What I learned from John Steinbeck-V: The Grapes of Wrath, Sixty Years Later: "My, how you've grown!"

When I first read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, it was a short, snappy, action story about the plight of the homeless Joad family during the Great Depression. The version of The Grapes of Wrath I read in high school was a highly redacted or Reader's Digest version of the novel, not just shortened but also expurgated, i.e., passages thought to be too explicit for young people were excluded.

Now, as I read the entire work some sixty years later for the first time, I want to exclaim, "My, how you've grown!" That is to say, "My, how what is arguably John Steinbeck's greatest novel has grown in length, detail, complexity of story, subtlety of character development and richness of overall artistic expression."

The unexpurgated version has a curious yet fascinating chapter-structure that makes it ripe for widespread editing and excising:

The even-numbered chapters (yes, by that I mean chapters 2, 4, 6, etc.) tell the Joad-family story, the shortened, clean, action-oriented version of the story I read when I was in high school. It's also the Academy Award-winning story you might have seen on the silver screen starring the great Henry Fonda and brilliantly directed by John Ford. The story told in the film, i.e., the even-numbered chapters, is the story with which you're probably already familiar: Tom Joad who has just been released early on parole from prison (having been imprisoned for murder) returns home to his family just as his parents, siblings, aunt and uncle and their children are about to leave the Oklahoma Panhandle for California. The Joad-family farm and the uncle's farm have been repossessed by the bank after their crops failed due to drought and poor agricultural practices that worsened the effects of the drought. Tom's father and uncle have read "circulars" stating there were plenty of jobs for migrant "pickers" of fruits and vegetables in the fertile California valleys. The Joad family decides to leave for California in the uncle's Model T truck.

The odd-numbered chapters (chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, etc.) provide a motherload of rich added-value material. They're sidelights, many of which have the qualities one might find in a classic New York Times "Reporter's Notebook" article. In fact, John Steinbeck was commissioned to write a seven-part series for The San Francisco News that was published under the title, "The Harvest Gypsies." It wouldn't be surprising to me if in covering the real-life tragedy unfolding in the San Fernando Valley, Steinbeck may have uncovered and developed a great many of the thoughts and observations that he subsequently worked into these odd-numbered chapters.

Some sixty years after I read the work for the first time, I'm reading the odd-numbered intermediary chapters combined with the even-numbered Joad-family chapters, and I am appreciating the rich, artistic experience Steinbeck had in mind when he first wrote The Grapes of Wrath in the mid-1930s. Reading it in the way Steinbeck originally intended the work does require more patience and care than reading the Reader's Digest "student version."

One example: Steinbeck devotes an entire intermediary chapter, Chapter Three, to describing what happens in a torn-up patch of grass by the side of a concrete highway. He describes, "the grass heads heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog's coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse's fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep's wool…"

I have always admired Steinbeck's eye for detail and his willingness to go "microscopic." He often allows his focus to include insects and small animals that inhabit this tiny patch of landscape: "The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet."

Into this patch of grass, this micro-environment by the side of a concrete road, lumbers a single turtle: "And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along."

For paragraphs we follow the painfully slow progress of this turtle as it moves over rough terrain: "The back legs went to work, straining like elephant legs…"

Presently, the turtle overcomes hurdles and crawls onto the highway where it is nearly hit by "a forty-year-old woman" driving a "sedan." We readers hold our collective breath. The car swerves to avoid the turtle. "The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot." And now a light truck almost flattens the turtle but only manages to flip the turtle on its back: "Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull itself over which it finally manages to do. Chapter 3 ends telling us the turtle's "old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust."

Why does Steinbeck focus on the affairs of insects by the side of the highway and then proceed to narrate the adventures of a lowly land turtle for an entire chapter in his novel (even if Chapter Three takes up only a tiny bit more than two pages)? Perhaps because his democratic values insist that non-humnan stories can have value and should be honored by being told? I'd say, "yes" to that. But there are story-structure reasons that also justify it: In Chapter 4, a truck that in Chapter 2 gave an unnamed distinctfully-yet-strangely dressed man a ride, and which is the same truck in Chapter 3 that nearly ran over the turtle, drops the same man off by the side of the road. For the first time our narrator gives the man a name, but only a last name, "Joad."

Joad removes his bright yellow shoes, places them under his arm and starts walking through the dust in his bare feet.  A page later he picks up the turtle. Some pages after that we learn he intends to bring it home as a gift. After another page of description, Joad meets "Reverend" Jim Casey, and in a way, that's when our story begins in the traditional sense with dialogue and description.

Does this novel have a slow start? It does. It starts as slowly as a turtle. (By the way I don't recall in high school The Grapes of Wrath I read having a slow start; perhaps it got off to a faster start thanks to further editing.

In the "grown-up" version of the novel, we get the distinct impression the author doesn't mind the slow start; he's intent on not allowing even the most minute details escape his and the reader's purview.

Next month, more about how the structure of the unexpurgated version of The Grapes of Wrath even when addressing emotionally explosive topics like sexual assault in the workplace, adds depth and artistic richness to the entire novel.

What I learned from John Steinbeck-IV: The Great Dust Bowl, from Fact to Fiction.

By 1936, the Great Depression and the economic devastation it wrought had been punishing the American people for six hard years. While Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd U.S. President, had just been inaugurated months earlier, his New Deal policies had yet to brighten the bleak mood of the American people.

Meanwhile, in the Oklahoma Panhandle, poor agricultural practices combined with chronic drought turned farmers' topsoil to dust along with any prospects they might have had for a harvest, no matter how paltry.

Prevailing winds picked up the dust (formerly rich topsoil from the Oklahoma Panhandle) and transported it an easterly direction.

When mud-brown, billowing clouds started drifting over New York City a few days later, a journalist coined the term "Dust Bowl" to describe what was happening in Oklahoma, and the name stuck for all time.

While the clouds carried the topsoil east, many Oklahoma farmers having no way to repay the loans they had taken out to plant their crops that spring, headed west. Economically ruined, but hearing enticing stories about their being "plenty of jobs to be had" in California,they packed up their belongings in their family Model-T Fords and followed Route 66 from Oklahoma to California.

Unfortunately, far more "Oakies" were arriving in the fertile San Fernando Valley than were needed as laborers to harvest the crops. Uprooted from Oklahoma but now penniless, with nothing to eat, slim prospects for work, and no place to go, the Oakies crowded into migrant labor camps that had been set up by the State of California to feed and house them and relieve their suffering.

That same year the San Francisco News, sensing a humanitarian tragedy in the making essentially on their doorstep, commissioned novelist John Steinbeck to write a seven-part series titled Harvest Gypsies about the plight of the displaced "Okies." The articles he wrote were published in October and early November of 1936.

(Of course the circumstances causing it are totally different, but if you've heard about the "camp" for displaced Middle-eastern immigrants that sprang up and still exists in Calais, France, it might provide an instructive modern-day analogy to what was going on in the San Fernando Valley in the fall of 1936. The overcrowding and dangerously poor health conditions in the Calais camp, especially during the Covid Pandemic, bespeak the plight of an abjectly poor, displaced and highly vulnerable group of economic refugees, which can be compared and contrasted with the plight of the "Oakies" in 1936.

Even before 1936, the State of California had set up a number of migrant labor camps to serve itinerant laborers and help alleviate suffering by housing them in humane conditions.

Tom Collins, the director of one of those migrant camps, the one called "The Arvin," wrote a series of reports about the conditions experienced by the Okies as they flooded into the California camps.

Of course, Steinbeck visited the camps himself and conducted interviews with the migrant laborers there, but knowing the controversy that was likely to be aroused by his passionate defense of the "Okies" as being exploited by a corrupt system gone awry, the author used Collins reports in researching his San Francisco News articles, as well as when he drafted his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath first published in 1939. In Steinbeck's writer's journal, which he kept at the time, he wrote, "I need this stuff [Collin's reports]. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong." He certainly comprehended the sensitive and controversial nature of what he was writing about.

Eighteen of Collins's reports are available on EDSITEment.com, which is a National Endowment for the Arts website devoted to "driving excellence in humanities education."

According to the website, "comparing the reports to The Grapes of Wrath offers students a rare look into a writer's process of converting nonfiction material into fiction."

In coming months I will explore what I consider this "rare find," but in the remainder of this essay, I'd like to emphasize that in my view the power and authenticity of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic tale of the Joad family, derive from it being scrupulously fact-based. I believe the passion very much in evidence in Steinbeck's voice as you read his work derives from the truth of it, as if the work itself wants to cry out and say, "What you're reading was once an American tragedy that happened to so many families just like the Joads during those very dark days."

 

If one simply reads chapter one, which is only four pages in length, one immediately understands this is a work of fiction based on fact:

"The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet."

Without ever using the word "drought" or ever coming out and telling the reader that Steinbeck here is describing the climatic conditions that bring a stubborn drought into existence, the author patiently describes the pre-conditions for drought, until, "The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as the day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.

"Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes."

Sounds a little like life during Covid, doesn't it? The pervasive sadness is the same as during a pandemic. I think it's the ever-present and inescapable notion that something very fundamental is very wrong. In the case of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, we find that along with damaging crops, drought damages human beings' spirits:

"The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break… Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant… Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was much to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still—thinking—figuring."

Steinbeck's writing here is spiritual, spare and elegiac; the deep sadness the people feel is evident; as well, the extra weight placed on the men just to comprehend what is happening to them, no less find a solution. Indeed, before Steinbeck has finished telling his story some men will be broken and some families, ripped apart.

Next month, more about how Steinbeck dramatized the real human tragedy occurring in Oklahoma and California in 1936 by inventing the Joad family and telling its story.

What I learned from John Steinbeck-III

John Steinbeck's Cannery Row tells the fictional story of a community by using an ensemble cast of what are truly "characters" who, during the worst days of the Great Depression, live in a poor industrialized neighborhood called Cannery Row just outside Monterrey, CA.

Its story structure is called "episodic" because the overall story can be broken down into individual, easy-to-watch-or-read "episodes" or "chapters," short stories that all work together to tell a longer and much larger story. Typically, episodic stories have "ensemble" casts of characters who play off one another to bring off the entire work. That's certainly the case with Cannery Row and Schitts Creek.

The word "ensemble" is French in origin. It may sound like a "fancy" word in English, but in French all it means is "together."

Whether you're viewing comedy TV shows like Schitts Creek or reading novels like Cannery Row, the episodic story structure lends itself very nicely to humor. And invariably, I've found, episodic stories feature an ensemble cast of characters.

Sure, Schitts Creek has its lead characters and its "stars;" so does Cannery Row, but the primary concern of both works is to tell a story of a community, using an ensemble cast, not just one or two principal protagonists.

So, for just a moment, let's look at the episodic story structure of Cannery Row. I think it's very soundly devised, beginning at the spiritual center of the community, and moving outward.

At the very heart of Cannery Row is Lee Chong who knows everyone because virtually everyone in the neighborhood owes him money. The novel starts off describing Lee Chong and his grocery. It goes on to tell how, after Lee purchases a nearby vacant building in payment for grocery debts, he negotiates a deal with a character named Mac "and the boys" (his cronies) to occupy the property in exchange for a monthly "rent" which Lee knows very well Mac and the boys will never pay.

So, given Cannery Row's episodic "start at the center and move outward" story structure, it's not surprising that the next major chapter (which is chapter three; chapter two is what I'd call an "interlude") discusses how Mack and the boys move into this vacant property; how they furnish it, and come to name it "The Palace Flophouse."

We learn that Mack is a no-account, extremely clever "bum," who's the ringleader of "Eddie and the rest, and whose ultimate goal is to live a life that never requires one to show up at a job. (Just as well, because during The Great Depression in the 1930s, there were an extremely limited number of those to go around.)

The next chapter describes the property directly to the left of the Palace, "the stern and stately whore house of Dora Flood; a decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a glass of beer among friends."

From this brief description I think you can begin to see how the novel's story structure contributes to making Cannery Row delightfully entertaining to read.

Cannery Row pushes beyond mere ensemble. It allows for individual characters, or pairs of characters to "have their own chapters" while the lead characters are off-stage. It's a perfect story structure for a novel like Cannery Row, where the tone is comic, and the reader gets to enjoy a series of eccentric and poignant characters mixing it up.

An episodic story structure is extremely solid when it's used to tell a comic or comedic story. Think of the TV show Office from the 1990s, or Ricky Gervais's current series, After Life. In both shows we see an ensemble cast that supports a story that's larger than any one character. But this kind of cast can also be used to support heroic or adventure stories.

As for why we binge on episodic comedies or action adventures like the ones mentioned here; I think it's that we feel extremely comfortable with the "set-up" of each show while individual chapters or, in the case of TV, individual "episodes" deal with specific stories, some with limited cast members “on stage” at the same time. That's the case with Steinbeck's comic novel Cannery Row as well as with Steinbeck's classic tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath, which I'll be discussing next month. Don't miss it.

What I Learned from John Steinbeck - 2

I'll bet you've heard of the expression "ensemble cast," used to describe certain plays and movies. It denotes "a group story structure" where characters interact with one another in the telling of the story rather than the story focusing on any single protagonist who undergoes a catharsis.

Ensemble or group-story structures lend themselves extremely well to comic or comedic tales. That's the case with Cannery Row, where we get to enjoy a cast of funny, eccentric characters interacting with one another.

In my view, the funniest character of them all is an artist by the name of Henri whose art includes creating assemblages of chicken feathers to paint portraits of chickens. Well, as we hear two other characters, Doc and Hazel, talking about Henri, we learn he's had a turn of artistic inspiration: "…He done all our pictures with chicken feathers, and now he says he got to do them all over again with nutshell. He says he changed his—his med—medium…."

"He still building his boat?"

"Sure," said Hazel. "He's got it all changed around. New kind of boat. I guess he'll take it apart and change it. Doc—is he nuts?"

"Nuts? he asked. "Oh, yes, I guess so. Nuts about the same amount we are, only in a different way."

"But that boat," he cried. "He's been building that boat for seven years that I know of… Every time he gets it nearly finished, he changes it and starts it over again. I think he's nuts. Seven years on a boat."

"You don't understand," he said gently. "Henri loves boats but he's afraid of the ocean."

"What's he want a boat for then?" Hazel demanded.

"He likes boats," said Doc. "But suppose he finishes his boat. Once it's finished people will say, 'Why don't you put it in the water?' Then if he puts it in the water, he'll have to go out in it, and he hates the water. So, you see, he never finishes the boat—so he doesn't have to ever launch it."

When I read this, I laughed uproareously assuming Henri was a stand-in for the type of artist who never gives himself permission to finish a work of art either because he or she is a perfectionist or, worse, a controlling coward who can't bear to send the finished work out into the world where it may be criticized. That kind of artist always finds something to change. If it's not fear of criticism, it may be an artist who doesn't know what he or she wants to say in the first place. An artist like Henri operates like a chameleon; he or she always wants to incorporate the latest artistic trends into his or her work.

If Henri were a novelist he'd never finish his novel because he doesn't have a strong conviction about what he wants to say.  Just as Henri is afraid of the ocean, this novelist is afraid of launching his novel into the world, and learning what readers and critics think of it; this is, finding out if it floats or sinks.

Reading about Henri tickled me because I recognized how some of Henri's artistic traits at one time summed me up perfectly as a novelist; the satirical sendup of your's truly hit far too close to home for comfort. 

 

While it's true that at one point I may have resembled Henri, that's not the case today. True, for years I wandered in the desert, not sure what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it. I've long since stopped  wandering. I'm on my way towards completing and launching my boat. I know exactly what I want to say with my novel, and I fully expect, if it's taken seriously, as I hope it to be, people will say about it whatever they will. I'll never forget that my novel will be imperfect because, after all, it's written by a human being.

That short sketch of Henri turned me into an ardent fan of John Steinbeck's writing. I thought to myself, either Mr. Steinbeck at one point in his life came across someone like Henri (perhaps when he hung out at Cannery Row) or else, more likely, I believe, he recognized that there is a little bit of Henri inside him as well as inside every artist. It's someone who is reluctant to launch his work into the world to sail the ocean's seas where everyone can read it; it's an author who always wants to be thought of as avant-garde. But the truth of the matter is, the instant the work sails into the public domain, it starts becoming dated.

Next month: More about Cannery Row's story structure.

What I Learned from John Steinbeck-I

I learned that when we write about a place like Cannery Row, we should never forget that places can only come to life and live on the page once characters and relationships between characters are described and made meaningful. As John Gardner wrote, a successful novel must possess the quality of "a continuous dream."

Ask yourself: Have you ever once had a dream without any characters in it? I haven't.

In his novel Cannery Row, Steinbeck is writing about a place that existed during the Great Depression and still exists today. Steinbeck is a patient builder, and he begins by describing and making real for his readers a single store that is central to the neighborhood, Lee Chung's grocery. Yes, he describes Lee Chung's but as he does so, he's actually describing Chung's personality as revealed by how he runs his grocery store. For example, Lee Chung gives credit to practically all his customers, which not only says a lot about Mr. Chung, but also about his customers, i.e., that they are in need of credit.

Steinbeck's choice of the first sentence to begin chapter one: "Lee Chong's grocery, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply."

That first sentence is not "artistic." It's not exactly funny but, in it's succinctness, it does make me smile. (The novel as a whole is comic, and at times comedic; it's poignantly funny.) It doesn't tax the reader with image. You don't have to imagine anything. It's about a business and the man who created the business and the purpose it serves in the larger community. During the course of the second and third sentence of Cannery Row, I counted fourteen mentions of specific product categories that can be purchased at Lee Chung's by "a man" both "to live and be happy," which tells you something about the world Steinbeck is writing about that, at that point,  purposely excludes women. And after another sentence of detail, he concludes his first paragraph with a sentence reflexive back to the larger community: "The one commodity Lee Chong did not keep could be had across the lot at Dora's." We later learn "Dora's" is a house of prostitution.

 

With restraint and consummate skill for expressing far more than his individual words seem to be saying, Steinbeck ennobles Mr. Chung, raises him up from a simple grocer to perhaps the closest thing Cannery Row in those days may have had to a power broker: "Lee's position in the community surprised him as much as he could be surprised. Over the course of the years everyone in Cannery Row owed him money. He never pressed his clients, but when the bill became too large, he cut off credit. Rather than walk into the town up the hill, the client paid, or tried to."

We're now at the beginning of the third paragraph and both Steinbeck and we, his readers, are yearning to learn something about Mr. Chung's physical description. So far not a word has been said about that. Steinbeck starts out seeming to give us what we want but then, like a ball in a pin-ball machine, he ricochets off in a completely different direction: "Lee was round-faced and courteous." What do those two thoughts have to do with one another? Nothing! Why do they deserve to be in the same sentence? They don't except that John Steinbeck decided they should be. Then the next sentence, which truly ennobles Lee Chung yet makes me laugh out loud: "He spoke a stately English without ever using the letter R." What a loving, entertaining way to say he spoke with a Chinese accent?

We couldn't have a finer enunciation of the deeper values that dwell at the heart of this novel: A belief in the nobility of the common person, that all people deserve respect; that all fictional characters deserve their humanity on the page.

At so many points in this novel, characters are shown in tremendously vulnerable circumstances, speaking their truth. I intend to share some of that with you in upcoming EWAs.

I came across a number of conversations between two characters of starkly distinct intellectual and emotional attainments in Cannery Row. Those scenes were tremendously moving and powerful to me. They reminded me of the power I remembered from having read Of Mice and Men, which Steinbeck published in 1937, earlier in his career. He published Cannery Row in 1945. Interestingly, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, six years before his death.

Perhaps I have so much reverence for John Steinbeck's writing ability as displayed in the opening pages of Cannery Row, because I believe what he's doing here is extremely hard to sustain without it going dead, flat, boring or all three. I've tried and I know. John Steinbeck pulls it off because he's more than happy to jump around from one sentence to the next, until, looking back we, his readers, realize he hasn't actually been jumping around so much as weaving for us a looser narrative fabric than perhaps other writers weave (for example, John Irving) but despite this looser weave, Steinbeck's narrative fabric is no less durable. As an example, discussing Lee Chung's "fortune," Steinbeck writes:

"What he did with his money no one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't get it. Maybe his wealth was entirely in unpaid bills. But he lived well and had the respect of his neighbors. He trusted his clients until further trust became ridiculous. Sometimes he made business errors, hut even these he turned to advantage in good will if in no other way. It was that way with the Palace Flophouse and Grill. Anyone but Lee Chong would have considered the transaction a total loss."

I'm smiling all through that paragraph. Aren't you? Consider the sentence, "Maybe his wealth was in unpaid bills." Admittedly it's dry humor; I think it's hilarious. And this: "He had the respect of his neighbors." Doesn't that make you smile? I find an abiding love and warmth for people throughout this book that draws me to Steinbeck's body of work. At this point in Cannery Row I think Steinbeck is warming us up. He's teasing us. He's giving us snippets of the story to come. "The Palace Flophouse and Grill." What a name! Who would give a place a name like that? Well, we're about to find out who named it and why that person gave it that name. Steinbeck is selling us on wanting to read his novel. But he had me from the opening paragraph. He didn't have to try that hard to sell me, but I'm certainly glad he did.

Next month: Story structure and pacing in Steinbeck's Cannery Row.

What I Learned from John Irving-V (The serious purpose behind Irving's running gags.)

This month I point out the comic craft of John Irving's novels, specifically something he practices known as "the running gag," which, by the way, he artistically borrowed from the likes of the Marx Brothers. (Harpo Marx loved the running sight gag, so running gags can be visual as well as linguistic, but I'll stick to the latter here.)

I think it's worth taking a look at how Irving makes use of running jokes in his novels.

What are running jokes or gags? In their simplest form they're Rodney Dangerfield whining, "I don't get no respect;" Joan Rivers asking, "Can we talk?" and Henny Youngman saying, "Take my wife, please."

Notice the role the running gag plays in branding and in unifying those comedians' acts. I think we know them by their running gags and their unifying "tag lines."

Likewise, Irving's running gags or what I call recurring wisdom serve to thematically unify Irving's novels, at least the ones I've read. They play a central role in Irving's entire approach to writing. His comic tone and his recurring jokes have the same purpose; they can also be entertaining in their own right.

In Irving's Prayer for Owen Meany my favorite running joke has to do with a dog named Sagamore that can first be found in the novel's opening pages, and then in various forms throughout the rest of the novel.

Irving's narrator Johnny Wheelwright states that his "hometown" of Gravesend, New Hampshire, "was purchased from "Indian sagamores" and then relates, "In New England, the Indian chiefs and higher ups were called sagamores, although by the time I was a boy the only sagamore I knew was a neighbor's dog, a male Labrador retriever, named Sagamore (not, I think, for his Indian ancestry, but because of his owner's ignorance). Sagamore's owner, our neighbor, Mr. Fish, always told me that his dog was named for a lake where he spent his summers swimming 'when I was in my youth.' Poor Mr. Fish: He didn't know that the lake was named after Indian chiefs and higher-ups—and that naming a stupid Labrador retriever "Sagamore" was certain to cause some unholy offence. As we shall see, it did. But Americans are not great historians, and so, for years—educated by my neighbor, I thought that sagamore was an Indian word for lake. The canine Sagamore was killed by a diaper truck, and I now believe that the gods of those troubled waters of that much-abused lake were responsible."

Something about being run over by a diaper truck (the comic specificity of it, the fact that it has to do with babies along with offended Indian spirits) is quite funny to me. But Irving doubles-down on his comic bet, adding, "It would have been a better story, I think, if Mr. Fish had been killed by the diaper truck—but every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent."  Irving fans know that's a familiar refrain of John Irving's.

And that is why I believe the innocent dog had to be killed by a diaper truck. Babies and innocence go together. That's what makes it so funny.

A few pages later Irving plays the gag all over again, adding more "facts" that make it funnier: "The only sagamore to be given official burial in our town was Mr. Fish's black Labrador retriever, run over by a diaper truck on Front Street and buried with the solemn attendance of some neighborhood children in my grandmother's rose garden."

On succeeding pages, we find Irving replaying the same recurring joke:

In reference to a community theater production where a part in a play "…was played by our neighbor, Mr. Fish. Owen and I knew that he was still in mourning over the untimely death of Sagamore; the horror of the diaper truck disaster…"

"…Sagamore before his appointment with the diaper truck, woke up Mr. Fish…"

Those are only a few references; all told we are treated to a tremendous number linking Mr. Fish with his poor, deceased dog, Sagamore. In the process, with Irving cracking the same running gag, we learn all about Mr. Fish and his talents or lack thereof as an actor in the community theater. When, much later, Mr. Fish plays a role in a Christmas pageant where Owen Meany plays the "Christ child" we've had so many references to Mr. Fish and his dog, we know exactly who he is. He comes off as a comic if not a sad, minor character, which in my opinion is quite an achievement for any writer to pull off. But it's a direct result of Irving's "running-joke" method of writing fiction.

In The Cider House Rules I'm not sure you'll find a recurring joke, exactly. Rather, the entire book's ethic as well the summation of Homer Wells' values are summed up by the phrase: "Be of use" to others. It's the novel's, if you will, "principal commandment" repeated over and over again and, therefore, inculcated deeply in Homer's—and the reader's—consciousness.

When it became clear to Dr. Larch, the St. Cloud's orphanage's director, that Homer belonged to St. Clouds, the only requirement Larch places on Homer, if he decides to stay is, "Be of use."

When Homer was "placed" with a number of potential orphan parents, "Dr. Larch told him, 'I expect you to be of use.' He was nothing if not of use. His sense of usefulness appears to predate Dr. Larch's instructions."Some other examples: "Of use, he felt, was all an orphan was born to be."

"By the time a boy is a teen-ager, he should be of use."

When Homer finds a pregnant woman who is about to give birth inside the orphanage, "The pregnant woman began to cry. "Be of use," she said, as if she'd learned to repeat the pigtails of sentences from listening to Homer.

When Homer springs into action: "Look at that," she whispered. "You want to be of use?"

"Right," said Homer Wells.

"You want to be of use?" the woman asked him, crying gently now.

"Yes. Be of use," he said.

"Sleep right here," the woman told him. He pretended to sleep with his face against the noisy boulder, where she held him snug."

When Fuzzy Stone, an orphan boy whose lungs are dysfunctional passes on, Wilber Larch wrote to the board of trustees, 'We are put on this earth to be of use,' Wilber Larch wrote to the board of trustees."

When Homer assists Dr. Larch in performing an abortion for the first time: "I want to be of use," Homer began, but Dr. Larch wouldn't listen. "Then you are not permitted to hide," Larch said. "You are not permitted to look away."

Indeed, the concept of being of use cuts through Irving's entire novel. The actual "Cider House Rules" (there are nine actual rules and another page of informal rules) all revolve taking responsibility for one's actions, or "being of use."

Although I slow down for these recurring jokes and wisdom statements as if they were speed bumps, most readers, even careful readers, speed up for them, their eyes reading at least ten miles-an-hour over the posted speed limit, most likely because they're finding Irvings' novels to be so entertaining.

Perhaps the next time you read a John Irving novel, you could  consider just once driving below the speed limit. You might enjoy the result.

What I Learned from John Irving-IV (Irving's emotional distance brings readers closer; so does his comic voice)

With social distancing being the hallmark of life in the Age of Covid-19, my thesis is that John Irving turned himself into a super-successful novelist by practicing emotional distancing.

When a writer as good as John Irving keeps his emotional distance from his characters, we care about them more, not less. Readers are attracted to a story where the author uses unadorned, brutal language to describe the story's supposedly most poignant moments.

In John Irving's Prayer for Owen Meany, we have eleven-year-old Owen Meany, who is best friend and schoolmate of Johnny Wheelwright, hitting a foul ball during a little-league game that kills Johnny's mother who's seated in the spectator stands. The story's narrator Johnny loses his mother and becomes an orphan in the same instant. Is it tragic? Absolutely. But I contend that the way Irving writes it largely skips over the tragedy and instead concerns itself with cold, clinical details. Yet readers adore his writing. But why?

My belief is that in John Irving's capable hands, emotional distance not only creates reader involvement; it goes beyond, and gives rise to comic effects that can be extremely attractive.

What's the Difference between comic writing and comedy writing?

Irving doesn't play his characters and their difficulties for laughs. If he did, we might think of him as a comedian or a stand-up comic.

Instead, we think of Irving as a serious novelist because, instead of playing his material for laughs, he plays it for pathos, which can variously be thought of as poignancy, tragedy or sadness, or all three at once.

Read how Johnny mother's death is described as she dies in front of her son as we look on: "The ball struck her left temple, spinning her so quickly, one of her high heels broke, and she fell forward, her knees splayed apart, her face hitting the ground first…" That language might appear to be right out of a true crime thriller, except for that detail about the mother wearing high heels. What mother of a young boy would wear high heels to a little league game? This is John Irving at work adding a comic touch.

That's the only description of Johnny's mother's death we have, that single sentence. Then:

"No, Johnny! No, Johnny!" Mr. Chickering said, "You don't want to see her, Johnny," he said.

At that point we're treated to a short treatice on memory:

"Your memory is a monster; you forget, it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you. You think you have the memory; but it has you!"

We glimpse a young boy's mother killed in front of her son. Is it funny? No, it's anything but funny. But is it comic? Yes, it is, because it's so poignant and tragically sad.

In the immediate aftermath, there's a conversation between the police chief and the team manager: "Where's the ball?" (It turns out it's missing.) "Well, it's the murder weapon." Indeed, it is. Seconds later in a terse interchange, it's called "the instrument of death." The tension crackles, but then dissolves when the team manager says to the police chief, " Don't be an asshole, Ben." To me that conversation comes off extremely plausible; also funny and entertaining.

And this: "All the players had been made to stand behind the bleachers while the police took photographs of my mother." They were taking photos of a deceased woman, a chance victim in a tragic accident, but by Irving using the phrase, "photos of my mother," we're brought up short. Once again, that's Irving's comic touch.

In Irving's The Cider House Rules, we likewise see the life of an orphan, Homer Wells, play out as he grows up at "the boy's division at St. Cloud's in Maine. There's enough tragedy in Homer's life for five orphans. Each time he tries out a new set of adoptive parents a new horror ensues. One set of parents can't stand the fact that Homer doesn't cry, so they torture him until he wails. That's Irving's comic writing, for you. It's cold and calculating, I'd say.

Irving's description of The Winkles, an adventure-loving couple looking looking to adopt a young boy with whom they can share their adventures, is quite funny (in a comic way). The Winkles string a rope across a raging river so they can go bouncy-bouncy in and out of the river's white water rapids. They're having a grand time until the paper company that's upstream launches a load of logs down the same river:

"Suddenly the Winkles looked upstream... So did Homer, in time to see the log drive when it was about twenty-five yards away… The mass of logs, each as big as telephone poles, moved swiftly downstream with a wall of water in front of it…"

"Homer Wells was still running when he reached the road… He turned in time to see the logs surge by. A line from the tent had been attached to the Winkles' survival rope, and the entire tent and everything in it were swept downstream in the pounding flow and charge of the logs. The Ramses Paper Company wouldn't recover Billy and Grant's [the Wikles's first names] bodies for three days; they found them nearly four miles away.

When Homer Wells returned to St. Cloud's, Dr. Larch the head of the boy's division, comments, "You didn't give the Winkles much of a chance." Only after Homer explained what happened does Dr. Larch say, "You mean the Winkles are gone?"

A fun-loving couple, the Winkles, are gone, but do I cry for them? No. Do I mourn them? No. The scene strikes me as being both comic and entertaining, the exact opposite of compassionate and caring. All in all, it's rather cruel, wouldn't you agree?

John Irving is always going for comic effects, and that's the brutal, cold, hard truth. What's amazing to me is that John knew at a very early age that the less emotion he invested in his characters, the more passionate his readers would feel about them. In my view, at a very early age, John Irving had that extremely brilliant insight, He realized he could leverage off the good will of his readers to turn them into his readers' champions. That's something Charles Dickens understood; but it's somethjing many writers today can't begin to understand, no less master. 

Next month: Still more of what I learned from John Irving.

What I learned from John Irving - III (Cruelty to Children & the Magic of Missing Body Parts)

If anyone were to pose the question to me, "How did John Irving write so many best-selling novels?" (No one ever has.) I would answer that, at least in the case of two of his books, Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules, he did it by portraying innocent, orphan children being subjected to abuse while he writes about it in a matter-of-fact way. By using this recipe, John Irving strongly motivates his readers to want to protect the innocents (while they may have secretly been entertained by the description of the abuse) which, in turn, creates an extremely strong and nuanced emotional bond between the reader and character.

As an example, I would point to Owen Meany being lifted aloft by his Sunday school class and being passed from student to student while he protests mildly. This short scene, which appears early on in Prayer for Owen Meany should be considered the key visual for the entire novel. A screenplay or movie of the book would almost have to open with this scene. By the end of the scene, I would wager most readers are ready to nominate Owen for a "Christ Figure Oscar," if such an award existed, while at the same time we're not only allowed but encouraged to be entertained by this scene of child abuse.

I believe most readers, if they were truthful with themselves, would probably admit that if they were a child attending a Sunday school class where this "passing around scene" actually took place, they might have taken part in the abuse and even enjoyed doing so.

(Please don't tell me you would have run from the class and told the teacher who was reportedly on a smoke-break that something bad was happening back at the class. Please, don't. Would you really have done that?)

My opinion: By writing the scene in as an enticing manner as he does, John has placed you in a morally compromised position.

(When we were friends, I always called him John, and I mean no disrespect by calling him that here.)

John forces you to take sides. You have little choice. If you have a pulse, you are involved. And the instant you admit to yourself you would be having fun cruelly abusing Owen Meany by passing him around, your parent-side kicks in, and you say to yourself, "Kids can treat each other so horribly. Sunday school was so horrible. I hated the whole experience." And once again, John's got you involved and morally compromised. Now you're ready to ban Sunday Schools all together. No, better yet, ban religion! Why do we do these horrible things to our own children who we supposedly love?

(And I'll have you know, this is being written by someone who taught religious school for seven years, and, cruelly abused his own children by bribing them with doughnuts with sprinkles on top to attend.)

When I was an innocent student of John's at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, John gave each of us fair warning. I can even hear John now saying, "You really want to be a novelist? Prepare to spend your life in a room alone abusing, mutilating and murdering the ones you love, i.e., your characters. Prepare to cut off penises and fingers in furtherance of getting readers to sign on to reading your 500+ page novels.

For God's sakes, give up being nice to your characters. If you want to be a novelist, prepare to perform unspeakable acts to your characters. Isn't being a novelist fun? Don't you love it? Of course you do. You can't get enough. That's why you're here."

(Just think about this for a moment: Isn't it uncanny how a novelist, as soon as he or she detaches a body part from a character, causes the reader to feel more attached to that character? Crazy, huh?)

When John said all that to us, he should have been costumed in a black suit playing the part of a somber, sober New Hampshire undertaker at the wheel of a very long, black Cadillac limousine.

I wouldn't listen to him. Not me. I was in the "I think I'll go easy on my characters and just pretend I'm going hard on them" school of novel writing. Well, that's a recipe for failure. It only took me some forty years to come around to John's persuasion. Let's hear it for the New Hampshire Undertaker. (The New Hampshire Undertaker. What a great title for a John Irving novel, agreed?)

Next month: Still more on what I learned from John Irving.

What I Learned from John Irving - II

As you may already know, I knew John Irving when he was practically an unknown novelist; he was my instructor when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

As for what I learned from John, I remember him saying numerous times, "Writers spend a great deal of their time working alone. If you want to be a writer, you had better understand that."

Of course, we're probably all familiar with the notion of the novelist acting like the divine creator, God herself, in the microcosm of the story-universe she's creating. (You don't happen to believe that God is a "she?" Very well. I won't try to prove otherwise to you.)

I believe that as a novelist, John Irving was not naïve to the analogy of acting like God in reference to his specific characters and the overall stories he told. As I reported in another EWA, he often said, "Kill off characters when they stop being of use to you in your story." I never heard him say, although in light of many of his novels, he could have said, "Remove your characters' specific body parts (fingers, for example) for added reader interest."

I used to think it was strange but John often said that before he wrote the opening of a novel, he would not only know exactly how the story ended; he would have actually written the final paragraphs of the novel.

I would have never been capable of even thinking such a thought, no less knowing my characters well enough to be able to write the last page of a novel before writing the first.

Now, forty-eight years later, it doesn't strike me as strange at all that he would make a habit of doing that. John is well known to be an inveterate and in-depth outliner of his novels before writing an initial word of them. Once he completes the outline, writing the final paragraph or even the final sentence that appears on the final page of his novel is not that difficult a feat. For Irving, it's a pretty straightforward process.

I still would not be able to do such a thing; I couldn't even come close.

From the opening pages of Prayer for Owen Meaning, John suggests that the religion the story's narrator (who's first name is also coincidentally "John") and his friend Owen were exposed to as children taught God's plan for every individual was known to God and intricately planned out long before any of us human beings get to live it out. Everything is pre-ordained, including one's salvation.

This theology suggests to me that God, if she wished, would likewise be perfectly able to write the final page of the story of each of our lives as each of us is born, if she wished.

By the way, I don't believe John necessarily believed in predestination—quite the opposite. My belief is that he thought that that specific theological tenant was quaint; he found it difficult to take seriously. That explains the comic side of his novels. He loved poking fun at certain beliefs, among them, predestination.

Yet he knew full well that his outline method as a novelist gave the lie to his theological doubt because, in the micro-microcosm of John Irving's novels, he did to his characters precisely what he doubted God ever did to him or to any of us. He knew exactly what was going to happen to each one of his characters long before he finished writing the novel they appeared in. In that way I think he got to play with these ideas, i.e., poke fun at them while at the same time having fun trying them on. In this way he was able to consider the consequences of taking these beliefs seriously.

The challenge with all of this is when you turn to the "terms" of John Irving's youth—no doubt about it, he had dyslexia and he did not excel academically. With John, you don't see many obvious signs of a famous novelist in gestation. What I can report as I observed him in his mid-20s when he was my instructor at Iowa: He had a strong, steadfast, in fact, unwavering faith in his eventual success. I never thought that that opinion was based on an overblown ego—not at all; rather, I believed at a very early age he intuitively understood his material, as any comic novelist should (what was funny about it, poignant about it, rip-your-heart-out bitter-sweet about it); and from the start he had an intuitive understanding of how to go about describing his characters' struggles as they lived out their lives—never letting the tone get sappy or sentimental.

As Irving wrote in the opening chapter of his memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, when he was growing up the son of a Phillips-Exeter Academy faculty instructor, attending that famed New Hampshire high school as a "townie," the essay was the reigning literary form, not the short story. It's no surprise to me that parts of A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules read like well written essays. Also apparent to me from page one of both novels: This writer has next-to-no interest in poetic language, in stringing together words that glitter like diamonds; rather Irving's words describe comic events that in Irving's telling become vividly visual and highly memorable. You laugh, but you also care; I do, at least.

By his example, John taught me great novels must always be about something. They must be ambitious and take up important issues just as The Cider House Rules takes on abortion and A Prayer for Owen Meany takes on faith in God and, as already mentioned, predestination.

Next month, more on what I learned from John Irving.

What I learned from John Irving - I

As many of you know, John Irving, an unknown novelist at the time I knew him, was my instructor when I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I've learned more from John in the last year than I did while attending his reading classes and workshops in the early 1970s.

Being an undiagnosed moderate-to-severe ADHD at the time (that disability being completely unknown), I noticed I grow bored easily; thus, as a young writer I projected the belief that my readers would rapidly grow bored with whatever I wrote if every sentence did not contain some fresh display of creativity. This was not the most nurturing soil from which one can grow warm, enduring relationships with readers. In fact, as I soon learned, readers "smell" fear in a writer, and if they detect it, readers will abandon their work faster and in greater numbers than rats off a sinking ship.

In truth, I'm perversely proud to say John Irving would bore me silly. The stories he would tell, for example, about his experiences in Germany and in Paris about meeting other writers and about art in general would go on and on far too long—long enough for my boredom to grow into a case of yawns that might lead to an in-class nap.

At the same time, many of the stories I was writing, my teachers and fellow students would point out, were far too short and, in their opinion, "undeveloped."

I remember vividly writing a short story about an "actor" who plays a "badman" in "Western reenactments" of train robberies, cattle rustling, and "prairie wars" at one of those tourist traps just off the Interstate in the 1970s.  My readers thought it was funny, entertaining, if "rather slight." I described my actor-character as dying three times a day in "shoot-outs" at 1:00 pm, 4:00 pm and 7:30 pm, but I never once considered that deep down I wanted to write this story so I could talk about death and the inevitability of it that we all face. If I were rewriting this story today, I would introduce a character actor who dies of cancer while he's also dying three times a day in these "Western skits." Now there you might have an interesting story, but the story I wrote played it for laughs and never had even a hint of actual death, in it. In retrospect that seems rather strange.

The passage of time cures many ills, and clears up others, and one sickness that I may have cured was my warped notions about how soon readers will "bail out" on writers. Given John's proclivity for writing long novels, he was absolutely right to go on and on in his stories and I was totally wrong to believe most readers would become bored as soon as I would.

There's nothing readers love more than a writer who insists on letting his writing take the space it needs in order to develop into a style, while the style, in turn, has the space it needs to give birth to unforgettable characters. I could sum it up this way: John's approach of finding a universe in a bottle was far more rewarding than mine of continually jumping from bottle to bottle. That was where my approach and my ADHD-thinking led, to me creating a rather strange universe that was difficult for readers to follow and not all that satisfying to read.

Now, if I currently had writing students and taught a writing and reading classes comparable to the ones John taught me (I don't), the stories I might tell might cause me to appear as boring to my students as John appeared to me. Hopefully, my novels will have as much appeal to modern-day readers as his novels had to readers back in the '80s and '90s.

It has been a privilege for me to begin taking ADHD medication in the late 90s, and over the ensuing years, to gradually grow to appreciate the world for what it is; to see it in a new light, and to train myself to write relatively normal stories readers can appreciate. Next month, more about what I learned from John Irving.

Editing and the Life-changing magic of tidying up.

That little book by Marie Kondo entitled The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up? Have you heard of it? It has sold three million copies worldwide and was a NY Times Best-Seller.

I came across it the morning of January 1, 2020, while I was looking at discarded belongings in the recycling room in my apartment building. I might have passed the book by had I not watched Marie Kondo being interviewed on my favorite Sunday morning show some weeks before.

As I was sifting through the pile of stuff, I was engrossed in thoughts about finishing my novel; mainly I was thinking that the considerable task that lay before me in the year 2020 was the editing of the novel to arrive at a final draft.

Perhaps it was no more than a case of propinquity, a number of random thoughts coming together: Tidying up is sort of like editing, isn’t it? And it being New Year’s Day and finding that book being one of the very first things I did in the year 2020 (besides sleeping) and my New Year’s resolution being, Finish that novel already! Get done with it! Get it out into the world where it belongs!

So as I plucked that book out of the junk pile, The Life-changing Habit… , all those thoughts did come together and out popped the notion that perhaps it might contain some wisdom for me.

If there were a way I could finish my novel before midnight of December 31 2020, it would certainly change my life. I was open to my life being changed, very open to it. Something good was already happening: The thought percolated in my brain: Hell, if it’s only a matter of tidying up my novel, I can certainly do that and finish before New Year’s Eve, couldn’t I? Of course I could! Perhaps her magic was already working? That was my state of mind as I began reading Kondo’s little book.

Of course as a novelist I couldn’t help but believe there was an untold story here: Had the previous book’s owner thrown Kondo’s out in a fit of rage on New Year’s Eve? Was he or she enraged at how unhelpful the book had been? Or did that person learn how to tidy up her life to the point there was no longer a need for this book on her bookshelf? I hoped she had read the book, gotten out of it all she could, and then discarded it because it had become clutter. And so the untold story might be that what was the end for her was a new start for me.

Within the first few minutes of cracking open this little tome, a world of parallels between tidying up and editing my novel opened up to me. Kondo’s advice is to “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.”

Likewise with editing: Look at all the chapters in your novel, setting aside all the chapters that don’t directly support the story you set out to tell. There is no “nice to know” information about your characters that should wind up in the novel. Only those events described that put across the story belong.

Once you’ve paired down your chapters, you can look at pacing and overall story structure within the remaining chapters: Does your chapter support a rapid escalation of tension and character development, so that as the story continues, we see the main protagonist in conflict and/or in danger or in a state of development. By the end do we see a new person emerging, functioning as people function in real life?

Then you can look at individual chapters; make sure each of them contribute to a chapter story arc. You can discard anything unnecessary and fill in gaps.

The other key thought that Kondo advocates and that I can attest applies one hundred percent to editing a novel is this: gradualism doesn’t work. You can’t organize a kitchen one day and the living room the next, and hope to ever escape the grind of continuously organizing; nor can you edit the first chapter one day and a middle chapter the next day and hope to wind up with a comprehensible, cohesive, and a single engrossing work.

That means you must edit the whole thing, the entire thing all at once, in the blink of an eye. Like Michelangelo, you must look at a large hunk of marble you’re about to start carving and see your finished sculpture within it. That happens in an instant. The concerns expressed on page one must be the same as on the last page, although obviously what the principal character learned from living the story must also be present.  The basic style of writing should be the same or very similar. The manner you use to tell the story must be consistent. The tone (the attitude behind the writing) should be different but must be reminiscent of the tone that you use on the first page. It certainly should serve to acknowledge how far the character’s consciousness has been transformed by living the story.

Some might say, “My character has changed by the end of my story. Is it any wonder that the style of writing has changed by the end?” While that argument might seem plausible, I’ve found that pulling it off in a novel is extremely difficult without inadvertently giving the impression that the end was written by a different author.

In order for your story to have emotional impact and credibility it has to work as a single, unified artistic whole. It truly must give the impression of being told by a single voice.

Kondo equates tidying up with putting one’s house in order and that it shouldn’t take that much time. It should happen all at once. She advises, “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go. If you adopt this approach… you’ll never again revert to clutter again.

Next month, more about what I learned from reading John Irving.