't Boring

1

I was at a dinner party a few years ago, and the guest of honor was a well-known Irish writer. The host asked the writer to answer a few questions. The first was this: “Why are there so many great Irish writers?”

The answer:

In Ireland, if we invite Uncle Patrick to dinner, people might say: “Uncle Patrick, he’s so smelly!” That’s okay. Smelly Patrick will be greeted warmly.

Or if we invite Aunt Colleen, people might say, “Colleen? She’s rude! And the woman never shuts up!’ That’s okay too. We’ll welcome rude Colleen.

Or if we invite cousin Rory, people might say, “Sure he loves the drink. He’ll be passed out within two hours.” That’s okay. Come on in, Rory, and what might you be having?

But if someone says, “Owen? He’s BORING.” Well, that’s NOT okay!

And that, he said, is why Ireland has so many great writers. Just one example: This Is Happiness, by the astonishing Niall Williams, who knows what happiness is, and who can break your heart in a paragraph.

(Now I am going to meander a bit, and speculate more than a bit. This is all through a glass darkly.)

2

Some writers are boring. Those who write for law reviews tend to be boring (I plead guilty). Law review articles are often dry, abstract, and lifeless. They can be great, of course, but they tend to lack energy. They are not vivid. But there are exceptions.

Here’s how John Hart Ely started a famous article on the constitutionality of affirmative action: “The problems were so intractable that this time it really looked like Fred and Ginger might not get together. But then Fred sang ‘I Used to be Color Blind,’’ and suddenly we knew that everything would turn out all right.”

Okay, it’s not Tom Wolfe, but for a law review article, it’s not boring. Ely could be surprising. He could be funny. (The same is true, by the way, of Justice Antonin Scalia, as a judge and as an author of law review articles.)

3

Speaking of Tom Wolfe, who should have been Irish:

In his first eight missions, at the age of twenty, Yeager shot down two German fighters. On his ninth he was shot down over German-occupied French territory, suffering flak wounds; he bailed out, was picked up by the French underground, which smuggled him across the Pyrenees into Spain disguised as a peasant. In Spain he was jailed briefly, then released, whereupon he made it back to England and returned to combat during the Allied invasion of France. On October 12, 1944, Yeager took on and shot down five German fighter planes in succession. On November 6, flying a propeller-driven P–51 Mustang, he shot down one of the new jet fighters the Germans had developed, the Messerschmitt–262, and damaged two more, and on November 20 he shot down four FW–190s. It was a true Frank Luke-style display of warrior fury and personal prowess. By the end of the war he had thirteen and a half kills. He was twenty-two years old.

Notice the rat-a-tat-tat there - it’s high energy - it’s not boring - it’s a bit like a machine gun. And notice the drama and the amazement of the last sentence.

And this:

The only trouble they had with Yeager was in holding him back. On his first powered flight in the X–I he immediately executed an unauthorized zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel, then stood the ship on its tail and went up to .85 Mach in a vertical climb, also unauthorized.

Three amazing things in a hurry: (1) unauthorized zero-g roll; (2) the X-1 stood on its tail; (3) close to the sound barrier (Mach 1!) in a vertical climb.

Can anyone forget this passage?

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, “they had to pipe in daylight.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

Wow. Notice the arc; that up-hollow voice is almost a person. And note the specifics. And then:

Just as Yeager had predicted, as the X–I approached Mach 1, the stability improved. Yeager had his eyes pinned on the machometer. The needle reached .96, fluctuated, and went off the scale. And on the ground they heard … that voice: “Say, Ridley … make another note, will ya?” (if you ain’t too bored yet) “ … there’s somethin’ wrong with this ol’ machometer …” (faint chuckle) “ … it’s gone kinda screwy on me …”

And in that moment, on the ground, they heard a boom rock over the desert floor—just as the physicist Theodore von Kármán had predicted many years before. [The sound barrier, broken.] Then they heard Ridley back in the B–29: “If it is, Chuck, we’ll fix it. Personally I think you’re seeing things.”

Then they heard Yeager’s poker-hollow drawl again: “Well, I guess I am, Jack … And I’m still goin’ upstairs like a bat.”

(Note the best word there, “upstairs.” It’s Yeager’s word, not Wolfe’s. It captures Yeager, does it not? But it was Wolfe who chose to use it.)

4

Following Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, many people contrast the Dionysian with the Apollonian, with the latter referring to reason, order, and logic.Here is one definition of Dionysian: “relating to the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature.”

Here is another: “characteristic of Dionysus or the cult of worship of Dionysus, especially: being of a frenzied or orgiastic character.” Here is another: “Frenzied, undisciplined, and ecstatic.”

Some writers can be characterized as Dionysian, but we have to be careful there. Dionysian writers are hardly undisciplined, and they may be anything but spontaneous. A Dionysian writer might produce a text in a flood, and it might even feel (to the writer, to the reader) spontaneous and frenzied, but there’s a ton of discipline at work.

(Dionysian writers can be cheap and desperate, or they can be piercing.)

I wanted to say that Wolfe was a Dionysian writer, and at times, he was. But The Right Stuff is hard to categorize. It’s mostly Apollonian. At times, it is ecstatic.

5

“A book can be infatuated - hopelessly, helplessly, heedlessly - same as a person. I’m telling you this not as a way of asking for allowances, but for understanding. In the following pages, things might get a little heated, a little weird, a little out of hand. Now you know why.”

That is toward the beginning of Lili Anolik’s great Dionysian book, Hollywood’s Eve. Things do get a little heated, and a little weird, and a bit out of hand. The book is about Eve Babitz, and Anolik clearly fell for her. She is girlish, smitten, awkward, over-the-top, and hilarious about that.

Of their terrible, cringe-inducing in-person meetings, she writes of “that habit I can’t seem to break of looking at her too hard, of lunging at her every remark as soon as it drops from her lips. Nor have I managed to completely shed my awe of her, my neediness around her, and it’s a strain on us both.”

On the phone, by contrast, “Our rapport is not just reliable but surefire, not just easy but instinctive . . . And she says, ‘Lili!” the exclamation point audible in her voice, which - and I think this every time I hear it, the same thought, without fail - is so charming, unusually charming. It’s girlish and lilting, the enunciation softly crisp, laughter always bubbling up in it; yet it’s drowsy, too, as if the phone’s ringing has pulled her out of a heavy slumber.”

That’s just a glimpse. Anolik is a Dionysian writer. She’s surprising. She’s playful. She notices the most telling details. She can tell a tale. She’s hilarious. She has strong opinions. Also: she likes transgressions and transgressors. Her follow-up, Didion and Babitz, is mesmerizing.

Anolik stands with her Dionysian goddess, Eve Babitz, not her Apollonian earthling, Joan Didion. (Severe, controlled, mostly joyless Joan Didion.)

6

Gerald Manly Hopkins was not boring. He was full of twists and surprises. Here’s his poem, Spring and Fall (read it and then go back to the title):

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

The last line is a gut punch, is it not?

7

Becca Rothfeld’s book, All Things Too Small, is heavier than The Right Stuff and Anolik’s two books on Babitz. It’s a collection of essays, and while it tells stories, it mostly makes arguments. Still, it’s not boring. It’s not Irish, but it’s Irish-adjacent.

Consider her claims about “the new puritanism,” which, she claims, “is at its core a stern and regressive asceticism, utterly without reverence for the shock of true sensuality.” That’s true, but it sounds a bit flat. Rothfeld gets better. She writes, “For the new puritans, then, a cigar is never just a cigar and sex is never undertaken for the immediate joy of it but rather for some incorporeal end, be it material compensation, the production of children, the extraction of fondness, or . . . the celebration of farming.” (Extraction of fondness - a terrific line. Celebration of farming - even better, because weird, and also faithful to her target.) Against the new puritans, she proclaims, “Eroticism is good - indeed, is erotic at all, because it is so unlike a dinner party.”

Rothfeld has a lot to say about that proposition, and it’s specific. It’s (umm) not Apollonian. Not by the way, this exchange is from A.S. Byatt’s Possession, my favorite novel, full of Apollo and Dionysus (both gods are in that particular house):

“You are safe with me.”

“I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”

Rothfeld likes David Cronenberg, also no Apollonian, a lot: “Cronenberg’s genius consists in his rare ability to see that elevation can attend disgust, and almost all of his movies raise the possibility that a hideous ordeal might at least double as a reprieve from banality.” True (and Cronenberg makes the most hideous ordeals elevating, funny, and a lot more; see The Fly and Dead Ringers).

8

Good writing often gets you to see things in new ways. Here’s Billy Collins, A Dog on His Master:

As young as I look,

I am growing older faster than he,

seven to one

is the ratio they tend to say.

Whatever the number,

I will pass him one day

and take the lead

the way I do on our walks in the woods.

And if this ever manages

to cross his mind,

it would be the sweetest

shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

I am not crying. You’re crying.

9

William Blake is not boring. He practiced what he preached: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”

Steadier and less surprising, but still: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” Also: “Enough! or Too much!”

Edgier: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” (Blake didn’t mean that, I don’t think, but he got at something in Paradise Lost.)

And consider this more-than-good writing:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.”

10

Our ending comes from Byatt, after two of the novel’s protagonists spend the night together:

In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction, and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.