[I took this photo of a ceiling in China.]

Cumulative form fosters a rich, lovely, rhythmic prose style.

[Nine years ago today, I started this blog. With today’s post, my 510th, I’m on a sabbatical to catch up on reading, to think, and to work on some essays.Thank you for reading!]

Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read by Brooks Landon. Plume: The Great Courses, 288 pp.

Brooks Landon wants you to write longer sentences. His belief in them goes against decades of teaching and advice. The dominant plain style prizes simplicity and clarity over elegance and eloquence. Specifically, Landon favors a type of long sentence—the cumulative, a detail-packed propulsive structure that enhances delivery of information, emotion, and rhythm. Such a sentence might impel you to savor it, or to stop and marvel at its maker’s skill.

Because cumulatives begin with a simple base sentence, they’re easy to understand even as they add modifying phrases that lengthen them—to 40 words, 60, even 100 and more. Here’s a fun one by Landon himself, from his How to Build Great Sentences, and I’ll underline the base sentence:

He drove the car carefully, his shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.

I bet you didn’t see the dead body coming, did you? Wouldn’t that sentence be a great opening to a murder mystery? It possesses much movement and suspense because the reader knows something is coming at the end—the sentence itself unfolding as a mini-story. You can also move the simple base clause deeper and deeper into the sentence until it gets to the very end, with all the modifying phrases coming before. Notice what a different effect this version of Landon’s sentence conveys:

His shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk, he drove the car carefully.

That isn’t as dramatic, of course, because it ends on such a low-key point. (And with its ostensible meaning pushed to the very end, I suppose it has become a periodic sentence.) But it might work as the resonant, dying-fall ending line for a book. Here’s a much simpler cumulative sentence by Annie Dillard, from her memoir An American Childhood, about being pursued by a man whose car she and her friends hit with a snowball:

He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets.

William Faulkner was known for his very long sentences—one in his novel Absalom, Absalom is 1,287 words, supposedly the longest correctly punctuated sentence in English—and his example below, from his story “Barn Burning,” is longer than Dillard’s. There’s an extra phrase, and each phrase is longer. But Faulkner’s sentence is equally clear because of how the simple base sentence sets it up:

His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horsefly, his voice still without heat or anger.

•

[I took this photo of a sign in London.]

Landon’s critique of plain writing traces to a polymath’s essay in 1946.

[John Erskine: artist and thinker.]

Erskine was a novelist, pianist, and composer who founded an honors course at Columbia University that led to the Great Books movement. He also achieved some attention for his essay “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent,” delivered at Amherst College on the eve of World War I, which elaborates on his notion of teaching the classics; it became the title essay his collection that’s still in print. In “The Craft of Writing,” Erskine observes that composing is a process of addition, not subtraction; he says addition clarifies one’s meaning—even though grammar wrongly makes us think that the noun is a sentence’s most important element, since it can stand alone.

Erskine:

What you wish to say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun. The noun is only a grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader’s. The noun by itself adds nothing to the reader’s information; it is the name of something he knows already, and if he does not know it, you cannot do business with him. The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.

[Francis Christensen: pioneer accumulator.]

Christensen’s work changed writing instruction for a while in the 1960s and ’70s. Many high school students and college freshmen were taught to improve their writing by imitating masterful long sentences and by combining short sentences to make compound and complex ones. Although this worked, the movement crashed under an academic counter-attack in the 1980s. Landon touches on the reasons, and cites an elegiac essay, “The Erasure of the Sentence,” by Robert J. Connors. Connors essentially says that having students imitate wasn’t sexy enough to prevail in academe. Christensen’s methods, he says, were seen as mechanistic, “lore-based,” and lacking in theory.

The stunning irony, to any practitioner reading about this academic dispute, is that writers, including literary artists, have always learned by imitation. In fact, all artists have learned that way through the ages: imitate what you love and then receive opinions from other makers. In writing classes, and certainly in creative writing workshops, the precocious stars are those who, having fallen in love with words, sentences, and stories long before, have already spent years informally studying them. In swimming through libraries, such writers absorbed structures and rhythms that help prose sing or pack a punch.

While many creative writing teachers lack pedagogical training, and may not teach imitation systematically or even overtly, their classes are actually based on immersion and imitation. Thus their indirect instruction works. Of course freshman composition aims to teach eighteen-year-olds to write acceptable expository prose. Not to produce “creative” or even professional writers, but to make better citizen writers. Just giving them practice helps, as does the widespread use of peer workshopping, since they also learn from each other’s struggles.

I gather there’s currently a resurgence of interest among rhetoric and composition experts in teaching writing by focusing on sentences. Some of these scholars are also teaching creative nonfiction, attracted to a burgeoning genre that’s ablaze with innovation, fed as it is by classical essays, by dramatized personal essays and memoirs, by literary journalism and poetry. Such rhetoricians tend to feel they possess the tools to teach nonfiction writing, at least at the sentence level, better and faster than muzzy “creative writers” can. That seems demonstrably true of Landon.

•

[My sister Meg took this photo in Idaho.]

Gesturing to the writer, cumulative sentences deepen the authorial persona.

Chapter Five of Building Better Sentences, “The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax,” drills further into their structure. Upon finishing it, on Page 67, you might wonder how Landon will fill his book’s remaining pages—ten subsequent chapters. Indeed, you have the gist of his point and grasp the reason for his passion. But Landon continues: to teach more about cumulatives; to consider a few other sentence patterns; to offer further insights into balance, suspense, and the rhetorical effects of using two examples, or three, or four (and more).

[Brooks Landon: helpful rhetorician.]

For me, as a memoirist, a fascinating corollary aspect of Building Better Sentences is Landon’s notion of what cumulative sentences imply about the writer:

When a sentence works like a mini-narrative, telling a kind of story that has a surprise ending, I think it will almost always catch a reader’s attention and remind the reader of the creative mind that crafted that sentence, and that’s one of the functions of style: to remind us of the mind behind the sentences we read.

In contrast, simple and compound sentences that lack detail and explanation emphasize the predicate—everything after the noun; the action the noun points to: “His house burned down.” They don’t subtly gesture to the writer trying to make sense and help us make sense of a situation. Landon explains:

Highly predicative prose isn’t long on explanations. It has a kind of take-it-or-leave-it quality. This is macho-speak that bluntly posits information without reflecting upon it or elaborating it . . . It’s a style Will Strunk would be hard-pressed to criticize, although I doubt he ever wanted any of his students to write exactly this way. . . .

The highly predicative style seems to me to introduce a mind that is amazingly unreflective, almost anesthetized, or so focused on one purpose that it simply refuses to think about anything else or consider alternative points of view.

Landon’s reference to Cornell University Professor Strunk reminds us of The Elements of Style, the apparently immortal guide by him and his student E.B. White. Landon treats the book kindly, although it’s an exemplar of and an advocate for plain style. Aimed at beginning writers, remember, The Elements of Style is a fine and bracing brief for clarity of thought and expression. And professional writers do discover the beauty of simple declarative sentences, after all. They’re always looking for places to use them. They also, of course, make sentences of other lengths and patterns.

In fact, Landon cites a wonderful cumulative by E.B. White himself, from his celebrated essay “Once More to the Lake“:

We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were mackerel, pulling them over the side of the boat in a businesslike manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the back of the head.

I don’t entirely agree with Landon about plain style’s flaws in fiction—that subject is very complex, and his two examples poorly support his contention. Yet his overall notion, based on his preference for depth of inquiry, seems valid. I’m totally on board with his championing of the cumulative sentence and with its implications for nonfiction. Especially when blended with simple and compound sentences, cumulatives offer many options for rhythmic variety and emphasis.

The cumulative form “urges the writer to give more information to the reader, and it suggests to the reader that the writer is doing her or his best to make things as clear and as satisfying as possible,” Landon writes. “This is the syntax that sends the signal that the writer is . . . trying harder than other writers.”

Cumulative sentences prompt the writer toward “speculative language.”

[I took this in London.]

Similies, metaphors, and such words as maybe, perhaps, possibly, suggesting, appearing, and apparently “establish the writer as a unique consciousness.” This isn’t inevitable in cumulative sentences—Landon is merely pointing out how they easily support and facilitate his favored, reflective aesthetic.

In nonfiction, of course, persona is foundational, especially the writer’s “now,” which among other things takes the curse off plodding chronological plots and provides enriching contrast to past events. I doubt most rhetoric-composition teachers are fully aware of the extent to which persona is an endless topic of conversation in creative nonfiction.

In fiction, we both suspend disbelief and, as Landon notes, appreciate that someone is providing the story. In memoirs, especially, we rely on authors to help us negotiate two personas, the writer’s and the writer’s past self. We reflexively judge both. We can accept almost any past indiscretion if the person telling the story manages to be acceptable and to help us understand, empathize with, or forgive the writer’s past self.

Consider one of my favorite cumulative sentences, from Leslie Rubinkowski’s “Funeral,” published by River Teeth in 2005. Lovely, suspensive, and wonderfully punctuated, the sentence helps open the essay and, at the same time, it launches Rubinkowski’s encounter with her past self; her cumulative is preceded and set up by a simpler sentence:

Gertie is my favorite aunt, her apartment is four miles from my house, and I haven’t seen her in twelve years. I got lost trying to find her, so lost that the fifteen-minute drive stretched to an hour, so lost that I navigated one-way tubercular streets with a map across my knees before I found the Doughboy guarding Lawrenceville—Penn bends into Butler, I knew that, I didn’t really forget—and I have to force myself not to run to her when I see her across the room: my sweet Aunt Gert in her fawn-colored suit with satin lapels and rhinestone angel pin, her hair, as ever, upswept and immaculate; and I lean in to touch her arm and study the fine familiar fuzz on her cheeks, the broader, softer version of my own jaw line, and the rafts of pink roses that cover her coffin and climb the walls.

Underscoring that style and content ultimately are inseparable, here’s a sentence cited by Landon, an incredibly fast and cinematic one by Ernest Hemingway, from In Our Time:

George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

In contrast, here’s a slowly moving cumulative sentence, which Landon took from the novel Memento Mori by Muriel Spark—she conveys in rhythm as well as words a man’s uneasy, interminable encounter with an ancient woman:

He went to speak to Mrs. Bean, tiny among the pillows, her small toothless mouth open like an “O,” her skin stretched thin and white over her bones, her huge eye-sockets and eyes in a fixed, infant-like stare, and her sparse white hair short and straggling over her brow.

Finally, here’s a cumulative sentence I wrote in college, at age 21, in essay about a farmer I’d worked for:

The wind had abated, leaving a stillness so complete we could hear the rasp of pigeons’ feet against the tin roof of the farmhouse.

Now mine doesn’t accumulate much, with only one phrase after the base sentence—I remember trying to add another and giving up. But I felt that the poetic and portentous tone I’d hit was perfect—full of movement and mystery, gravid with implication.

In its simplicity, in any case, my sentence illuminates why cumulatives are sometimes called “loose” sentences, which likens the phrases tacked onto base clauses to wobbly boxcars. Without the sturdy engine of the simple sentence pulling them forward, they’d uselessly derail. Landon dislikes the term “loose sentence” for that prejudicial connotation; he feels it has privileged the less useful periodic sentence. The latter structure relies on an introductory phrase and forces the reader to wait until the end of the sentence for its meaning. For example: “In spite of scorching heat and brutal humidity, the game continued.” Such a form is obviously less suited to the immediately understandable accumulation that Landon favors.

I wrote the great sentence of my twenties by “instinct,” which is to say by imitation. Under the influence of Hemingway, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor—I was a southern boy—that sentence materialized upon my typewriter’s platen. As I’ve noted, immersion’s still literature’s approved apprenticeship. Usually the results are credited to individual talent, however, obscuring the way craft is acquired in a monkey-see, monkey-do process. As one matures, learning becomes steadily more focused and overt, more self-prescribed and self-directed.

Now one of the top writing manuals in my library, Building Great Sentences is the most useful study of the sentence I’ve ever read.  I’ll write more and better cumulative sentences after reading it. Landon benefits writers, teachers, and rhetoricians in explaining his obsession with cumulatives, spotlighting their relative simplicity, their flowing beauty, their subtle but steady reassurance about the writer, and their effectiveness in carrying rhythm, in conveying information and emotion, and in providing aesthetic pleasure.

[Building Great Sentences is the basis of Brooks Landon’s Great Courses audio or video proprietary class, “Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft.” For a richly cumulative style in fiction, Landon recommends Don DeLillo’s wonderful New Yorker short story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”]

The post A special sentence structure appeared first on Richard Gilbert.

Vile New York Times colon usage & looking at the lonely sentence.

The New York Times isn’t alone in making me ill over its colon usage. But I adore the Times and read it faithfully, so I’m daily aggrieved. The usage I detest: capitalizing the first letter of the clause after a colon. In this style, incomplete sentences escape the initial capital. But independent clauses unfortunately do not.

Here’s an example in the second sentence of Frank Bruni’s recent column “Trump is Never to Blame”:

The buck stops with Sean Spicer, who kept wandering from the script like a toddler into traffic. All he had to do was stick to his lines: The president’s proposals are the wisest.

Maybe I’m seeing many more colons-plus-capitals in the Times because influential editors there love colons. Or more of their writers (including civilian contributors) are using them. Maybe we are in a national mood to spew our colons?

The Chicago Manual of Style sanely eschews the Times’s practice; the only time an independent clause after a colon is capitalized is when there are a series of sentences afterward. Here are the examples it lists:

• The study involves three food types: cereals, fruits and vegetables, and fats.

• They even relied on a chronological analogy: just as the Year II had overshadowed 1789, so the October Revolution had eclipsed that of February.

• Many of the police officers held additional jobs: thirteen of them, for example, moonlighted as security guards.

• Henrietta was faced with a hideous choice: Should she reveal what was in the letter and ruin her reputation? Or should she remain silent and compromise the safety of her family?

Among other things, what makes me hate the Times’ and others’ usage here—the Times appears to be following The Associated Press Stylebook, so this hideousness is widespread—is that the capital is ugly and totally unnecessary for meaning. Worse, it destroys readers’ pleasure in making their little jump between sentences. Readers can do it! And they should and they must, even when a colon sends their noses into a brick wall. Any sentence both stands alone and relies utterly on what comes before and after. So always the little leap.

My true pig story—properly punctuated!

Here’s a true story in which I’ll use a colon before an independent clause in the first sentence of the second paragraph:

I knew a farmer who had a sow who learned to escape by ramming herself through an electrified fence. Hot wires hurt. Even if briefly. The swine knew this. But oh, the rewards of freedom! So she’d run full bore, as it were, at the fence.

And, knowing she’d suffer, she’d start screaming: before she was shocked, she’d start screaming. Which was how the farmer knew his pig was out again. Inside his house, he’d hear her cries as she ran, unfettered and unharmed, at the waiting fence. I wonder if what really motivated her was rage—at injustice, since, technically, the fence hurt her before her crime.

Now I like colons better than semicolons, aesthetically, but I’d really have to think about using a colon there. I wouldn’t if a publication’s style was to capitalize independent clauses after colons. The idiocy of this stylistic practice is that, following its hazy logic, the first word in an independent clause after a semicolon should really be capitalized too:

And, knowing she’d suffer, she’d start screaming; Before she was shocked, she’d start screaming.

Now I really feel nauseous. I mean, look at it.

Do you follow the Times’s colon usage? How can you live with yourself?

•

Gary Lutz ponders the glory & terror of the sentence. 

They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died.— Ben Marcus

There’s a sentence snapping with stressed syllables, cited by Gary Lutz in his interesting essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” for The Believer. Lutz writes:

The fewer unstressed syllables there are, the more sonic impact the sentence will have, as in Don DeLillo’s sentence “He did not direct a remark that was hard and sharp.” You can take this stratagem to breathtaking extremes, as Christine Schutt does in her sentence “None of what kept time once works.” Schutt’s sentence should remind us as well that we need not shy away from composing an occasional sentence entirely of monosyllabic words, as Barry Hannah also does in “I roam in the past for my best mind . . .”

This passage interests me partly for how hard it is to process “fewer unstressed syllables” instead of the positively phrased equivalent—“more stressed syllables”—followed by DeLillo and Schutt’s even harder to understand negative sentences, which must’ve been done for a reason. But yes, the power of monosyllabic words. As in the King James Bible. After leaving journalism, I went on a bender with fat words—moreover, furthermore, nonetheless, however. One day, amidst a long penance of later writing, I noticed myself seeking the shortest word. All else being equal, I’d learned, on my own dime, that short words are better. This is my beef with those who warn writers off the thesaurus. It can remind you of a great short word, often ancient. One with biblical impact.

Which brings Lutz to sentences made from such words. By writers he discovered “who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. . . . [A]s if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.”

Some writers say they write because they love making sentences, and maybe that’s true. Having that love, or discovering or kindling it, seems necessary. But giving sentences their proper loving attention takes time, for me—typically I first spatter page with them, anxiously fighting off the void. As Lutz observes,

The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish.

Fighting first fear, and then slashing at numbing received usage and their own human flat-footedness, writers see again they’re really writing songs. Maybe they started out trying for an opera. But joy abides, all the same, in a good song.

The post Punctuation & my pig tale appeared first on Richard Gilbert.

[Richard Ford stands between his loving parents.]

Ford’s spare, rhythmic style; Doyle’s long, aural ramblers.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford. Harper, 173 pp. 

Richard Ford’s new memoir, a short book made of two long essays, is a vocal performance. And he’s in good voice. Forget scenes: he’s telling. The New York Times Book Review said Ford’s prose style in his novel Canada (which I reviewed here) is “so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next.” The same applies in Between Them: Remembering My Parents, though it’s Ford’s rhythms—how his sentences work together—rather than lone sentences that please you and lure you onward.

Here’s an early characterization of his father that slides into his mother:

His large malleable, fleshy face was given to smiling. His first face was always the smiling one. The long Irish lip. The transparent blue eyes—my eyes. My mother must’ve noticed this when she met him—wherever she did. In Hot Springs or Little Rock, sometime before 1928. Noticed this and liked what she saw. A man who liked to be happy. She had never been exactly happy—only inexactly, with the nuns who taught her at St. Anne’s in Fort Smith, where her mother had put her to keep her out of the way.

What various vocal rhythms here. Take just the first four sentences: a passive sentence—Daddy didn’t smile: his face itself was “given to” that act—followed by a great turn of phrase about that quality, his smiling nature; then a fragment; then another fragment—with a dash! More fragments follow. Their colloquial snap. Then, this passage about his father, in the essay about his father, pivots into his mother’s dire childhood. That’s a much longer sentence, with a kick at the end, though it relies on what’s come before. Relies on how Ford has set us up.

Ford seems ambivalent about the semicolon, using only a few in his new memoir, but plenty of dashes, short sentences, and sentence fragments. His style is undergirded by and reflects his forthrightly imaginative approach to his parents. Like they’re two of his fictional characters he’s made up. So he writes confidently, almost over-confidently. As in that great, cheeky (borderline smarmy) “only inexactly” line about his mother’s happiness. But we see in his judgments and generalizations the same confidence (and speculation and limits) we possess in musing upon our own ordinary yet mysterious parents.

[Richard Ford]

You keep opening Between Them for their boy’s vocal performance. You can feel Ford’s implicit wink at us as he conjures his parents. His manifest love is how he escapes sentimentality in asking us to share simple affection for them. These ordinary forgettable people from Arkansas, who landed in Jackson, Mississippi, left no trace aside from their gifted only child. And as he talks them to life, rather than dramatizes their narrative arc—well, he does, inexactly—they melt away when you shut the book.

•

[Brian Doyle on his home turf at the University of Portland.]

Rhetorical & other reasons for Brian Doyle’s long sentences.

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

—Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras,” The American Scholar

Brian Doyle was a prolific writer, of novels and narrative nonfiction, and a master of the short, tight essay made of long, loose sentences. His shortest essays verge on, or become, poetry. A devout Catholic, he saw life suffused by love. He took rapture in the ordinary, which he showed is extraordinary. He wrote the best essay about the 9/11 attacks, “Leap,” only 572 words. He died at the end of May of a brain tumor, aged 60. Early last week, I came across his essay “His Last Game,” reprinted by Notre Dame Magazine, and bookmarked it. Only 1,184 words, it’s about an outing with his older brother, who was dying of cancer, in 2012.

It feels almost wrong to analyze some of his essays rhetorically, since they’re about what’s sacred. But such study leads to imitation, and that’s what makes writers, even before they know they’re doing that lowly, necessary act, so that, when the greatest joy blesses them or the hardest fate befalls them, they can sing truthfully in their own voices. Craft is the necessary portal to make what’s called art from experience.

In the case of “His Last Game,” Doyle makes long, loose, plain, rambling sentences that put hard emphasis on conjunctions, which further imparts movement. He and his brother are in a single unfolding scene, driving around during an ordinary day. Which we see isn’t ordinary at all—the brother is sick. Very sick. Maybe he’s not going to make it. And Doyle’s looking at that, with his brother looking at it—their conversation and what they see is all about that, sometimes overtly but mostly between the lines. Enough for us to get and to feel all the implications.

Here’s the opening in paragraph in which Doyle plants his brother’s refrain: mock concern over remembering to pick up his medication, at this point pointless:

We were supposed to be driving to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, but he said just drive around for a while, my prescriptions aren’t going anywhere without me, so we just drove around. We drove around the edges of the college where he had worked and we saw a blue heron in a field of stubble, which is not something you see every day, and we stopped for a while to see if the heron was fishing for mice or snakes, on which we bet a dollar, me taking mice and him taking snakes, but the heron glared at us and refused to work under scrutiny, so we drove on. We drove through the arboretum checking on the groves of ash and oak and willow trees, which were still where they were last time we looked, and then we checked on the wood duck boxes in the pond, which still seemed sturdy and did not feature ravenous weasels that we noticed, and then we saw a kestrel hanging in the crisp air like a tiny helicopter, but as soon as we bet mouse or snake the kestrel vanished, probably for religious reasons, said my brother, probably a lot of kestrels are adamant that gambling is immoral, but we are just not as informed as we should be about kestrels.

[One of his many books.]

Doyle also advised the University of Portland’s student journalists at The Beacon, their newspaper, and, upon his passing, its editor Rachel Rippetoe used a run-on sentence to make her own point about his animus toward periods—an existential and spiritual one: “Brian had a contentious relationship with punctuation. He had a special distaste for periods and the way they interrupt thoughts needlessly and arbitrarily, he said they give a sense of absolutism to an indefinite world.” Doyle told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2015, “I get teased a lot for my style. People are saying, ‘Wow, a sentence will start on Tuesday and it doesn’t end ’til Friday.’ But I want to write like people talk. I want to write like I’m speaking to you.”

And so he did.

I resisted reading “His Last Game” until this past Saturday, fearing it might be sentimental, that he couldn’t earn from us his desired response, that it couldn’t be that good, but it is.

[The link to Doyle’s “Leap” in the first paragraph goes to the printed text; below, Doyle reads it, with text on the screen.]

The post The long & short of sentences appeared first on Richard Gilbert.

[Intricate peacock feathers provoked Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.]

Bird by bird, new book explores Darwin’s theory of mate selection.

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us by Richard O. Prum. Doubleday, 540 pp.

Giving a friend a tour of Otterbein University recently, my wife and I guided her into its Science Center, mostly so I could re-visit its plexiglass aviary of parakeets just off the lobby. A subject of study by faculty and students, the birds, of the sort sold in countless pet shops, are native to Australia and are properly called budgerigars. Otterbein’s dozen budgies flit about in an array of colors and patterns: traditional greens, spritely blues, luminescent yellows.

“These birds all look different,” I said to our guest. “But all of them have something in common. Can you see it?”

A mathematician, she accepted this empirical challenge and circled the aviary. The birds took scant notice, accustomed to visitors. After she gave up, I said, “They’re all males.” The only giveaway is that, in the traditional patterns, males have a vivid blue cere, a patch of flesh, above their beaks.

Thus the chance to explain that Otterbein academics have duplicated a fraternity house—because a female-only budgie flock would fight. (And surely all hell would break loose if the academics had mixed males and females.)

“But why do they make that noise?” she asked me. “What are they saying?”

We listened to the birds’ chortling—an endless, repetitious but pleasing boy chorus. Why indeed? A traditional survival-of-the-fittest answer: they’re claiming territory. A prelude to war. But surely the best answer—and equally Charles Darwin’s—is: because female parakeets like the sound. Furthermore, they’re favoring males who are sociable enough to flock together to produce such background sound for them to enjoy.

The latter answer isn’t my Romantic notion but arrives courtesy of an important new book, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us. Its author, Richard O. Prum, a Yale-based ornithologist, previously led the hypothesis that there were feathered dinosaurs. Maybe not the biggest news, to anyone who has seriously looked at a chicken. But thanks, all the same, for the concept that you’ve got dinosaurs in your coop.

A quick review here. By now we’ve all imbibed Darwin’s concept of natural selection. Animals assume their shapes and behaviors under environmental pressure—the gazelle that can outrun and dodge the leopard gets to procreate, etc. Explained in Darwin’s first book, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, this theory upended the scientific world. No God anymore, just nature, “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it. Some say this theory cracked the foundation of the church. Eventually it helped Ayn Rand inflict her stunted vision upon teenagers and the weak minded.

But after his first revolutionary theory, Darwin worked out a second and somewhat contradictory stunner. It started with his thinking about the peacock’s tail. He famously told a friend that its feathers made him ill. Such an ornament simply could not be a mere billboard proclaiming fitness. Sure, the tail’s breadth, length, and heft indicate that the male bearing it must be a sturdy fellow. But look at the tail’s intricate, artistic, colorful design. Females had to select for that, Darwin realized. He started studying and theorizing about the evolutionary effect of mate selection. He broached this notion in his second book. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in 1871.

As Prum explains, Darwin’s fellow Victorian scientists, to a man, reacted with outrage. How could a peahen—or any other bird-brained female—drive evolution? Their unrelenting sexist campaign seriously damaged the spread and acceptance of Darwin’s second great theory.

Evolutionary scientists since then have likewise rejected or minimized sexual selection’s role in shaping animals. The current reasons are less clear. Maybe we can intuit from one of their contemporary leading lights, the author of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, who believes all human behavior flows unconsciously from programming aimed at furthering our own genetics. As if that isn’t dreary enough, Dawkins bruits his religion—a giddy militant atheism—far and wide. Dawkins and his ilk have inherited from Darwin’s Victorian gatekeepers a paradigm that explains everything. Case closed. Easy peasy. But to admit that creatures possess agency to shape themselves—where did that come from? Suddenly they’re cheek by jowl with poetry and religion, whose turf is . . . mystery.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

[Richard O. Prum, Yale ornithologist and evolutionary psychology provocateur.]

Explaining the rise of the global human patriarchy.

The payoff of Prum’s argument starts more than halfway through The Evolution of Beauty, as he teases out the implications of aesthetic evolution for our own species. In short, as with birds, men and women created each other—physically, intellectually, emotionally.

But if it’s true that our hominin foremothers began domesticating males millions of years ago— especially selecting for those who’d help rear children—and then handed the torch to Homo sapiens women 200,000 years ago, what has happened?

How arose patriarchy and other forms of sexism, plus homophobia and oppressive totalitarian and reactionary politics? Prum’s answer: two cultural innovations, agriculture and the market economy that arose with it, some 15,000 years ago. Farming again, alas, as The Fall. The Bible broke this story thousands of years ago. So the consensus remains: farming permitted humans, for the first time, to achieve wealth and to amass it variably.

Goodbye to the Garden of Eden. Hello to farms and cities—to the risen glory of human civilization. And to having to earn our bread in the sweat of our faces. Prum:

When males gained cultural control over these material resources, new opportunities were created for the cultural consolidation of male social power. The parallel and independent invention of patriarchy in many of the world’s cultures has functioned to impose male control over nearly all aspects of female life, indeed human life. Thus, the cultural evolution of patriarchy has prevented modern women from fully consolidating the previous evolutionary gains in sexual economy.

Prum doesn’t speculate on why men. I’d say the ego of Homo sapiens has something to do with it—while instantiated in both sexes, what the Bible calls “vanity” seems more strongly rooted in males. What’s ego? That which “wants and fears,” says Eckhart Tolle in his remarkable spiritual synthesis A New Earth.

[Otterbein University’s bro budgies: cheerful bachelors singing for absent gals.]

Duck sex & patriarchal rage at women and homosexuals.

[Muscovy drake: suspected rapist.]

But the lion’s share of sexual selection, as it were—and therefore of autonomy—goes to the lioness, in Prum’s view. For example, here’s Prum’s take on human male homosexuality, which will be controversial: it’s a byproduct of females selecting males for greater sensitivity. Which actually makes more sense, in context, than people aping Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory who say, after Dawkins et al, that non-breeders boosted a clan’s prolificacy by providing child-rearing services.

Sensing the sexual power of women—if not their dominant role in shaping men—no wonder patriarchal ideologies are so focused on controlling female sexuality and reproduction and on condemning same-sex behaviors. But “patriarchy is not inevitable, and it does not constitute human biological ‘destiny,’” Prum writes. “Patriarchy is a product not of our evolutionary history nor of human biology per se but of human culture.”

Culture of course can and does change—witness America’s social progress in the past 50 years alone. In part, Prum believes, such pushback represents the “emergence of cultural countermeasures to reassert and preserve female sexual and social autonomy.” But he considers the war between the sexes far from over:

The concept of an ongoing, culturally waged sexual conflict arms race also allows us to understand what is at stake in the battle between contemporary feminists and advocates of conservative, patriarchal views of human sexuality. After all, control over reproduction—including birth control and abortion—is at the very core of sexual conflict.

Like the evolved sexual autonomy of ducks, feminism is not an ideology of power or control over others; rather, it is an ideology of freedom of choice. This asymmetry of goals—the patriarchal aim of advancing male dominance versus the feminist commitment to freedom of choice—is inherent in all sexual conflict, from ducks to humans. But it gives the contemporary cultural struggle over universal sexual rights an especially frustrating quality.

The centuries-long war on women—eloquently summarized by Tolle in A New Earth—along with literal wars and despots who usurp our species’ transcendent yearnings, are a global human tragedy. Prum both illuminates its causes and makes you feel that we’re not nearly at the end of our story. This thrilling book is very important. Prum offers a refreshing theory built from solid research and a mind unclouded by stale dogma. His findings and theory imply that humanity’s narrative arc bends toward cooperation and justice. Toward a future that appears sublime.

[Prum’s book is very recent, so major reviews are few, but a lengthy article on it has recently appeared in the New York Times, “Challenging Mainstream Thought About Beauty’s Big Hand in Evolution.” Meanwhile, Carol Dyhouse writes interestingly about the fear of female sexual power in her essay for Literary Hub, “Why are We So Afraid of Female Desire?”]

[You can follow Otterbein’s bro budgies on Facebook—they support climate science!]

The post Feminism & our human destiny appeared first on Richard Gilbert.

[Senior art exhibit, Miller Gallery, Otterbein University.]

A student artist’s insights about making art apply to prose.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. . . . This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point.

— Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

I.

One day late in the semester just ended, I ran into Shelby Page, a former student. I was leaving Otterbein University’s Art and Communication Building, and Shelby was going in. When she was a freshman, I had taught her and 13 other whip-smart honors classmates in my themed composition class, “Tales of Dangerous Youth.” I hadn’t seen her since our class. She told me of her upcoming senior exhibit, which I’ve now attended. I was impressed by Shelby’s work and by her brief Artist’s Statement on the wall. Her thoughts on artmaking addressed her work as a visual artist, but they apply to writing and probably to making anything.

[Shelby Page’s “Iron Horse.”]

Artwork tends to take on its own life as it is worked on and the basic composition is set up. With each piece, it is a compromise between the life of the piece that has been created and what has been intended for the piece. The metal sculpture Iron Horse, for example, took on a life of its own as the end result was completed through the piece’s specific needs. Like any work, each medium, composition, idea, and so forth, need different ways of being handled.

With Iron Horse, the material was something that required a bit of practice to work with and pre-planning ahead of time. The composition of the piece—like the decision to have it balance on one point—was decided on later but greatly impacted one’s view of the piece. It would be much different if it was to sit on the entire base of the neck.

There’s hard truth in Shelby’s insights here, and there’s hope. The truth is that what you envision in a flash hasn’t really been planned, though it may feel that way, and it sure isn’t done. What you sensed was glorious completion was pure possibility. Nothing more, nothing less. A glimmer. The first step is to act on it or to let it go. Let’s say you begin, fired with intention. As Shelby says, your intention quickly meets the reality of what’s emerging.

Art is a field of geniuses, but I presume that, like me, everyone gets humbled. In writing, no one is smart enough to foresee where actual words and sentences will send your notion. And of course the writer is struggling with what s/he’s capable of—at that moment, with that material—and so on into the future. But because art flares during creation, as Shelby says, also lends hope. Especially when, however cheerfully you began, you proceed in fear and trembling. What happened to my plan?

Wow and Amen, were all I could think as I read Shelby’s first paragraph. Any serious writer must learn and accept Shelby’s first precept:

Artwork tends to take on its own life as it is worked on and the basic composition is set up. With each piece, it is a compromise between the life of the piece that has been created and what has been intended for the piece.

II.

[“Sitting Woman” by Shelby Page.]

Paradoxically, greatly complicating her work helped her keep it alive. A seemingly mistaken choice created a struggle that freed her:

When setting out to work on a piece, there is usually a new challenge to face, whether it be a new medium or a different way of approaching a familiar style of artwork. It is a push to try something new so the piece does not lose the sense of a natural quality as it becomes routine. Creating challenges makes the piece more interesting to create. It becomes much more about the process and becomes a great learning experience, as well as makes the piece that more interesting in the end.

A challenge that was faced in the painting of Sitting Woman, was the use of two non-traditional paint colors that were used for the base layer. Working around this challenge allowed for the painting to have a more loose and natural quality that was achieved by breaking the initial tension of making a mistake. Having a challenge to overcome when creating a piece helps to break through minor concerns that can get in the way of the creative process. In this way, having a challenge can actually work as a way of focus and although it is an obstacle that one may face, it is an obstacle that allows the maker to overcome the smaller challenges and worries that can stop the creative process dead in its tracks.

Blazing truths here. I wish I could take credit as her long-ago teacher for Shelby’s quiet authority. Her eloquent statement defies excerpting, though “Having a challenge to overcome when creating a piece helps to break through minor concerns that can get in the way of the creative process” seems key.

I’ve become a fan of prompts and borrowed structures for this reason—they thwart intention. By raising or lowering the stakes, they bleed off preexisting intention and some anxiety. When I write something with a fully realized intention, it risks being superficial, boring. Without friction, it isn’t deep enough: there hasn’t been enough discovery. I sense this sometimes in others’ work as well. For me, intention, in the sense of chasing a germinal idea or feeling, is vital—but not in the sense of hewing to a predetermined plan, of transcribing what you already “know.”

Shelby’s thoughts remind me of one of my favorite quotes:

To write is to overcome a certain resistance: you are trying to wrestle a steer to the ground, to wrestle a snake into a bottle, to overcome a demon that sits in your head. To succeed in writing or making sense is to overpower that steer, that snake, that demon. But not kill it.

This myth explains why some people who write fluently and perhaps even clearly—they say just what they mean in adequate, errorless words—are really hopelessly boring to read. There is no resistance in their words; you cannot feel any force being overcome, any orneriness. No surprises. The language is too abjectly obedient. When writing is really good, on the other hand, the words themselves lend some of their energy to the writer. The writer is controlling words he can’t turn his back on without danger of being scratched or bitten.

—Peter Elbow, Writing With Power (reviewed)

III.

[“Elegance” by Shelby Page.]

At the same time, students often give me my keenest instruction in classes that go hardest for me. But enlightenment doesn’t come till I’ve labored, and sometimes suffered, all the way through them. Unlike a piece of writing, you can’t shelve a class and walk away. I’ve slowly learned, at least, that how I feel about a class doesn’t necessarily reflect the experiences my students are having.

For instance, in Fall 2013, shortly before Shelby’s class, I taught a composition class under the same “Tales of Dangerous Youth” banner. Except I had thrown out proven coming-of-age memoirs and had tried untested ones. Edgy, artistic books, they came highly recommended. A parallel honors section dealt with them okay, with some grumbling—freshmen need plot!—but the regular class suffered. They didn’t complain, but I could see their pain. The few talkative students who loved reading, and found these new toys stimulating, soon fell silent before their classmates’ wall of silence. What a long semester!

And the stunner came when I received their evaluations: they gave me high marks. They’d expected to suffer in an English class. And, forgive me, I delivered. That class taught me, at last, about choosing books for different audiences, and it taught me to try new pedagogical moves. One of that class’s problems was that I’d made it my responsibility alone, so I’ve since had two or three students lead reading discussions. In spreading responsibility, the teacher helps build a community, however various or reluctant its components.

Two weeks ago, at a class’s last session—during our final exam period, actually—I played a song by Loudon Wainwright, “The Picture,” about a man looking at a photograph of himself and his sister when they were children. Integrating both visual art and narrative, it hit our class’s theme one last time, I’d co-taught the class with a talented artist-teacher, my friend Susan Fagan, whose first half exposed these juniors and seniors, mostly science and athletics majors—with smatterings across the board: history, global studies, music, art—to journaling and making visual art. Then I taught them memoir writing for two months. Most had never written about what’s been significant in their lives. That’s now my guide for them, significance, not drama, though most of their stories also involved things like bullying, injuries, parents’ divorces.

My eyes glazed with tears as I listened to “The Picture” and then talked about it. I told them that when you do what Wainwright did, write carefully and truthfully out of your significant experience, you connect with others. And in the belief that we’re all connected at the deepest level, I said, resides much of my faith. Maybe I got carried away. They have their own ideas, I know that, but I saw them listening closely to my passionate, nondenominational witness. And of course connection’s highest form is love. In a teacher’s sweat, s/he comes to love students, the hard and good alike.

At Shelby’s exhibit, I remembered an essay she’d written in my class about her high school art teacher. Shelby had found artistic delight and community in the woman’s room. To learn to become a teacher like hers, Shelby had to learn to make many types of art at Otterbein University. I thrilled to see some of what she has made since leaving my room. And for her two paragraphs of wisdom about what she learned doing it, I’m grateful.

[Miller Gallery, Art & Communication, Otterbein University, Westerville, Ohio.]

The post A creator’s credo appeared first on Richard Gilbert.

[When Kiki fed Kathy last year.]

Or rather, about the twelve-plus hours in February when I had cared for her alone. Let me repeat and recast that: a guy in his sixties, with a bad back and a grumpy demeanor, was tasked with watching a toddler, then in the throes of the Terrible Twos, alone for over twelve hours.

Oh, she’s adorable—the cutest, sweetest, smartest kid on Earth—but she does something different every 30 seconds. A force of nature, she totally sets your agenda. And did I mention that she doesn’t nap when at home, only at daycare? That she’s in the Terrible Twos? For the uninformed, the latter means “no” is a fraught word. So I’d rolled with the punches, all 12.5 hours of them.

At the end, punch drunk, I possessed only two clear memories of that Saturday. A vivid one at the start and another indelible moment at the end. Two memories to work with. Which seemed great, in a way: open with the first and close with the second. A memoir sandwich. I steadily warmed to this, seeing how beautifully those two moments captured my and Little Kathy’s rollercoaster of emotions and activities. It was so intense, I have only two memories! She wiped my slate clean and almost killed me! Perfect. The problem, of course, emerged as I tried to write the essay. I have only two clear memories of that day.

Much spilled out for the middle, don’t get me wrong. As I said in my email to my memoir class for retirees that starts tonight, “After this class, should you choose, you’ll be well on your way to inflicting your own grandchild, dog . . . partner, self, or family on the unsuspecting world!” But it didn’t seem believable, even to me, that I couldn’t remember the long middle of our day. Part of the problem, which I wrote about, since it constitutes a memory in the form of negative space, is that I couldn’t get Kathy to the park she loves or even to her own backyard swingset. Both were unprecedented decisions on her part. Her toddler mind had decided it was an inside day.

So the middle is about toddlerhood, its impact on me, and the experience of grandparenthood in the arc of one’s life. I write about being ordered by Kathy’s parents, my daughter, Claire, and my son-in-law, David, to pick my grandparent name:

David’s family tradition had already acted: upon Kathy’s birth, his mother, Janet, became Mimi; his father, Bruce, became Bumper. I dithered, but my wife, little Kathy’s namesake, then known for convenience as Big Kathy, pounced. Doubtless she was eager to shed her Big Kathy handle.

Awakening one morning a week later, an inspired grandparent name floated into my cerebral cortex. Smokey Lonesome. He’s a character in the novel and movie Fried Green Tomatoes, though why I wanted to be named after an alcoholic hobo mystified everyone. Even me, at first.

[A musical Easter card from Bumper!]

Further fleshing out the essay’s middle, I also wrote about what I think Kathy and I probably did—I knew I’d fed her several times, that she’d likely painted, that she loves taking baths in purple-dyed water. What’s feeding a Little Grubby Goombah like? And living with a pint-sized artist with toddler-ADHD? Thus the essay’s intrinsic problem was slowly solved. And it brought forward my hopes and fears for her, based on my own disrupted toddlerhood and on my love of wildly expressive art.

The essay, “The Boom Boom Song,” appears today on Longreads. As with my essay they published last summer, “Why I Hate My Dog,” I worked with a talented editor and writer, Cheri Lucas Rowlands. She liked the humor in both essays. For “Boom Boom,” she sought illustrations, using an artist, Kate Gavino, who captured Kathy’s joyous spirit. Here’s Kate’s interpretation of Kathy’s use of her mother’s yoga mat to soothe herself in child’s pose on the day I watched her:

•

My and Dad’s close call with a bad cop becomes an essay.

[The scene today: Publix at Atlantic Plaza.]

After Dad answered the cop and kept walking, the cop jumped in his car and rammed it onto the sidewalk in front of us. As I write:

Now that officer was running at me and Dad. He pumped his arms and jerked his head. I was 16, a high school sophomore, and my stomach went hollow. Dad kept walking. We were almost on him, and I could see his red face and his eyes flashing white. He was young, I saw—maybe early 20s, I think now—and stood with legs planted, arms bent, glaring at Dad.

“I asked you what you were doing,” the cop said.

“I answered you,” Dad said, still moving, unruffled. “We’re walking.”

We walked right past the man, and he left. The fact that Dad didn’t seem angry or scared probably saved us from some harm. It surely helped that my father commanded respect. The way he handled the hyper kid cop made a huge impression on me as a teenager. To tell the truth, I’m still impressed by Dad’s calm and firm and yet non-confrontational manner. I wrote the story several years ago and filed it away.

I’ve thought of our encounter every time I’ve read lately about excessive police violence. After much brooding, I came up with a solution—a continuing education initiative for every badge in every police department in America. My idea is for ongoing post-academy education in law enforcement history, emotional self-management, and a nonviolent martial art like Aikido—with its ethos of actually protecting attackers as well as oneself from harm.

Admittedly, I’m no expert. And I heard doubts about my notion from an Ohio police chief I know and from one of my brothers who is doubly retired from police agencies where we grew up, in Brevard County, Florida. My brother lost six friends and colleagues in his career there: three to cars and three to bullets; our hometown, Satellite Beach itself, lost two officers to a drunken driver, on May 31, 1992. Most of us are unfamiliar with the harsh world that law officers face daily. The chief and my brother said essentially the same thing: find a way to hire good cops in the first place; and in your dealings with them, treat officers like you’d like to be treated. I worked their responses into an essay on my and Dad’s experience, “Insight From a Close Call With a Bad Cop,” published this past Sunday by The Good Men Project.

I linked the essay to my book’s Facebook page, and one commenter responded, “This can’t be fixed because they’re good people and they’re bad.” I agree the problem lies in human nature. At the same time, I wonder if there are actions that would still help. Can we try? We know different cultures have different characteristic behaviors, and police departments, like any institutions, seem to vary widely within that. Nudging a particular one that’s poorly led or toxic is what I’m talking about.

There are highly progressive police departments. The New York Times recently featured a video report, “In One Crime-Ridden City, Police Try a New Tactic: Patience,” about how officers are being trained in ultra-violent Camden, N.J., to “exercise restraint in situations where they may have previously resorted to deadly force.” So how do we scale Camden as a model? How can smaller, poorer police department be supported in being more humane?

I see an underlying cause of bad behavior among police and civilians: we’ve been at war for 15 years now. There has been so much “get tough” talk from the top regarding enemies, terrorists, criminals. Stomp the bad guys! Torture was even sanctioned under the George W. Bush administration and has been praised lately by Trump. Such policies, practices, and words have a wide effect. Like war itself, they come home.

[My childhood home today, 339 Norwood Avenue. Dad put up those numbers!]

The post My grandfathering essay appeared first on Richard Gilbert.

[James Baldwin (1924–1987) in 1975.]

James Baldwin, writer & movie lover, in words & film.

The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin. Vintage, 127 pp.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.— The Devil Finds Work

I’m always circling back to James Baldwin. My latest return, reading The Devil Finds Work, his essays on American cinema, was spurred by watching the recent documentary about him, I Am Not Your Negro. I found the film, as a work of history, of racial reconsideration, of brilliantly structured art, quite literally stunning. Based loosely on Baldwin’s unrealized plan to write a book about three slain friends—civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.—the documentary was nominated for an Oscar. It opened nationwide on February 3, and I saw it shortly afterward in a screening at Ohio State. I’ve been trying since then to watch it again. The film’s power derives, in large part, from its periodic juxtaposition of images of American racists of another era with those who’ve gaped and japed at recent rallies.

[Watching movies while black.]

Baldwin sank his teeth in such foundational issues. Which is partly what makes him one of America’s greatest writers. He loved America and its culture, but was an outsider—made doubly so by his race and his homosexuality—and he wrote in fierce, profound clarity and despair. The Devil Finds Work shows you what it’s like for such a man to consider movies he loves and ones he hates. It’s a racial and social deconstruction of American cinema, and absorbing for its prose as well as for its intellectual and moral acuity.

How could he remain the kid rooting for the cowboys against the Indians when, to his horror, he realized he was rooting for his own enemy?

[A face-off in Little Rock in 1959 over school desegregation.]

James Baldwin’s halting prose style: a mind under pressure.

His style of many clauses slows Baldwin’s delivery, making his halting considerations appear thoughtful, hard-won, precise; the result of an intelligence determined to think and perceive clearly and get its truths down. An elegant appeal to the judicious and fair-minded, to the best in us. Sometimes, though, he rushes forward in flat successive clauses. Or throws in a punchy line for impact and rhythm.

Baldwin writes again in The Devil Finds Work of the young white schoolteacher he portrays in America’s greatest essay, “Notes of a Native Son.” He was ten when she saw his genius and became his patron:

But Bill Miller—her name was Orilla, we called her Bill—was not white for me in the way, for example, that Joan Crawford was white, in the way that the landlords and the storekeepers and the cops and most of my teachers were white. She didn’t baffle me that way and she never frightened me and she never lied to me. . . .

I was a child, of course, and rather unsophisticated. I don’t seem ever to have had any innate need (or, indeed, any innate ability) to distrust people: and so I took Bill Miller as she was, or as she appeared to be to me. Yet, the difference between Miss Miller and other white people . . . had to have had a profound and bewildering effect on my mind. Bill Miller was not like the cops who had already beaten me up, she was not like the landlords who called me nigger, she was not like the shopkeepers who laughed at me. . . .

From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason,  and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords.

Reading The Devil Finds Work I was pleased to discover that Baldwin is the source of the refrain “people who think they are white” in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me (reviewed). Here is its first use, in Baldwin’s analysis of In the Heat of the Night:

And nothing, alas, has been made possible by this obligatory, fade-out kiss, this preposterous adventure: except that white Americans have been urged to continue dreaming and black Americans have been alerted to the necessity of waking up. People who cannot escape thinking of themselves as white are poorly equipped, if equipped at all, to consider the meaning of black: people who know so little about themselves can face very little in another: and one dare hope for nothing from friends like these.

When James Baldwin’s savory style becomes a stutter.

[In 1975, photographed by Anthony Barboza/Getty.]

For his part, Baldwin seems to be trying to convey all shadings of a matter, not just its broad black-and-white outlines. His syntax sometimes feels almost tortured as he gropes toward a truth—the way poets do—from all angles, loathe to always approach something so large yet so exquisitely complex by direct assault. His sentences reflect his torturous experience as a black American—style arising from experience and substance to a rare degree.

He relates in The Devil Finds Work being questioned by two FBI agents in Woodstock, NY, in 1945. They were looking for a black suspect and thought Baldwin might know him. They marched him out of a diner and stood him against a wall:

They conveyed, very vividly, what they would do to me if I did not tell them the truth—what they would do to smart niggers like me. (I was a smart nigger because I worked, part time, as an artists’ model, and lived in an artists’ colony, and had a typewriter in my shack.) My ass would be in a sling—this was among the gentler warnings. They frightened me, and they humiliated me—it was like being spat on, or pissed on, or gang-raped—but they made me hate them, too, with a hatred like hot ice, and all I knew, simply, was that, if I could figure out what they wanted, nothing could induce me to give it to them.

Speaking the truth—not to his tormentors but to us—in fiercely correct prose, was Baldwin’s answer. To savor his style is to thrill to the way it influences one’s own more ordinary effort. But I need a fresh mind to properly read him. And his two-steps-forward-one-back sentences weary some readers, especially when they become fussy. Here in The Devil Finds Work he’s discussing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner:

A thirty-seven-year-old black doctor, for whom the word “prodigy” is simply ridiculously inadequate, has met a white girl somewhere in his travels, and they have come, together, to the home of the girl’s parents, in San Francisco, to announce their intention to marry each other.

His occasional stutter-step notwithstanding, it’s a powerful essay. Maybe I’d be halting too if I were seeing, in this self-congratulatory Hollywood movie, “the American self-evasion, which is all that this country has as history.” The doctor has had “to become a living freak,” Baldwin observes of his encyclopedic attainment of knowledge, to be seen by “those who think of themselves as white, and imagine, therefore, that they control reality and rule the world.”

Writing of the “mindless and hysterical banality” of the evil in The Exorcist, Baldwin reveals his own feeling of insufficiency before the “heavy, tattered glory of the gift of God.” Any human’s freedom carries the almost unbearable burden of honestly confronting one’s failure to be fully human. But there’s hope:

To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live.

Remarkable clips on YouTube capture Baldwin & his times.

Baldwin’s impassioned confrontation of a white incrementalist on the Dick Cavett show, in June 1968, remains riveting. He’s always mesmerizing to watch, but consider the context. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated two months before; Robert F. Kennedy had fallen eight days prior. I Am Not Your Negro features this appearance, including Baldwin’s brief one-on-one with Cavett, memorable for the host’s panicked eyes in the face of Baldwin’s outrage. I felt for Cavett, so progressive in bringing intellectuals and persons of color to TV, but his fear captures that uneasy time. Tempers have since cooled, but how far we have come in the intervening 49 years?

Three years before, Baldwin, then 41, gave a remarkable speech at Cambridge University on the question “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?” Clips were used in I Am Not Your Negro, including his startled response when he sat down and thunderous applause became a standing ovation, unprecedented at the Cambridge Union, a debating society.

The event was billed as a debate between him and the conservative movement’s “intellectual,” William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley, then 40, rose and gave his usual fatuous address dripping with condescension. Baldwin’s “copious literature of protest,” he said, has heaped scorn on America, which has simply repaid him in kind. In trying to reduce Baldwin to peevishness, Buckley even alleges that Baldwin was protected from due backlash criticism because of his race. Negroes are better off in America than they are any place else, Buckley says, adding that many of their problems are their fault. If it comes to “confrontation,” he warned, whites are ready to “fight the issue . . . on beaches and on hills and on landing grounds.”

In a word, pitiful, this exquisitely educated man of privilege. Baldwin, who did not attend college, wasn’t the only writer or thinker to take apart Buckley—Noam Chomsky eviscerated Buckley in his one appearance on Buckley’s TV show. But in the conservative mind Buckley staggers on, zombielike, as a thinker.

Baldwin’s subject, his great subject, especially in his nonfiction, was race. Except his concern was even deeper and more egalitarian than that: he saw, pointed to, and ultimately was obsessed about the quality in humanity itself that made race an issue. This is what gave Baldwin the moral high ground, not just the particulars of slavery and subsequent injustices but the damage done on all sides by racism. A pagan is one who won’t grant you his God—and such exclusion is the bigot’s essence too. One who narrows his clan (conveniently using skin color, ethnicity, religion, nationality) to exclude, instead of granting and together widening your shared humanity.

[52 years ago: moral acuity meets vacuity. Baldwin speaks at 14:09, followed by Buckley. Baldwin was voted by Cambridge Union members to have won the question overwhelmingly, that the “American dream is at the expense of Negroes.”]

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Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays From a Nervous System by Sonya Huber. University of Nebraska Press, 177 pages

We are primitive in our methods, and the nervous system is a mystery.—Sony Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys

Humans don’t want to think about pain—at least I don’t. But pain is our lot, sooner or later. For Sonya Huber, it came sooner.

After a divorce and well into single motherhood, at 38, she contracted an autoimmune condition in which the thyroid slowly erodes. Within three months of that, she felt her skeleton “pulsing.” A new bodily self-sabotage—rheumatoid arthritis. As Huber points out, autoimmune diseases are when the body attacks itself, for largely unknown reasons. She endures constant joint pain—the main effect of her particular arthritis—along with whole-body aches and odd effects. Woven through Pain Woman Takes Your Keys is her effort to accept and make sense of her suffering.

She writes:

It took roughly five years of pain days to believe that the pain-free body had died. I need to understand that she is buried in photographs with my face, to understand that I am now living another incarnation of myself. . . .

Chronic pain is not a missing limb or open wound; it is the essence of invisible suffering. In Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Illumination, characters in pain radiate light through their skin. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society like that, where our collective agony might blind us, or where the skin of the afflicted would shine as though they were ethereal beings. I wish I sparkled. I wish my pain made me beautiful, made me more noble, or was a fashion statement. Instead it is just pain, wordless and desperate for expression.

Because she’s a writer, Huber does express, in a considered and artful way. The linked essays in Pain Woman Takes Your Keys form a memoir with a narrative arc. Her desperation early on, when she realizes her fate, but still knows what it feels like to be pain free, makes her “feral.” She sees specialists and cries. She demands, of herself and doctors, to be healed. She settles for palliative measures. Medical professionals’ power over her—their ratings of her “difficulty,” their cold rejections, for endless insurance-related and humdrum reasons—gradually make Huber wary, furtive, meek. This degradation feels instantly real, and you’re angry on her behalf. Friends and colleagues, not knowing what to say when they notice a flare-up, often blunder. They suggest yoga, acupuncture, massage, all of which soothe but cannot defeat what’s undefeatable.

In opening the book, Huber writes more than three pages of declarative sentences starting with the word “pain,” including:

Pain has something urgent to tell you but forgets over and over again what it was.

Pain tells you to put your laptop in the refrigerator.

Pain wants to be taken to an arts and crafts store.

Pain demands that you make eye contact with it and then sit utterly still.

Pain would like French fries and Netflix.

The book’s witty title essay is about one of her few refuges, writing. At first afraid that the “fogginess and ache” of rheumatoid arthritis would destroy her practice, Huber still goes to the keyboard for an hour or more a day. The focus helps. Sometimes blogging is the best she can do. She explains how she wrote, in “an altered pain state,” her humorous post “Shadow Syllabus,” a hermit crab essay. It went viral. In the book, she explains the new persona, in life and on the page, that made that essay:

Pain Woman gives no shits. Pain Woman has stuff to tell you, and she has one minute to do so before she’s too tired. Pain Woman knows things.

My non-pain voice searches for metaphors to entertain you. She aims to fascinate with far-reaching, pretty, solar-system lava curlicues, hiding behind constructions that might allow you to forget for a second that you are even looking at a woman at all.

Pain Woman takes your car keys and drives away.

Thus humor and offhand brilliance meet testimony and literary art. All crafted from hard experience and a fierce struggle. This is why summarizing fails Pain Woman Takes Your Keys. But why read a book about pain in the first place? I’ve had seasons in pain—back injuries and degenerative disc disease generally—and autoimmune diseases run in my family. Not just my own bad allergies. There’s an older sister’s decades with rheumatoid arthritis. A cousin’s Wegener’s disease, very rare. A cousin with severe asthma. An aunt who died from the side-effects of drugs for rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe other stuff I’ve forgotten. As a hospice volunteer, I’ve seen suffering and different reactions to it.

Knowing someone who’s suffering makes real what we normally deny. I have attended a few writers’ conferences with Huber (and I reviewed her book on Hillary Clinton). Such familiarity surely helped me identify with her. But reading Pain Woman Takes Your Keys is searing because of its emotional honesty and its artful shaping. Readers cannot help but imagine themselves into Huber’s situation. Writers will admire what she has wrested from experience.

Sonya Huber answered some questions by email.

Q. Why did you write this as essays instead of as a straight narrative memoir? Having said that, these essays are so linked they are virtually chapters, and they deepen and they extend each other. There’s a progression in both time and disease/life stage. So do you think of this as a kind of “memoir” in the usual sense, even though the pieces are also discrete? And it’s called “essays” in its title. But it’s a stealth memoir, I’d say. Your structural approach has such intent behind it, and I wonder if you’d talk about that.

SH: When I started writing about pain, I knew that I didn’t want to write a narrative. Pain itself feels like it disrupts my sense of chronology—it almost lifts me out of time. Because I have told the story of my illness to doctors so many times, that chronology feels sort of numb and less interesting to me, and the timeline feels depressing, too, because there’s no cure or ending in my situation. I wrote these slices of my life with pain to offer a kind of escape and even a sense of play and delight for myself as the topics occurred to me.

Then, much later, I looked at the collection I had in progress and gave myself topics to fill in what I saw were the holes in the manuscript, the big topics I hadn’t yet taken on but that I knew were affected by pain. I like the fact that it might hold up as a stealth memoir! The ordering of the essays was done after the collection was finished, kind of as a mix tape, to break up the long serious prose with shorter bursts of lyric writing. But I never looked at the collection from the perspective of time, and now that I think about it, the first narrative piece (“Lava Lamp of Pain”) was the first one I wrote, and the last (“Ten Thousand Things”) was one of the last. So maybe there’s more chronology going on here than I’m aware of!

Q. How in the world did you write such a beautifully crafted and deep book so fast? Were you writing it after five years with your autoimmune diseases? You seem impressively quick even if you started writing three years in. Could you discuss the nuts and bolts of your process, of making this kind of art from your life?

SH: Thank you! I wrote the first piece at the end of 2014, so I had already been sick for over four years at that point. Until then, I wasn’t writing much about pain–although I was reading about pain and venting about it in my journal. The funny thing is that I was working on a different book project (a memoir) while I was writing these essays, and that book project felt really difficult. So I would “play hooky” on days when I couldn’t tackle the memoir and write about pain. The pain essays felt like recess, because I did not envision them as a collection. In a way they were a place for me to play with language and a way to make something pleasing or interesting out of a situation that I often frankly fight with a lot.

It doesn’t feel to me like I am a fast writer, but I do put things in documents whenever I have ideas, and I believe those accrue shape over time. So I might have had seven or eight pain essay ideas, and as something would occur to me on one of the topics, I’d write it in one of the documents and it would sit there and simmer. I worked for a number of years as a reporter and freelance journalist, and I think being involved with journalism has so much impact on my writing process. I just put text on the page and then worry later about what form it will take. That helps me get to a very rough draft.

Then—and this is so important—I would bring something that felt “done” to one of my two writing groups, and they were completely central. They helped me see where I was diving off the deep end of metaphor and abstraction. That’s my pitfall, especially with this project. My treasured readers helped rein me in. The last critical part of the piece was post-publication readers. I didn’t know I was writing about an interesting subject until after “Lava Lamp” [about the onset of her disease, her desperation, her screaming meltdown] was published in The Rumpus. I thought I was putting something out there that had to be published as a way to share around the agony a little bit, and then responses from readers helped me see with each publication that I could take a tiny further step out into what seemed like weirdness with the next publication. As I’ve only worked on completely structured books before, I had never had the experience of being emboldened by my readers in a step-by-step fashion, and once people—and editors—responded to something, I got more confidence to try the next thing.

Q. You portray one screaming meltdown. You’re at a low point, hardly able to believe what’s befallen you, and you drive hours to a specialist who can’t or won’t help you. Your raging despair in his parking lot is breathtaking, scary. It’s a departure from your largely quiet, thoughtful suffering. It really drove home your pain, loneliness, fear, and hopelessness at that point. But were you worried about readers not accepting this honesty? That is, in cnf terms, of not accepting your persona because of the way writers of nonfiction are judged in a way fiction writers aren’t?

SH: This is so interesting as a question—and it’s weird, I guess, that I never worried about it, as I always worry about my persona and how readers might view me. But in this case . . . this was one of the clear signpost events in my life that I never doubted writing about. I was so outside of myself with fear and anger that the event feels very objective, like a mystery or a monument I had to describe. In a way I can see that an alternate ordering of the book would lead up to this crisis, after the reader would get to see me as reflective and calm. But in real life that’s not how it feels. It feels like pain dropped into my life like a bomb. I guess I hoped that the reflection and language itself in the essay up until the crisis would make some of the readers trust me. And those who were going to be judgmental about a breakdown in a parking lot definitely would not want to read further. I never wanted to write a book—or even an essay—in which I might describe pain as less than overwhelming, as that doesn’t do justice to either the pain experience or to the many other people with pain. I guess I offered my reliability as persona as a sacrifice.

Q. I found it interesting that Buddhism’s lessons and tools suffuse this book. The penultimate essay, “Between One and Ten Thousand,” presents your ongoing Buddhist learning and practice. And thus Buddhism seems to resonate through the last essay, “Inside the Nautilus,” a tour de force of inquiry and reflection into official pain scales. How did you decide to do so much implicitly instead of writing straightforwardly, maybe near the start, about your spiritual path? And was it a preexisting condition, as it were, to your ailments?

SH: Oh thank you so much about that last essay—it’s one that’s close to my heart. Yes, Buddhism was a pre-existing condition. I’ve been practicing since 2004, after my son was born. So I am very lucky that I had a few years of meditation under my belt by the time pain hit, as meditation, among other supports, have all helped me get through days of pain. I think Buddhism sort of permeates rather than announces itself because the spiritual practice itself doesn’t offer a drastic change or an epiphany. It’s just another way to inquire. In many ways I think meditation made these essays possible. Buddhist monks in Tibet and India have a practice of going to charnel grounds, places where bodies were decaying above ground in order to look at the corpses and to study their own revulsion and resistance. Thinking about these things—the practice of watching my own struggle with my reality—gave me the support to describe an experience that for many is a bit repulsive.

Q. Your work underscores how far as a society we are from truly treating those in pain. I am thinking both in terms of pain management and in treating them with respect and compassion. Why do you think this is so, when there’s so much suffering? At the same time, America is said to have an opiate epidemic from some doctors’ laxity or corruption. Has that clouded the issue?

SH: This is such an urgent and complex question, and it connects to the previous question in terms of our clear revulsion toward pain as a society. We don’t like pain—well, no one does—but in the U.S., suffering is still often ascribed to character weakness. Calvinism, the Protestant Work Ethic, capitalism—all these systems tell us that we get what we deserve, and that we can make our lives better through individual effort. Effort is important, but we have a mythology that individual striving can erase all suffering, which is clearly not true. Pain is still, on some level, seen to be either psychosomatic, something having to do with age, or something related to a weak constitution. And pain of women and people of color is assumed to be exaggerated and not that urgent. So we’re often deluded about suffering. We can’t even look at it to examine it.

In terms of the medical system, I think our for-profit insurance-based healthcare has to go. It’s not working; doctors barely have time to spend with their patients. And most doctors don’t learn much about pain or pain management in medical school. Their training prioritizes cure as an achievement, and the absence of cure as a failure. Doctors do want to heal people, so chronic pain often feels like a failure to doctors. I think that connects to the opioid epidemic, and the genuine interest doctors may have in doing something to help within their limited structures. I think the primary cause of the epidemic is a medical system in which many patients received prescriptions because they don’t have insurance that is adequate to treat or investigate underlying conditions that might be causing pain, and doctors don’t have time to inquire into the causes or build a relationship with their patients.

The “opioid epidemic” has resulted in a crackdown on medications that chronic pain patients use to survive, and that’s wrong. The suspicion of chronic pain patients being seen as “med seekers” has been present for years, and it’s good to have some awareness about the dangers of substance abuse, but it’s strange that despite that concern, people with addictions still often go into debt to get treatment. What is unseen is that chronic pain people visit multiple doctors out of a genuine desire to get a diagnosis and get better. As I gradually realized there was no cure and that my former life was not coming back, I had profound desperation. That made me scream in a parking lot. It makes people do desperate things, including turning to substances or anything else that might provide relief. So chronic pain is often one piece of a puzzle to solve in a person’s life, and maybe other pieces are mental health, physical issues, employment that aggravates chronic conditions—but our medical system can’t see us as whole people in order to address these problems.

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[U.S. war fleet, the Pacific, WWII. My father flew bombers in that theatre.]

Revising an essay about Dad’s prize bull, my wife’s hurt foot.

A year and a half ago here, I wrote about my excitement at having drafted an essay in which I relive accompanying my father to buy a Hereford bull when I was four. That’s the main story, but the essay really explores the complex relationship among memory, story, and imagination as I relive that trip and some other early memories. What happened to provoke it was fetching a cane for my wife, who was recovering from foot surgery two summers ago. That reminded me of a cane the bull’s breeder gave me. I still have it, over 55 years later. Why?

[Charles C. Gilbert, a Pacific pilot in WWII.]

I don’t expect my essay to go further—I’m counting the long list as its award. What an honor and unexpected achievement. It’s hard to remember what I was thinking when I sent it in. For great reading, go to the 2015 long list and search your chosen authors and their titles—these “losing” essays have since appeared in an array of journals, and many are readable on line.

My essay will soon be three years old, and I’m still fiddling with it. After my first year of working on it, I had it so messed up. I quit it and dashed off (in comparison, at least) an essay on my crazy dog that was well received on Longreads. I actually used in the dog essay something I was trying in “The Founder Effect,” which is showing how I jump to conclusions about people and situations from mere scraps. I think that’s common, and says something about the operating system of the human mind: stories.

But after sending it around, it wasn’t getting anywhere with contests or journals. So I sent it to a friend who’d never seen it, and he said he couldn’t understand what I was getting at. I knew he was being honest and that I had to get some distance on it. I hired a developmental editor, the excellent Joan Dempsey, up in Maine, to read it and advise me.

[Joan Dempsey: writer, coach.]

And I restored something neither my friend nor Joan had seen. This is the essay’s initial foreground thread about Kathy’s recovering from foot surgery. That thread running through the essay really grounds it in the here and now. And it echoes the notion that in life as in stories, the little details and shadings, one way or another, are the big things. For example, the shallow step at our house’s side door and a low tile lip on our shower loom like Everest to someone with only one useable foot. A friend who brought us a casserole dish? Huge.

The real-time segments make the essay kind of amusing, too, because while Kathy was painfully recovering, and I was tending her, I was also going down the internet rabbit hole learning about the rancher who sold my farther a bull in remote southwestern Georgia over half a century ago. With that license, I dragged in Dad’s previous adventure, on the California ranch where I was born. And his pride in the bull he bred and registered there, Atoka Gold, whose quizzical eye now regards me from my atop my walnut dresser.

In the process of relating all this memoir to humans’ inner stew of memory, imagination, and story, I came to a new understanding of my father. This man who’d begun his aviation career in the wake of biplanes had ended up at the Kennedy Space Center. A failed rancher, yes, but also a former aviator who was helping to send humans into space. And, ultimately, to set a man’s foot on the moon.

How fitting Dad’s story arc; how sweet its trajectory.

[Dad bred and registered this bull; the photo was taken about 1954, a year before my birth in Hemet, California.]

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[Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, giving a White House tour.]

Portman & a film’s braided structure give an icon her human due.

God isn’t interested in stories. He’s interested in the truth.—a priest counseling Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie

Since narrative appears to be the human mind’s operating system, I’d quibble with the priest. Naked truth, shorn of narrative, becomes eye-glazing philosophy or an aphorism that’s useful mostly in response to a story. But he’s a wily old coot, played by the great John Hurt in his last role, and bears witness to Jacqueline Kennedy’s private devastation. Though I doubt God was in the bullet that killed Jack Kennedy, the priest partly redeems himself by also declaring, “God is love . . .”

Interested in stories, I watched Jackie twice. Nothing against the delightful La La Land, or Emma Stone’s refreshing performance, but I was disappointed that Natalie Portman didn’t receive best actress honors. This injustice seemed an aspect of the largely salutary balancing of awards the academy undertook. Such as honoring La La Land’s visionary director for his joyous blockbuster while declaring the wonderful artsy film Moonlight as best picture.

Sort of like calling Stephen King “best author” but naming an obscure, challenging small-press title “best book.” Usually the literary set finds a compromise between those poles. Maybe for me, in cinema, that sweet spot this year was the strangely overlooked Jackie. There were too many great movies, or otherwise unlucky timing, or movie-world politics I don’t understand. But Jackie was unrivaled for Portman’s inspired performance and for its complex layering of time frames.

Portman nails Jackie’s breathy finishing-school voice—you imagine it began as an instructed affectation, as an adaption to a wealthier milieu, or as an ambitious adoption that became her. She also conveys Jackie’s sincerity, her flashes of insecurity, her fidelity to duty, and ultimately her pain. After the horror in Dallas, she plans Jack’s funeral, even as she medicates herself with alcohol, comforts her two young children, and oversees the packing of her family’s possessions for their abrupt exodus from the White House.

The movie opens after all that, scant days after the funeral, with Jackie being interviewed. She wants to further her husband’s legacy by cementing his image as a noble leader, as an aristocrat who loved the people, as a demigod. This foreground frame (or recurring braid, if you choose) grounds the narrative. Otherwise a succession of flashbacks, not always linear, the segments reflect Jackie’s PTSD and the nation’s disorientation. The background elements include:

• A televised tour of the White House Jackie gave, about a year into the couple’s residency, that focuses on her historical restoration.

• A concert in the White House that showcases Jackie’s devotion to art and culture. Likewise at times, the inaugural ball.

• Dallas, including the couple’s arrival, the shooting, the fruitless race to a hospital, LBJ’s oath of office on the airplane.

• Jackie’s research into Lincoln’s funeral, which she used as the model for JFK’s.

• Her battles to achieve those trappings we remember, such as the rider-less dark horse, and her vulnerable walking “with Jack,” as she thought of it, while exposed to other possible shooters enacting an unknown plot.

• Her counseling by the priest, in which she reveals her grief, her love for her late husband, and the flaws in their marriage.

Like many a boomer, I carry memories of November 22, 1963, when Kennedy fell in Dallas and Jackie scrambled briefly onto the car’s trunk: to retrieve a piece of his skull, the movie affirms—not to flee, as it appeared to many at the time. Then, as we watched: Oswald’s killing and JFK’s funeral and John-John’s brave salute. But I’d never contemplated Jacqueline Kennedy’s grief, much less her PTSD. She was an odd, glamorous celebrity, a myth seemingly of her own creation. Not like us.

Thus Portman’s sobbing is heart-rending as she portrays Jackie, 34 years old, scrubbing from her beautiful, agonized face her mate’s clotted gore.

[Aboard Air Force One, after the shooting, returning to Washington, D.C.]

An edgy, fractured narrative deepens our understanding.

In the foreground interview, exactly one week after the assassination, Jackie is a grieving and traumatized woman; but, holding it together, she’s also steely, insightful, sardonic, calculating, and angry. Above all, she’s one pro dealing with another—a celebrity widow and the celebrity reporter she summoned. Both are vested in her glossy image, even as the journalist tries to negotiate for some human grit. Jackie won’t have it. “I don’t smoke,” she tells him as she chain-smokes through their meeting.

My beef with the film’s take here is the reporter’s insensitive, even disrespectful, attitude toward Jackie. Not only is this almost unimaginable in human terms, in real life the reporter, Theodore H. White, was the consummate beltway scribe. Friendly toward the Kennedys, he possessed, thanks to JFK and his own talents, a nascent literary franchise. White’s The Making of the President campaign series began with his account of JFK’s narrow victory over Nixon a few years before. This mega-bestseller also won him the Pulitzer prize. He was a respectful supporting player, the journalistic father of today’s fading print insider, Bob Woodward. And Jackie needed White, wanting to establish, as she did, the Camelot mythology for JFK’s short reign of under three years.

In real life, when White phoned-in his concise essay, of about 1,000 words, from the Kennedy’s Hyannis Port house, his editors resisted the Camelot metaphor, feeling it was overdone. White pushed back, at Jackie’s insistence. It remained. His interestingly structured essay is dated by that, the writer’s and Jackie’s sentimental collaboration, but it’s also of historical interest because of that excess. Years later, White wrote in his memoir In Search of History: A Personal Adventure that his editors were right; he was being kind to Jackie, but wished later he’d been less malleable.

I imagine that Jackie’s gifted Chilean director, Pablo Larrain, wanted his screenwriter—a journalist!—to seize the Hollywood cliché of the crass reporter because it provided a splash of vinegar. This gave Portman-as-Jackie something to play off; something to bring out her anger and a soupcon of bitterness at life in the fishbowl. Something to set apart the audience, in its growing sympathy for her, from the staring outside world. This braid has been criticized for, among other things, being unnecessary. But it does tremendous work in grounding the segmented narrative and in giving Jackie, and us, a slight distance from which to reflect.

The Guardian, which named Jackie number five among the top 50 U.S. films of 2016, wrote in its review:

The narrative doesn’t just move back and forth between the tragic day in Dallas, the arranging of the president’s funeral, her time spent accompanying her husband’s coffin to Arlington cemetery, and her earlier time in the White House – it often swirls, whirling the series of events together into a dizzying whole.

But what the fractured narrative does seems more considered and more precise than the Guardian’s summation. I’ve heard Jackie’s structure also called a mosaic, but I think there’s greater relationship among its elements than that term implies. The second time I watched Jackie, I saw how the Dallas flashbacks increase old-fashioned narrative suspense. Early in the movie, we see the first, survivable shot JFK took, to his neck. Certainly from that moment, the film makes an implicit promise to give its audience the next moment. The fatal one. But the filmmakers delay depicting the shot that removed the top of the president’s head. That wound left Jackie’s pink suit covered in blood for that whole day—in life, and for key scenes in the movie.

Finally the film delivers Jack’s death, and Jackie’s full experience of horror, in a way that deepens our compassion for her.

Jackie’s skilled, versatile scribe favors compression.

Jackie didn’t win a single Oscar, and wasn’t even nominated for original screenplay. The winner in that category went to writer-director Kenneth Lonergan for Manchester by the Sea. I’m a fan of Lonergan’s, for Margaret, and Manchester’s a beautiful film. But I found its script, an exploration of grief, a letdown, both manipulative and mundane in the buried secret that haunts its protagonist. Maybe that’s just how it hit me. And, after all, it was critically acclaimed and earned another Oscar for best actor.

[Noah Oppenheim: reporter, author, screenwriter.]

In the Los Angeles Times essay, he traces his Jacqueline Kennedy obsession to his mother:

My mother grew up in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Scranton, Penn. Not a lot of breathing room, let alone storage space for memorabilia. And yet, she saved one box — filled with yellowing newspapers and crumbling magazines, printed in fall 1963.

Over the years, visiting that apartment with my mom, I’d leaf through the fading images of the president’s veiled, heartbroken widow.  I didn’t really understand why my mother had saved them.  But I knew that this moment in history—and this woman—mattered deeply to her. . . .

I couldn’t shake the feeling that, like so many women in history, her story had never really been told. Sure, she’s been portrayed on the page, on television, even in film.  But always as a mannequin, a fashion icon, a beleaguered spouse suffering the indignities of her husband’s infidelities. Never as a fully realized human being. Further, my time covering politicians had taught me one thing—there is almost always a gaping chasm between a person’s public persona and who they really are.  

In an interview with Variety, he said the priest braid was actually a bit of dramatic license, derived from letters that Jackie exchanged with priests during the months and year following the assassination. Not a fan of slogging, cradle-to-grave biopics, he chose to focus on the week between JFK’s death and burial, he said in a YouTube interview, believing he could show Jackie’s many sides better through that cathartic prism.

Early on, the movie’s rhythms are slow, with some braids long, almost stately; about two-thirds through the narrative, the climax of JFK’s death is heralded by a staccato delivery of the story’s elements. These late, rapid cuts go like this:

• interview

• funeral

• priest

• funeral

• priest

• SHOOTING

• priest

• funeral

• priest

• funeral

• SHOOTING

• funeral

• SHOOTING

• funeral

• interview

• White House tour redux

The film’s juxtapositions reflect an unreal situation’s component parts, shards of Jackie’s shattered and shattering experience. But we must care about her to feel her tragedy. The Jackie who emerges in Jackie is a woman preoccupied by and keenly responsive to history and to beauty. These two qualities, at the film’s core depiction of her, we sense as true. Her interest in history surely flows at least partly from her historic position; her concern with beautiful furnishings, clothing, and artistic expression helpfully unites her official role, and her allied sense of occasion, with her own aesthetic taste and desire.

Jacqueline Kennedy was an opaque figure Americans saw but never knew. God may not be interested in stories, as the priest claimed, but Jackie sure as hell was; she fed her intelligence by serious reading, and in her last act became a trade book editor. Jackie gives her something precious, her human due: just another person, albeit exceptional, a private someone who merits compassion. How fitting that she’s at last delivered unto us through the alchemy and empathy of narrative art.

[She wore her bloody suit all day, wanting “them to see what they’ve done,” assuming that hateful right-wing reactionaries killed her husband.]

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