Discerning Reader,
I am not much of a curator, but this week, instead of my usual rambling, I will be sharing certain tidbits of writing which I very much enjoy.
This was a little out of my comfort zone, but it was also helpful for me as a writer to look at some writing, both modern and more classic, to see what makes it noteworthy. The only parameters I have applied are that the quoted works be from short-form writing, in the spirit of keeping things quick and snappy, and any emboldening and italicising is my own intervention.
Michael Harding
During the lockdowns, when the sounds of the Australian bush reminded me only of how far I was from home, I tuned in to Michael’s podcast, and his kind and rural Irish tones were a balm to me, a flicker of optimism in the darkness. He had started the podcast for that very reason, to reach out during a hard time, and it worked – it was like having a conversation with my own father, if he were the chatty type and if he were available always on my little podcast app.
But Michael is a writer first and foremost and his writing is extremely gentle, invested with an abiding calm and saintlike quality. I love when he writes about the mysterious and evocative conversations he ends up having with strangers, and he tells these stories with a curious and inviting incompleteness, leading the reader in a merry little dance filled with meaning and recollection.
He is a wandering pilgrim of sorts, and his columns bring us from Glangevlin to Arigna (I once went there as a homage of sorts and was delighted by its beauty), and from to Donegal to Warsaw. But it is in the former Irish counties when he is at his best.
Here, he shows us the vibrancy and beautiful openness of life in small town Ireland.
In the hills I can sit all day staring at the lake, and at the tracks of last night’s badgers, but small towns have a more vibrant allure. They are cauldrons of living stories. There are swarms of people in every village in the country who will still share their lives, worries and obsessions with a stranger, at the drop of a hat, at the door of a church, or at the table of some coffee house.
I can tell that his wanderings nourish his writing, and vice versa. In almost everything he writes, there is a very strong sense of place. Here is the beginning of an article of his about belonging.
I was in a pub recently when a man with a soft felt hat began singing a song about Drumshanbo.
His opening lines are always arresting, and so too are his closing images. Here, in a piece which discusses nature, gardening, and birdsong, he leaves us with a description of music that he knows he will never hear again.
There was a time I would play the flute when the garden was full; at long ago parties until night met the morning. And sometimes I’d play during the day when I heard my neighbours’ spade hit stony ground in a nearby field and I knew that the sound of the flute would travel as far as the ridges he dug.
But my neighbour sleeps by the lakeshore now, and hears no more music at the gloaming or the dawning. And I play on my own without even a bird to give me an ear. I admit I’m no match for the blackbird, but I play what I can and imagine that someone is listening, somewhere beyond the wild mountain gorse.
Ernest Hemingway
I always return to Hemingway. Supposedly, when he wrote as a journalist for the Kansas City Star, they had a style guide which included the following rules:
Use short sentences.
Use short first paragraphs.
Use vigorous English.
Be positive, not negative.
Through constraint, his mature style, simple yet complex, emerged. It served him well. Hemingway too was a master of creating a sense of place (I am starting to see themes, reader) on both the macroscopic and microscopic level. His memoir (of sorts), A Moveable Feast captures Paris so brilliantly that I never go there without reading it. I wish every city had its own book, like that. (Dublin has Ulysses – what are some other good examples?)
In A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel he describes both the city and, afterwards, a café which he knows very well – the macroscopic and the microscopic.
Here is Paris:
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.
After some description of the Café des Amateurs, he is back again to describe the city more generally.
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter. I think of this line every year when the seasons change and winter comes.
Then there was the bad weather. Another line which lives rent-free in my head.
On the microscopic level, in the very same story as the above, Hemingway switches from describing Paris to describing a girl in the café.
A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rainfreshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
A clear description of the girl is followed by a the beginnings of a drama – the girl is waiting for someone, and the writer keeps on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencilsharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James.
The above is enough to make anyone want to be a writer. Hemingway makes writing look easy, using simple words with few syllables, and bringing the reader along with suspense and pacing.
Sasha Chapin
Sasha is extremely hard to categorise. I have seen him describe himself as a “self-help” writer and, even if true (much of his writing is unexpectedly helpful), his non-idiomatic and sometimes absurdist self-awareness is entirely incongruous with the genre, and is in complete disharmony with the style of “self-help” writing found in airport bookshops. Here is an example of helpful advice which relates authenticity in writing and in interpersonal relationships.
We all know that we're most charming when we’re least inhibited—usually when we have a trusted audience, a friend or lover who we’re not worried about impressing with our wisdom. In this kind of context, you're not thinking about a finished product. Thus, you’re effortlessly genuine. All your mental twists and turns and convolutions can be exposed, in all their charm and strangeness.
Unfortunately, replicating this state can be hard. When you’re talking to a trusted lover or friend, you're receiving constant signals that you are an acceptable human doing an acceptable thing—comforting facial expressions, and so on. By contrast, your laptop is inhospitable environment. There’s no evidence that your laptop loves and trusts you, and your new MacBook keyboard was designed by a lunatic who should be punished, or at least re-educated.
Beyond the realm of “self-help” (an imprecise and troublesome term here), Sasha has many other writerly aptitudes. Of particular note is how he finds a way to describe qualia, particularly smells and colognes, in figurative and analogical language.
His very first article on his Substack, Five Brief Remarks About Le Labo Santal 33, contains the following passage:
I first encountered its radiance spilling off the neck of a patron at the pasta restaurant I used to work at, where it forcefully announced itself to my olfactory receptors, competing effectively with the formidable scents of that workplace—pig jowl, garlic, inky Sicilian wine—instantly making a memory that juts out now from the undifferentiated mass of hours I spent hustling spaghetti under the stars, memorable for the recognition that I had finally inhaled a scintilla of the Good Life, the smell of an untroubled and various existence
Here, we get a glimpse into the detailed and highly descriptive metaphors which were to come later. In his article My Recent Divorce, and/or Dior Homme Intense, he successfully marries a metaphor about a cologne with the gut-wrenching melodrama of carrying out the paperwork of a divorce. Here, early in the article, we are given inklings of the personal disturbance experienced by the writer, on finding himself unhitched again.
My life was in the shape of a person, a house, a landscape—the desert, where we lived—and a car, roughly in that order, and they were all gone.
Without any of this, the days were composed of raw sensation, pouring through me, with nothing to catch it.
Deviating from the difficulties of divorce, he sprinkles in some of his powerful eau de cologne:
During this week of wandering, it was important to have some familiar things to hold onto, so that my current existence didn’t feel entirely discontinuous.
One of them was Dior Homme Intense, which had been my favorite fragrance, my daily wear, during the period where our marriage dragged itself through its final dirt.
He later doubles down on some more of the material attributes of his Dior perfume.
It has tensegrity—gravity attained not by any one material weighing it down, but, instead, by the molecules tugging against each other. It’s cozy but firm, sweetness with shapeliness.
Towards the end of the article, Sasha implicitly marries the winding down of his relationship with the dissipation of the cologne which was associated with this time in his life.
In the end, Dior Homme Intense winds down beautifully—while it’s quite large and stately in the opening stages, it falls, after a period of hours, like an elegant melancholic onto a therapist’s sofa, into a prettily crumpled little package.
All truly great writers are funny. For Hemingway, see Landscape with Figures, for Joyce, see the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, or basically all of Finnegans Wake. For Flann O’Brien, see….everything he ever wrote.
Sasha, too, is funny and his humour comes out in one of my favourite posts of his, Dubious Life Strategies of a Dumbass. I will leave you with some of his unconventional advice.
—Be lazy for long periods of time, and then, in sudden jags, work furiously. You’ll know that the work is important because it roused you from your laziness.
—Become fascinated by a new hobby or lifestyle every two weeks, tell everyone about your new interest, then forget you ever cared about it. Residual information and people will stick to you, making your life rich and complex.
—Save up some money, then move to another country without doing more than a few hours of research about it. If you do research, you might discover that the country doesn’t meet your preferences, which is information you don’t need. Find lodging there by talking to random people on the street. If you really don’t like it, leave right away and go to a neighboring country.
—Become completely unacceptable as an employee at most large companies by publicizing your insanity. This will force you to find alternate means of employment that are more interesting and precarious.
—Take cheap uncomfortable trains in India, even though you can afford more convenient, comfortable, reasonable modes of travel.
Virginia Woolf
Back to the classics. I have just said that all great writers are also funny writers but I may be wrong or I may not have read enough of her, but I am not sure that Virginia Woolf is funny. I know, however, that I like her very much and I generally regard her as the queen of the semi-colon.
The first work I read of hers was Mrs Dalloway, and my first impression was that it was very close, in time, and in attempted style, to Ulysses. It was published a year or two after Joyce’s novel and, although a fine effort, it’s not my favourite work of hers.
I love her short fiction and, breaking my own rules here, I will quote just the very start of The Waves, an oddly rhythmic and hypnotic novel, to give you an idea of what she is about.
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
Followed shortly by:
The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.
I did not bold anything above because…every line was so perfect. Yet, despite this, for me, she is at her most pulsating in her short fiction, most notably in A Haunted House and The Death of The Moth. Here, in the former, in one of the shortest pieces of powerful literature ever written, she describes a long-dead couple revisiting the house where they once shared a life in common. The deceased flicker through the house, which is now inhabited by a young couple, speaking hauntingly of memories which are evoked by what they see.
“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the garden—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—” The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart. Nearer they come, cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”
And then we are given a breathtaking closing image, delivered from the perspective of the young couple now living there.
Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy. “Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”
In The Death of The Moth, Woolf opens with the curious space the moth occupies, being neither here nor there, identifying it as a “hybrid” creature.
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species.
Seeing a moth which has invaded her room, she watches him and describes his curious movements, the impetus behind which, is not as yet clear.
The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane. One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth?
Then, realising that there is something different about the moth’s movements, Woolf suddenly becomes aware that the spectre of death is the animus behind them.
It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.
The final harrowing scenes of death, poignant even when describing what is seen as a tiny and unintelligent insect, are described, and the story ends.
I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.
Gentle readers,
I hope you enjoyed the above soupçon of my literary tastes. It was a difficult one for me, and I am unsure if I will venture again into such territory. If you have any comments, be they good, bad, or indifferent, then let me know.
Thank you for sharing. My favorite writer is MFK Fisher. Some may dismiss her as a food and travel writer but she writes about life as experienced through food and travel.