Owen Barfield on Language

“Of all devices for dragooning the human spirit, the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language; and we should recognize, I think, that those — and their number is increasing — who are driven by an impulse to reduce the specifically human to a mechanical or animal regularity, will continue to be increasingly irritated by the nature of the mother tongue and make it their point of attack. The strategy is well advised. Language is the storehouse of imagination; it cannot continue to be itself without preforming its function. But its function is, to mediate transition from the unindividualized, dreaming spirit that carried the infancy of the world to the individualized human spirit, which has the future in its charge. If therefore they succeed in expunging from language all the substance of its past, in which it is naturally so rich, and finally converting it into the species of algebra that is best adapted to the uses of indoctrination and empirical science, a long and important step forward will have been taken in the selfless cause of the liquidation of the human spirit.”

– Owen Barfield

That was written in 1951.

Barfield seems to be prophesying the closing of libraries, reducing the language to a mere collection of letters that stand for sentences, the bankruptcy of bookstores and publishers, a pandemic of mispellings in commercial applications, and educators being reduced to merely teaching to the test. But that’s all fantasy, right? No civilized nation would ever try to liquidate the human spirit by destroying its own language! That would be double-plus ungood!

Truth Versus Fact in Memoir

Thanks to some out and out lies by author James Frey, and some heavy-handed bludgeoning by self-aggrandizement expert Oprah Winfrey, memoir has received some bad press in the past few years. True, Frey resorted to pure fabrication in writing about his ordeal with drug addiction, when he didn’t need to. That, however, is no reason to jettison the entire genre as a literary version of P.T. Barnum. Many writers and critics want to do just that very thing.

The current war over memoir seems to be raged by two sides. On one side, are journalists and book critics. Granted, to me, book critics by and large are examples of those who can’t do, criticize. What they have to say, in my opinion, is irrelevant. When I am published, I have no intention of ever reading a review of one of my books. The bad ones will infuriate me (how dare you insult my child?) while the good ones will go to my head (and it’s large enough as it is). The journalists, however, have a point. That point may be misdirected by their necessary zeal in pursuing pure fact. In the wake of Oprah’s harangue of Frey, several journalists took his editor, Nan Talese, to task for not checking Frey’s facts. Uh … book publishers can’t do that. Newspapers and magazines have fact checkers, but they work with small articles that don’t take much time to check. A 500 page book? That could take years! What is the editor supposed to do, send the book to every name mentioned and ask for a verification? The editor has a trust relationship with the writer, built on a belief that the writer is telling the truth and citing facts to the best of his or her ability. No foul to Nan Talese. All foul to James Frey for violating that trust.

It is possible to become obsessed with factual accuracy. Historian Hampton Sides (author of Hellhound on His Trail, about James Earl Ray’s stalk of Martin Luther King) was blasted by his colleagues for describing the smell of yeast coming from the prison bakery the day Ray escaped. “How do you know? You weren’t there!” they shouted. No, Sides wasn’t, but he interviewed several former convicts who were there and they all described how they loved working in the bakery because of the smell. Sides filled in the gaps with logical, and researched, facts. I wonder if David McCullough is chided for not going back in time and following John Adams around with a tape recorder?

Facts can lie, too. According to my grandfather’s death certificate, he died from Alzheimer’s disease. I knew the man and was there. Granddaddy died from pneumonia caused by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. His doctor was simply a lazy idiot who couldn’t tell a mole from a terminal cancer. Yet, it’s my word versus an official State of Florida document. Which will be believed in a court of genealogical or historical inquiry? The lie.

Still — there is no excuse for pure fabrication. The critics of Frey are right. He made up massive chunks of his life to increase the drama and to make him look more dangerous than he really was. There is no excuse for that level of narcissism.

On the other side, are the memoirists themselves. Memoirists defend their territory by stating that it is built over a treacherous fault line, called human memory. Memories shift through time, and are personal to the one holding that memory. One man can state adamantly that something happened, while his brother will swear on a stack of Bibles that it did not. Each is right for himself.

I think the debate boils down to the difference between fact and truth. Journalists must deal in fact. Memoirists are not so wedded to it. Fact is the realm of historians. Truth is the domain of philosophers and poets, and memoirists belong to this school of thought.

In writing about something as faulty as human memory, memoirists often have to fill in gaps. To hard core factists, this appears to be fabrication, and lies. To the memoirist, however, it isn’t. The truth has not been strayed from, and a better story has been told. It is possible to fill in gaps with made up pieces that come close to the historians’ or journalists’ fact, without ever violating the truth.

I just returned from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, held every year in Grapevine, Texas. This year, two memoirists addressed this very issue. The first was Diane Ackerman, a poet and nature writer. She discussed the gaps she had to fill in The Zookeeper’s Wife, and she filled them with accuracy. Ackerman said it was easy for her to find out the migratory patterns of birds so she knew what the wife saw when she looked at any given sky. It was easy to learn what animal cried first in the morning, so she knew the sounds that greeted the wife. Ackerman visited Warsaw, and tasted foods that haven’t changed much in 65 years, and saw the same city from the wife’s bedroom window. Is it possible to know exactly what a woman in Warsaw, Poland saw on March 20, 1944? No. But Ackerman was able to deduce what she probably saw, and fill in the gaps with something very close to fact. Even with the additions, the truth remained the same.

The other memoirist who spoke was W.K. “Kip” Stratton. He said that a memoir needed to be “believably truthful.” There is a lot of room in that phrase for interpretation. Allow me to offer my own. While it is impossible to remember accurately the events of 40 years ago, it is possible to retain the truth of that moment and capture it faithfully. Most readers of any common sense understand that memory cannot fully be trusted, but they do expect the writer to be trustworthy. We can do that!

Here are two cases in my own writing where I have not adhered to the facts, but have adhered to the truth.

The first case is in a memoir I wrote about how my parents and I became obsessed with the hobby of genealogy. In the essay, I described a morning conversation I had with them, and said it occurred in October, 1985. Do I have a photograph of that moment, showing the calendar, what we wore and what we drank? No. Do I have a tape recording of the conversation? No. I do have some knowledge, however, that allows me to recreate the scene with a high degree of factual faithfulness. We talked about driving to Georgia to look at the leaves change. That occurs in October. It was 1985, because I had just graduated from college and was still unemployed. It was morning because that night we were in Athens, Georgia, and it takes ten hours to drive from our then home in Florida to Athens, and my parents hated driving at night. If it was morning, then we were drinking coffee because we were all caffeine addicts. And I can reconstruct what we wore that morning — Dad always wore double knit trousers, a rayon button up shirt over a white undershirt and no socks, Mom always wore a zipped up bath robe (either pink or purple) and in the mornings I wore shorts and a teeshirt. In reconstructing the conversation, it is easy for me to know how my Alabaman father and Georgian mother spoke, and how I would have responded. Is it historically factual? Probably not, but I am not a historian, so I bloody don’t care. Is it truthful and accurate? You bet it is! In essence, I did what Sides and Ackerman did. I used logical possibilities to fill in gaps that had to be filled to create a readable story.

The second case is a recent essay in which my wife and I visited a small town in West Texas. The opening sentence is “Trish, there is a goat grazing by the swimming pool.” I know for a fact that those are not the words I used. I never address my wife by her first name unless she is at the opposite end of the apartment and I need her. Usually, I call her by some term of endearment. We both grew up in Florida, and know that a pool is a concrete construction designed for swimming, so I would have simply said pool. However, “Wampusina, there’s a goat grazing by the pool” may have confused too many readers! I modified the sentence for the sake of clarity. Reporters do that too (I know, because I was one and was told by my editor that I could). Did I fabricate the sentence? No. It still conveys the accurate truth.

It’s funny. In this debate, truth is the inarguable element. Fact is flimsy. I love a tasty irony!

Typewriter Fever

I’m thinking about buying a typewriter.

Yeah, I know. It’s 2011. Buying a typewriter is akin to buying a Model A Ford for transportation or an icebox for food storage. But I do have my reasons and I hear an Underwood singing my name as surely as Odysseus heard the song of the sirens.

Many moons ago, when the world was younger and so was I, all of my writing was done on a typewriter, usually a 1940 L.C. Smith manual. In fact, the only class I took in junior high school that had any merit was a typing class (it was called typing in those days, not keyboarding). I loved that old typewriter! When I had a hard day at work, or suffered from the icy grip of chronic depression, I sat down at the Smith armed with a head full of ideas and a glass of whiskey and beat my frustrations out on its steel keys. The Smith just said “Is that the best you can do, you wimp?” Eventually, however, the allure of a computer finally penetrated my rather Luddite mind. Carbon paper, cloth ribbon and Wite-Out make lousy editing tools, and all the balls of poorly written prose laying on the floor made for a bad fire hazard. The ease of editing on a computer using a word processing program won out, so I converted to an IBM PS2 (remember them? 20 meg hard drive! I swore I’d never fill it up).

My hands were so strong from pounding the Smith that I broke the IBM’s keyboard right in half within six months.

That was 1987. Why am I thinking of investing cold, hard cash into an iron dinosaur when my computer is a superior editing tool? Why am I seriously thinking about buying a reconditioned 1939 Underwood World’s Fair Model that will cost half of what my current laptop cost? Well, like I said, I do have my reasons.

First, I am working on a biography of a writer who lived during the 1920s and 1930s. While working on his story, I would like to engage in some level of immersion journalism, plunging into his world to see what it was like. He used a 1911 Underwood #5. A little too anachronistic for my tastes. The 1939 was much easier to use, hence its almost ubiquitous presence in movies from the 1940s and 1950s. It was a secretary’s dream in the era of Hemingway and Bogart. Since I really don’t remember what it was like to write on what amounted to an anvil, I need to buy one and refamiliarize myself with it.

Second, while the computer is a superior editing tool, I just don’t see it as a superior writing tool. It’s just the way my brain is wired, but I like using a writing tool that has a direct connection with my subject. If I am writing science fiction, then the computer is my first choice. A computer just seems to reek of spaceships. When I write poetry, I like to use a pen and a sheet of paper. If my mind is bleeding metaphors, then my fingers need to bleed ink. For sword and sorcery fantasy and stories set in the Depression, the typewriter comes to mind. It fits the era in a dirty, greasy, loud, cigarette smoke filled kind of way. Yeah, I know, I should use a quill and papyrus for a fantasy story, but I do have my limits. The typewriter seems like the best way to really get into my stories on the first draft. Then, retype them on the comptuer for the second draft. No point in being stupid about this.

Then there is just something visceral and tactile about an old typewriter. I miss the clack-clack-clack of the keys and the zing of the carriage return. I miss watching the carriage move across the top of the machine. I miss slamming the return bar and trying my best to move the 25 pound beast with my left hand. You don’t have any of that with a computer! If the keys of a computer make that kind of sound, I have a problem and need to buy a new computer. If the laptop starts moving across the desk, then one of the cats has grabbed the power cable and there will be an electrocution soon. If I slam the monitor with my hand and toss it across the table, then I need to see a therapist.

So, it appears that a typewriter lies in my near future.

When it comes to music, however, I draw a line. I’m just not sure about returning to a hand-cranked, wax cylinder Ediphone.

To Brand or Not to Brand

Gene Weingarten, the two time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, opened a rather nasty cauldron of worms recently. A journalism student wrote him a letter asking him how he created and promoted his own brand. The question didn’t just offend Weingarten. The man came unglued! To read everything he said, check out the full essay here.

That sparked a whole series of back-and-forth comments about whether Weingarten was right or just a narrow-minded, old fashioned curmudgeon. Eventually, the professor who assigned the task to the student weighed in, himself offended that Weingarten would dare be offended at the idea of self-branding in the 21st Century. To read his rant, check out this link.

I have to agree with Weingarten, but he didn’t fully explain the issue in his essay. The issue isn’t whether a “brand” is good or not, although I hate that term. “Brand” comes to us from the lowest dregs of society, the advertisers, and makes human beings seem like mere commodities. The concept of a brand may be a good one, but can’t we find a better term? One that doesn’t put us on the shelf between Coca-C0la and Clorox? One that recognizes that we are still human beings, despite the dehumanizing trends of the 21st Century? Be that as it may, the issue here is whether a writer, or any artist for that matter, should promote his or her own brand. In other words, should they promote their own names, rather than their work?

NO!

There is only one proper way to do this, at least from where I sit. That is to do the work, to take the talent and develop the necessary skills, and write stories and novels and books. Or paint paintings, draw drawings, sculpt sculptures, act scenes, play music, whatever. Become good at it, and keep achieving, accomplishing and being better today than you were yesterday. In other words, get your durn hands dirty doing what you claim to do, pounding away at your craft day and night, the old fashioned way. Build a reputation through sweat and genius. Eventually, all that hard work will pay off and people will begin talking about you, the artist. They will write reviews, invite you to speak, beg you to participate in galleries, offer themselves as your agents and scream for your autograph. Other people will develop the brand for you, the artist, without you, the artist, having to spend time, energy, or talent promoting yourself. Others will do that work for you. That is the way it should be done. Yes, there will be a “brand,” your name will become a hot commodity, but you won’t have to pandar it to the public like a half-starved prostitute looking for attention. What would you rather be, an artist or an attention whore?

What do we get when someone develops and promotes his or her own brand? We get Lindsay Lohan. When was the last time she starred in a movie or issued an album? Yet, she still hogs more than her 15 minutes in the news. Why? She is a brand and is self-promoting it. A brand, in that regard, is merely fame with no substance, a shadow with nothing to cast it, a name with no talent or achievement to back it up. That is what self-branding is, and what Weingarten was griping about.

And self-branding is destroying all the arts.

I would personally rather live in ignomy but know that I’m producing the best I can, rather than be famous for producing trash. In other words, I’d rather be Cormack McCarthy than Stephanie Meyer. The former is an artist. The latter is a brand. McCarthy will continue to write, up to the day he draws his last breath. Meyer has written her last unedited treacle about a vampire whose only power is to be hot. Yet, who will continue to rake in millions and posture proudly and promote a self-brand? Meyer.

I don’t know about you, but I think too highly of myself to follow in Meyer or Lohan’s footsteps. I refuse to engage in self-branding. If my name is ever known, it will be solely the result of the quality of my work, not the bandwidth of social media I consume to promote myself.

Terms of McMurtry

I admit to having a love-hate relationship with Larry McMurtry’s prose. Well, maybe those verbs are a little extreme. Perhaps it is best to say “I’m not sure whether I like his prose or not.”

I’ve been reading one of his memoirs (he’s written three) and I groused to Trish about the terseness of McMurtry’s language. Trish said “Well, it’s all that dry West Texas dust distilled into ink.” Now that makes sense. I’ve been to Archer City, McMurtry’s home town. It’s as flat as an ironing board and as dry as a lecture on economics. During the summer, the temperature spikes above 110 degrees, and in the winter it plummets to 10 during the day. It’s a region of cattle ranches and oil wells. In such a climate, a storyteller doesn’t have the time or saliva to spin long yarns of languid language like we do in the Deep South. Of course, McMurtry is going to get to the point, and get there fast.

Where I respect McMurtry is in his honesty. Memoir is a danger zone of fragmented memories at best. Too many critics today expect every fact to be accurate, right down to what Dad wore 30 years ago. Nobody can remember that kind of detail with any clarity and crispness. Some things have to be fabricated to make the story flow. It’s the difference between fact and truth. As long as truth is held to, the facts can be fluid. But critics don’t get that. McMurtry has found a way around the critics by admitting up front that his memory is flawed. He liberally uses phrases like “it seems to me,” and “I think it was like this,” and “but I’m not really sure anymore.” That works! That kind of literary device I can put in my own tool box for future use.

And the man does own and operate a bookstore with 400,000 volumes in it. Gotta love that!

LAUNCHING A NEW BLOG

I’m starting a new blog. Here, I’m going to post observations about writing, the writer’s life, the English language, literature, music, art, being a student and being an educator. In other words, I’ll rant and rave about things I read, write and see, and make a general nuissance of myself.

Stay tuned.

– NB