Topical Guide 223
Mark Dorset
Deception
Writing: Difficulty of, Headaches Caused by
Persistence
“PETER!” my father called from the foot of the stairs. “What are you doing up there?”
His voice startled me, and I reacted like a guilty party. I pushed aside the paper I was writing on, covered it with my science book, grabbed some other pages of the Tars Manual, and spread them in front of me.
Then I recovered. I reminded myself that I had, at least technically, been doing something of which my father approved. I had been working on the Tars Manual. “I’m working on the manual,” I said. There was, however, a tremor in my voice. I hoped my father wouldn’t notice it.
“Are you really, Peter?” he asked. He must have noticed the tremor.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.” I decided to take the big step, to see whether my father would accept the reasoning that I had accepted, whether he would legitimize what I was doing. “I’m working on a whole new section. It’s called ‘Tales for Tars.’ … This is going to be a section of stories that Tars can read at night, when they’re off watch and hanging around on the afterdeck or lying in their bunks. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’s giving me a headache.” …
“Well, Peter,” said my father (and from the note of sympathy that I could hear beneath the sternness on the surface I knew that I’d been successful, that he’d accepted my writing “Tales for Tars” as a legitimate part of my working on the manual), “sometimes you have to just grin and bear it. …”
I listened with a guilty pleasure, because the tales I was writing for the Tars were, of course, about Larry Peters, and the headache I felt was of a different order from the one I got when I had to reorder the Tars Traits, or rewrite the procedure for the Tars meetings.Little Follies, “The Young Tars”
Repeatedly I took stabs at writing, but the results were so poor that I would tear up the sheets. I was striving for a level of expression that matched those of the novels I read. But I always somehow failed to get onto the page what I thought and felt. Failing at sustained narrative, I compromised by playing with single sentences and phrases. … I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living.
INTERVIEWER [Gerald Clarke] Did you always know you would be a writer?
WODEHOUSE Yes, always. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose. . . .The Paris Review, “P. G. Wodehouse, The Art of Fiction No. 60”
Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few words on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.
See also: Deception TG 91; Writer at Work, The TG 19; Persistence TG 28; TG 84; TG 89
I’ve learned that the link to Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’” in Topical Guide 222 did not work for some readers. Here’s an alternative:
[more to come on Friday, March 25, 2022]
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Afternoon Concert, Sunday, March 20, 2022: the Balourdet Quartet in the Schneider Concert Series.
On their program was Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, usually taken as one of the thinnest of Nabokov’s novels, is slender and delicate, but appealing for just those reasons, a small monument to the fragility of hope and loyalty. It touches us across its tricks, because of its tricks—its tricks are images of our eagerness to deceive ourselves. If it is not a great masterpiece it may be something more precious: like Ford’s The Good Soldier rather than Tolstoy’s War and Peace; or like Debussy’s string quartet, for which, if I had to, I would give away all Beethoven.
Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
Here is an earlier performance of theirs, at the New England Conservatory, on April 19, 2021: