ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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11.2
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Thomas Larson
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1 / From “The Graces of Prose,” a chapter in The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (1941), I note this: “Though modern prose is intended to be read silently and two or three times faster than at ordinary speaking rate, some people read with their mental ear not quite closed.”
I’m reading an essay about Caravaggio by Teju Cole, and, as I go, I hear his words inside me. Like a tongue, my mental ear, forked and flicking, activates my response: one tine sees the word, the other tine hears the vibration of the words’ syllables, fast-read, quick-consumed, much the same as the words motor on when I type or longhand. Cole’s essay burbles along, whether I’m notching the sounds or not—until I get to the word, misericordia and I pause. I don’t register its meaning, though its rolly collocation is so softly vocalic that I say it aloud. I’ve heard it before, I think. A bell rings. That word applied to musical illustrations of Christ’s suffering, a scene commonly painted and set into a musical narrative by composers of the Medieval and Baroque eras. Encountering a new term, like Anthropocene or wifty, I stop the flow and out-loud them for my ear alone. Several reasons. To taste it on my tongue and in my mouth. To see how it fits with syllables I’ve spoken previously. To see how it fits into the roomy mansion of my vocabulary, in effect, making space for the term to join its cousins who already occupy my nomenclature. Still, even before checking the O.E.D., I need to further audition its bandwidth: four vowels and six syllables. Mi-ser-i-cord-di-a. Italian via Latin, the stress on the penultimate syllable, di. It’s a word that tumbles, Cirque du Soleil-like, with its chummy abundance of vowels (i-e-i-o-i-a), mellifluous to the requia baritone or the chanting monk. Repeating the word, I imagine using it with others (which is how a new term becomes yours—say it so it’s heard among others). I imagine using it in context, say, at a frumpy literary party among a scrum of Catholic writers, and the occasion arises to discuss Extreme Unction as a technical term. Sounds fair. Pio Monte della Misericordia, the title of a “charitable society” of art-loving donors to the destitute, bought Caravaggio’s painting in 1606, (an apical year, considering its nearness to the publication dates of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Montaigne’s Essays.) The title’s translation is “the pious mount of mercy.” (Mount’s trope is the loft from which the generous give to those below.) That charity, in turn, is the name of a church in Naples where Caravaggio’s painting, The Seven Acts of Mercy, still hangs. The word misericordia may be the opposite of its rival, misery. It means mercy to those who suffer, and the artist crams its seven kinds of compassion into the painting as allegorical figures. According to David Carrier, “The picture shows these six actions: feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; taking strangers in; clothing the naked; helping the ill; and visiting those in prison. And the medieval church added a seventh, also shown by Caravaggio: burying the dead.” More simply said, from a psychologist friend: “You’re pain in my heart.” Much is nested in the Italian word: its spoken tone or color, its sense, its etymology, its denotations, its quickness to connotate. There’s something in the word of Christ taken down from the cross, handed limb by limb, cradled and wrapped in a shroud. There’s something akin to B. B. King’s, “I woke up this morning / and my baby was gone.” Another gift of Caravaggio: The painting encases the word’s referential breadth or echo, allowing us, as with music, to hear extra-narrative matters, the story of mercy being told with figures. 2 / The wonder of words includes their graphic nature on a page, their etymological history, and the context in which they appear, are used, here, as the title of one of Caravaggio’s 65 attributive paintings. Those things accompany the word’s sounding, which is its life, not its readability, but its spokenness. While reading, I pause to tune or integrate misericordia into my mental ear’s lexical soundscape. (Such a multi-syllabic word requires some antagonistic cooperation.) Like other readers, we may say it under our breath, discreet, barely heard, an unsure utterance, that is, until its ours. Think of the child who’s reading aloud and stops to sound out as-soc-ci-a-tion. The degree of unfamiliarity to new words is wide; the need to know their meaning from the first meetup, to recall it when next met, is hardly universal; for some, the word’s feeling (miseri: your pain in my heart) and sound (cordia: harmonically tied) sounds like what compassion might say, had it a voice, while for me, I linger over the word’s feeling-cum-tone, in part, just to listen to it and let it occupy me, an overlook into the Grand Canyon. I think of other words that use the auditory for a denotative effect: oink and meow, Whitman’s “Yawp,” Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha,” the sensual “Ah” for “I” in Zora Neale Hurston, the towering ogre “Lerch” of The Adams Family. The mental aspect of a word connotes things I know, the language referents, while the earful part is like a peculiar but not unvoiced orchestral sound—say, flute, bassoon, and tuba arpeggiating an E-flat ninth chord with an augmented sixth, believe me, an uncommon coloring. No single chord, we know, has meaning outside its context. What got us to that chord and what comes after is of equal heft as well as of greater heft because the musical goal is the point, not its constituent parts, lovely to isolate as they are. The goal is to activate ambiguity. This is/should be the state we listen in, the state our lives universalize. That first hearing remains forever yours and yours alone. But individual hearing inevitably joins the human phonosphere (the collective or planetary sound array). This is the condition I contemplate constantly, probably more than most of my peers. A condition, indeed, conditional where there’s more to hear than I pick up, a more that passes by faster than my picking up can identify, suggesting that in the first, second, even third go-round I’m listening for things that aren’t fully heard. (For musicians, following a score brings out more of what is often missed without a score, same with how reseeing a film activates more of the sound “behind” the images.) Simply put, I’m listening for things I know from experience should be there but elude, momentarily, my attention. They are suggested, leave traces, knock at the door and run off. Most people are unengaged by apparency; no autopsy is required if the overweight middle-aged man died of an apparent heart attack. Like a dinner host, how often we greet new sounds and their new meanings with a nod and move on. 3 / To anyone who asks how I learned to write prose, I tell the person that the greatest guide, in addition to reading Twain and Morrison and Knut Hamsun, was to study and complete the exercises in Joseph M. Williams’s rhetoric, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (1995), grace, the Le mot Juste. In it, he murderously dissects the fundamental elements of prose—cohesion, coherence, and emphasis—and their effectiveness in paragraph, section, and chapter. Citing poor examples of turgid, unfocused prose (corporate-speak, academic drivel, medical brochure), Williams, who taught at the University of Chicago and died in 2008, erases the glib and the governmental with two pillars that support coherent prose: the topic string and the thematic string. First, the topic string—pronouns, nouns, and noun phrases are typically the grammatical subjects of sentences. The writer positions these as the old information of a sentence; topics should be sequential, seated early in the sentence, and should echo one another, like a melodic figure, with repeats, paraphrases, and synonyms. (Williams also defines the topics as “characters,” which, in turn, “act” or cause “actions.”) Placing topics clearly allows the writer to add, range, and emphasize new information, that which the writer is getting to, at the end of his sentences. Second, the string of thematic points—ideas, actions, and conditions that may echo each other but do more; they expand and develop the paragraph’s movement. This first (topic) and second (theme) arrangement simplifies and streamlines reading, a progressive path from old to new so the new info will, handily, become the old initial info of the next sentence, paragraph, section, or chapter. Reading prose involves remembering where we are as we journey to new areas of interest, that is, what the author seeks to emphasize and what we participate in as we are systematically prepped for the new and the emphatic. Williams’s very neat idea is that “by so thoroughly engaging your readers in your ideas,” those readers “lose touch with the surface of your prose.” That surface, like waves on the ocean or the three-chord pattern of a country tune, is housed in the topics. Which points up a paradox: What you hear in a topic string is its guiding sameness, which frees you not to linger on those topics—they act like conveyor belts—as well as frees you to listen to and concentrate on the new material, fueled and refueled. You want readers to trust you because you, far more than they, know or should know where it’s going. 4 / To illustrate Williams’s design, here’s a healthy chunk from D. H. Lawrence’s essay, “New Mexico” (1928), in which he ignites his passion (Lawrence, the “burning man,” as Frances Wilson calls him) halfway through the third paragraph. . . . Poor creatures that we are, we crave for experience, yet we are like flies that crawl on the pure and transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bonbon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it, though we see it there all the time as we move about it apparently in contact, yet actually as far removed as if it were the moon. Take it as true that the rest of this flaming essay burnishes New Mexico’s magic and Lawrence’s time, eighteen months, there in the early 1920s. Note how he argues initially that his well-traveled, surface-skimming audience knows little about what’s authentic. Why does he do this? Because the sameness of tourism and image-making covers up the indigenous blooded life of the people, which is interred by civilization, an evil in Lawrence’s mind. What’s more, puritanical Americans hide the blooded world in Paul Bunyanesque tales and Fred Harvey guidebooks—they don’t know how badly they want the animistic life Lawrence cites until—his mission—he points it out.
Reread the topic strings; they’re obvious. We (poor creatures) . . . our great-grandfathers . . . they . . . we (who don’t know much) . . . I (who went West) . . . (to) New Mexico . . . New Mexico . . . New Mexico . . . (and realized) . . . you (like me can change) . . . (in) New Mexico. It’s easy to track the repetition of topics: we, great-grandfathers, they, we, I, you (briefly), and with a Ferde-Grofé, Grand-Canyonesque indulgence, the place, New Mexico. (He must have been convinced that few Americans knew the state even existed, or else it was Old Mexico.) Note, too, the invariance of the topics, a sort of syntactical rhyme or scheme. We need only to quickly recognize them in passing as we read on; we need not dwell on topics with familial likenesses. This assonantal musicality is typical of Lawrence’s ecstatic, instinctive style (evident in his poetry, as well, which I think of as “flash” prose)—one of his techniques is a kind of pelting emphasis: check (or feel down there) Mellors’s voluptuous iterations of his and Lady Chatterley’s private parts in his letters. In Lawrence, we hear repeats, we catch synonyms, we recognize paraphrase, including pronominal sentries to mark our progress, and we recall the sound they make in our memory, their drumbeat, a pace measured and accentual and invisible, leading us to what he has to say and how—his adamant tone, his anti-civilized perspective, his wild self-righteous energy. Williams calls the work of chronicling and structuring topics and themes the “aboutness” of a prose work. 5 / If we think of topics as synonymous retreads of grounded or known characters, the old information, which becomes less important once they are known and easily grasped, we then regard (with our mental ears) the thematic points, that is, the new information, as more important. Topics gateway points, the forward-voyaging content. As such, content those new points must have their own relatedness to one another, those coming and those having been stated. Declaring point after point, however, is not music. It’s scale practice. As discussed, I hear in the Lawrence example similarities in the repetitions and paraphrases of the topic string; I also hear a sonic sharing of likenesses in the thematic string, though these feel different because Lawrence, the colorist, plays with them. Note the abusive slaps he wields against the guarded, uncreative traveler: those “poor creatures” who are “like flies,” “bowling along in a rickshaw,” who live “outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilization,” which is “absolutely hygienic” and part of a “trite civilization” of tourists who “put on a sombrero and a red kerchief” and go “Red Indian.” Yowza! And then, inside one of those slaps, is a list (another Lawrentian ploy), also part of a faux New Mexico, reflecting America’s vacationland tawdriness: “the picturesque reservation and playground of the eastern states, very romantic, old Spanish, Red Indian, desert mesas, pueblos, cowboys, penitents, all that film-stuff.” Note further a few contradictory opposites between the inept traveler and the liberated participant: Though we are in the USA, New Mexico is its own state; in it, we can “touch the country,” but, like a wrapped bonbon, “we can never get at it,” that is, the part of an undiscovered world we recognize as real because of its distance from our experience. Yes, we’ve been everywhere (and, certainly, Lawrence had: see Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage), but “underneath” our know-it-all attitudes “is everything we don’t know.” I can’t show it better than Lawrence or summarize it better than Joseph Williams. The latter writes, “[W]hen we listen to our prose, we should hear something beyond sheer clarity and coherence. We should hear a voice. The voice our readers hear contributes to the character we project—or, more accurately, to the character our readers construct [italics added].” And more wise counsel: “I suspect that we all speak in many voices, no one of which is more or less false, more or less authentic than any other. When you want to be pompous and authoritative, then that’s in the voice you project because that’s what you are being. When you want to be laconic and direct, then you should be able to adopt that voice. The problem is to hear the voice you are projecting and to change it when you want to. That’s no more false than choosing how you dress, how you behave, how you live.” 6 / It’s not possible for me to separate sound from print—their reconcilableness began in high school when I discovered a cache of Folkways albums, the music of Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton, oral recordings mastered by the folklorist Alan Lomax who got prisoners and brothel pianists to play and sing and ramble on with truth-stretching tales to his questions. Soon, I found Caedmon Records and its albums of English and American poets and short-story writers. (None of these albums was available in record shops; but my suburban St. Louis local library had them in abundance.) In sonorous readings by Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Frank O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and my favorite, Robert Service’s “The Face on the Barroom Floor” read by Ed Begley (who also recited the work one night on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson), I heard something, in the low fidelity of these oft-scratchy records, of that Homeric, bardic oratory, now crafted by modernist writers who sung metrical verse and lyric prose lustily. (The worst of the lot was Robert Frost whose lugubrious voice drained the life out of his poems teenagers memorized and loved in our American Literature textbooks.) Was this, I wondered later, how Thomas Hardy, perhaps the most musical of all early twentieth-century poets, who varied his verse/chorus schemes in hundreds of rhyming poems, might have sounded, say, crafting a poem’s melody as he did for “The Voice,” a lament for his dead wife: “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, / Saying that now you are not as you were / When you had changed from the one who was all to me, / But as at first, when our day was fair”? |
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Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press), The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a twenty-five-year staff writer of longform and investigative journalism for the San Diego Reader, the former book reviews editor at River Teeth, and an editor at Wandering Aengus Press. He works privately with authors of nonfiction manuscripts.
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