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More On Napalm
By Alex Keegan
Returning to the excellent collection For the Relief of Unbearable
Urges, Nathan Englander's debut, we find his story "Tumblers."
In "Tumblers" a group of Jews, meant to be transported to the
concentration camps by train find themselves on a different train,
mistaken for a troupe of tumblers, acrobats. To stay alive, they
frantically practice on the train. It's heartbreaking. The whole
story is an example of making the pain stick, making it sink in.
At the end of the story the troupe actually have to perform, in front of
a cackling audience, possibly Hitler himself. Of course they are
terrible, but the audience sees them as comedic, and the main guest says
from his theatre-box, "They are as clumsy as Jews."
There are three more heart-rending paragraphs like this. Englander
simply will not let us go. There is another space-and-see sentence, then:
Mendel waved him off and stepped forward, moving down-stage, the
spotlight harsh and unforgiving against his skin. He reached out past the
footlights into the dark, his hands cracked and bloodless, gnarled and
intrusive.
Mendel turned his palms upward, benighted.
But there were no snipers, as there are for hands that reach out
of the ghettos; no dogs, as for hands that reach out from the cracks in
boxcar floors; no angels waiting, as they always do, for hands that reach
out from chimneys into ash-clouded skies.
In my previous article on Napalm, the art of making the story stick long
enough to burn through to the bone, I discussed the idea of
relentlessness: how often the hint of the problem ("Francis Macomber"), or
the problem itself ("A Silver Dish," "Ballistics") is placed early in the
story in such a way that the reader cannot escape, cannot skim, and the
issue then influences every word that follows.
What I often find when reading student stories is that the
crucial words are there, but like the crime writer's clue hidden in plain
sight, they are simply there, not displayed there. When we read a story,
we should read perfectly, meticulously, but we don't, certainly not
always. Sometimes I read and mark a story only then to hear a protest
that on line seventeen the writer wrote some word or phrase that changes
the meaning of what follows. Occasionally I have to confess I simply
missed the thing!
Rarely, when I go back and read-to-see, does the story
suddenly leap up the rankings. Partly I think this is because the
words I have read once are now part of me, have become uncharged and the
zip or power or pain cannot be added retrospectively.
But I say to the student, "Why did you allow me to miss the
point?"
You see how here, in the paragraph above, I isolate MY point and
emphasize it by italicizing the word allow? Here in my article, I want
the word allow to be out there in the middle of a yard with floodlights
around, with no possibility of being missed.
In my story, "The Reds," which won a first prize in Canada:
My brother is out of bed today and we pretend to play cards. We could
talk about anything, it's been a long life, but we're talking about the
Reds. He swears blind he scored two goals that day but he didn't; I got
one, he got one and Dez Thomas scored a cracker, cutting in from the
corner flag and letting fly with a forty-yarder.
Don't look back at the
story. What is happening? Did you read the crucial word in the first line?
In the first line they pretend to play cards. In a recent live-chat in my
internet writing group Boot Camp we were discussing napalm and this
opening popped up. I asked what was the crucial word and everyone (they
looked again) said "pretend" and then they were able to talk about how
the brother is dying and this is a case of people going through that
awful time unable to talk about it.
Fine, good, aren't we clever, and isn't Alex such a cool
writer?
Cough. Then someone said, "Sorry, I missed it when I first read
it!" and out came the confessions. A third of the group admitted to
missing the word! Whose fault is that?
Well, partly it's poor reading, but more importantly I did not
shape the story in a way to ensure that the crucial word that sensitizes
every word that follows is bound to be seen and absorbed.
How about this?
We pretend to play cards.
My brother is out of bed today; we could talk about anything, it's
been a long life, but we're talking about the Reds. He swears blind he
scored two goals that day but he didn't; I got one, he got one and Dez
Thomas scored a cracker, cutting in from the corner flag and letting fly
with a forty-yarder.
Such a simple change. Now if someone misses the crucial word it's not the
writer's fault, it's definitely down to the reader. But putting that line
alone, up front, is how a poet might write. Set them up for the burn.
I have a confession to make. In my first Napalm article, I had
intended to finish with "Tumblers," but when I read the ending of "The
Twenty-Seventh Man" I felt I simply had to have white space, a long break,
a pause, time to reflect. I needed to wait for the ache to go away. It
seemed simply wrong to hit the reader like that, then break the mood, and
say, "Right, here, we go, next point!"
That to me, says something important about weight, timing, the
art of applying the burn. When we finish a very good short story, we
should want to wait, think, feel the emotion and the meaning move through
us.
I'm reminded of a publisher, who, after I had won a literary
competition, said he knew of some of my work, would I send him my
latest half-dozen stories, and another six or so?
I did, was forgotten. When eventually I chased the publisher up
he said he'd read them that night. He did and the following day he rang.
He was saying no. "I read your latest six straight after supper, and I'm
sorry, but they were simply too intense."
I will, at this point, bite my tongue.
The more I think about stories which hurt, which get deep under the skin,
and tear at the heart, it seems to me they employ relentlessness. Somehow
they avoid that more common feeling of setting, set-up, run-in and
punch-line. They insist on every word of the story enveloping me and
echoing, back, forth through the piece. If the stories weren't often
musical and beautifully orchestrated, they might be accused of repetition
or failing to get to the point. Except, of course, it's all the point,
just like Poe told us, every word, every sentence is doing a job.
In these stories, doing a job on us.
Child abuse is a terrible thing, yet child abuse stories as fiction are
now difficult to place. Why?
They are tough to place because the matter, in fiction has been
de-sensitized, turned to cliché by a flood of such stories in the late
nineties.
Also, often, there are barriers in readers, where direct
reference to certain affairs feels wrong psychologically,
emotionally, and we start to see words rather than feel feelings.
The poets say to show feelings don't be too direct, but do be
concrete. That is write about concrete things to show the abstract. I am
no poet so forgive me if the quote is incorrect.
But too often my criticism of beginners stories is two fold.
First, I say, it's TMAWIA, Too Much About What It's About. I don't claim
the origin of that phrase. I first heard it from the screenwriter Steve
May in a talk at Bath University, but I suspect it's older than that.
Too many stories are so clinically "this is what happened" and
nothing but what happened, that we throw up the defence of "not
again!" and the emotions never bite.
The trick is to find a way round the defences. We can not be
solely surface, not WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), and we must
avoid being TMAWIA.
A very recent story in Boot Camp (it landed today!)
approaches abuse by a father by an obvious denial.
What she doesn't do is write about her father. She writes about a fox.
The fox, it smells a little. It trots across ash, a black, corn-
stubbled field, heading for a thorn hedge. It sees, far-off, a
tractor, a driver, a ruddy man, oblivious, facing the wrong way,
birds wheeling.
We immediately know, of course, what this is about. Primed. Charged.
The story is an incantation of pain, of avoidance but not avoidance.
Paragraphs follow, almost all beginning something like this.
What she doesn't do is write about her father. She writes about
sea lions, walruses. She writes about shingle beaches, great fat,
blubbery animals, slapping, banging into each other, deep roars,
bang, bang, slap-slap, bang! the blood, the splatter, Attenborough
fodder, flashed blood, weight, roars, the males, the males, until
just one, the heaviest, the most determined.
What she doesn't do is write about her father. She writes about the fox.
Nowhere in this story is there a word about a father abusing a
daughter, nowhere is there a direct word. But the napalm is there
because the story is not TMAWIA (the fox's story is real) nor is it
WYSIWYG (because the fox story shimmers and vibrates with metaphorical
meaning).
But the napalm also is there because, like the poet, we make sure
that the first line is working, supercharging the rest; the napalm
also works because the repetition becomes an incantation, a
frightening repetition, a prayer; and the napalm is laid thicker by
language, by sentences with many commas, building, aching, battering,
refusing to let the reader off the hook.
Sometimes, the sensitization is trivial, arguably crude, but still
can work. A very early story of mine was called "Postcards From
Balloonland." In it a man, who knows he has not long to live, takes his
wife and two young children to Disneyland. The opening was three
postcards and the story said resolutely unsold. It was a poignant story
but the postcards, seen alone looked like, well, boring holiday
postcards!
The problem was solved by pre-emption, by as British footballers
says, "Getting your retaliation in first". In front of the postcards,
bold, italic, centred, highlighted I put:
There are things we should say, things we should not;
And there are things we want to say but have never learned how.
This looks to my cynical, more experienced eye, a little twee now, a
little forced, but by 'eck did it work! That unplaceable story
immediately made print and was reprinted half-a-dozen times. The salter,
the pre-sensitizer got the editors to read the "light" postcards with a
different eye, a different ear, a different sensibility. The reader was
made to absorb in a different way, slowly, building, knowing that this is
doing something.
Raymond Carver's "A Small Good Thing," like many of Carver's stories, opens
gently.
Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center.
After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped
onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favourite.
The baker isn't a jolly chap. The woman gives up trying to be
friendly. The cake will be ready Monday morning. Carver describes it, all
in that slow, echoey, deliberate style.
"A Small Good Thing" is a tragedy. The child dies suddenly, the parents are
devastated, but there is still the cake. When the woman fails to pick up
the cake, the baker starts to make telephone calls. How could he? But his
world-focus right now is a cake, unpaid for, uncollected. The dead child
he knows nothing of.
The telephone exchanges are horrible to us because we know what
the parents are suffering, but where this story steps into something
which ratchets tighter and tighter and tighter is that Carver never
allows us the relief of that simple line; no-one stops long enough to
say, "For God's sake, my child has died!" and the pain goes on and on and
on and on.
By the last third, the parents just have to confront this
man, this pig, this insensitive moron. Reading carefully, we realize it's
not his fault, but the parent's grief and anger, the seething, deep, deep
anger is peculiar and so real you can see it burning off the page.
I remember almost screaming at this story, "For God's sake, will
someone, SAY IT!" Even when the final confrontation comes, still Carver
keeps the misunderstanding going, until, finally, finally, the wife
blurts out the facts and calls the baker a bastard.
What is different here, and what places this story in my top ten and will
never ever come out, is that nothing was done glibly, with a single
brush stroke. Instead I was forced to feel, to become, to know before the
denouement. By the time it comes, I am there feeling, not watching. The
last two pages are the bakers, first apologizing, and then comforting.
Carver knows just how much time and space to dedicate to the simply
clearing of a desk, the act of sitting down. It is drama of the highest
order, exquisitely paced. Too slow and we waver, too fast the moment is
no longer perfect. Then he speaks.
"Let me say how sorry I am," the baker said, putting his elbows on
the table. "God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I'm just a
baker. I don't claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years
ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten. I don't know
for sure. But I'm not any longer, if I ever was. Now I'm just a baker.
That don't excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I'm deeply sorry. I'm
sorry for your son, and I'm sorry for my part in this," the baker said.
This continues. Taken alone these are such ordinary words, and
frankly, not the words, in isolation, we would imagine in a quality piece
of literature. But the difference here is the man has been built up from
the opening paragraphs where he's terse and uncommunicative, through
being the bringer of pain, to this sudden shame, deep in the middle of
the night. NOW it's perfect writing.
The bakery is hot. The parents stand, take off their coats, then they sit
down again. The baker makes them coffee. They sit together. They eat
cinnamon rolls. We discover the sadnesses of the baker's life, the
endless days, and empty sixteen-hour nights. He tells them, he's a baker,
he feeds people; the smell of baking bread far better than the smell of
flowers.
It's the dead of the night.
"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a
heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It
had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They
ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight
under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early
morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not
think of leaving.
British Crime and Literary Fiction Author Alex Keegan is
publisher and editor of the British literary magazine,
Seventh Quark. He is
creator of the five Caz Flood novels: Cuckoo
(Headline Books, St. Martin's Press), Vulture,
Kingfisher,
Razorbill (Headline Books) and A Wild Justice (Piatkus Books)
which all feature
feisty female private investigator Catherine "Caz" Flood.
Cuckoo was published in the U.S. by St Martin's Press, and
was nominated for an Anthony Award as best
first novel. His prize-winning short stories have been featured in
numerous publications including
Mystery and Manners,
BBC Radio 4,
Blue Moon Review, Southern Ocean Review,
and The Atlantic. He is a Contributing Editor for
The Internet Writing Journal.
You may click here to
see all of Alex Keegan's available books on
Amazon.co.uk. He may be
reached by email at
alex.keegan@btclick.com. His website can be found at
alexkeegan.com and
his blog can be found here.
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