Francine Prose
The upstairs room of the Catskill Mountain Foundation Red Barn was filled last month with reading enthusiasts, eager to be in the presence of one whose knowledge and command of the written word is at least awesome, if not absolute. It felt just a little like church as Francine Prose opened her latest book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them and proceeded to elucidate its two commandments: 1. Thou Shalt Read and 2. Do It Slowly. She led her congregation through chapter and verse—beginning with words, sentences, paragraphs, the importance of a close examination of each in the works of various writers, punctuated with examples from great novels by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov and many more—so that by the time the ubiquitous plate would have been passed, had we actually been sitting in church, we were all converted.
The next morning I drove the wet back roads of the lower Catskill Mountains to her home outside Krumville, a comfy farmhouse surrounded by woods and decorated inside with scores of masks—hung to ward off the evil spirits of writer’s block, perhaps? A well-banked fire radiated welcome heat, and we settled into a room full of books and intriguing iconic artifacts, collected over the past three decades and lovingly arranged like treasured, inanimate friends.
Fumbling over my notes just a little—I was, after all, sitting with the master—I asked Prose if there was anything that she especially wanted to say about herself and her work. She talked about spending the holidays in Mexico with her family, about living here, about getting ready to order seeds for the garden, thinking that maybe she should, or could, move to Rhinebeck since she teaches at Bard and the train station is right there, but that the thought of packing up “all this stuff” is prohibitive. She misses the chickens they used to keep—“There’s nothing like a warm, fresh egg!”—but not the coyotes attracted to the yard because of them. (The chickens were ultimately done in by a neighborhood dog.) In stark contrast to her life in the city and the various college campuses she’s moved her family to over the years, this territory, we agree, is a haven of tranquility.
Easing from this homey, female sort of chat into a more academic conversation about her work and her underlying mission to educate, I wondered aloud if she considers herself a feminist. “Of course! You can probably archive this piece I did for Harper’s [in 1998] called ‘Scent of a Woman’s Ink,’ about the fact that women writers are still not getting…that the playing field is still not even. Then Harper’s assigned one of their interns to research things like grants, awards, number of reviews in major publications, etc. And the inequity was much worse than I’d imagined. [The article] was a huge bombshell because you weren’t supposed to say this.” She doesn’t think of herself as a “woman writer,” rather simply a writer. Still, it’s a mystery to her that the label “feminist” has an unsavory, pejorative connotation, undoubtedly based on the more absurd, knee-jerk feminism that, for example, criticizes Tolstoy for writing definitively about a female character. (Like, who did he think he was?)
Of course, male authors are capable of writing female characters with empathy and some measure of authority, and vice versa. And Prose was certainly not suggesting in the Harper’s article that there be a quota system to assure women 51% of the recognition awarded to writers. From a rigid feminist perspective, her own female characters may sometimes represent less than self-actualized, pro-active, powerful, in charge women—because we do exist, and in numbers greater than we women would like to think. Prose defers to Chekhov’s declaration that a writer’s responsibility is to describe the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. She reports feeling extremely close to subservient, accommodating characters, like Bonnie Kalen in her last novel A Changed Man, because she can so readily relate to those inadequacies in Bonnie that she experienced herself. “I like to say that everything I know about neurotic motherhood, which is plenty, I put straight into Bonnie.”
Prose is eager to talk more about the tenets of her latest book and its messianic admonition to “Read! Read!” Arranged categorically in this tome, the elements that comprise a work of fiction are examined for their integral values, and the techniques used by various authors to shape these elements into a story line are indicated with ample quotations from their works. We are gradually shown how just the right word, the perfectly spare sentence—or perfectly complex one, as found in the works of Woolf or Stanley Elkin—pulls a reader’s attention solidly into the realm of the story. We’re allowed to share in the writer’s agony over paragraphs and points of view, her ecstasy in descriptive details, or the exasperation over rules that don’t hold and Chekhov’s admission that “…nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything.”
Thinking we already know and understand everything there is to be known might be symptomatic of a modern condition that could be called “Over-Stimulation/Desensitization Syndrome.” We can’t possibly know and understand the finer aspects of literature or art, given the cram-it-in methods we’ve adopted for attaining such knowledge. At one point during a brief question and answer period, a CMF audience member bemoaned the lack of a truly liberal arts education for our young people and the resulting dullness of our growing population. The whole group seemed to concur. It is a condition with social implications we are beginning to feel in our collective guts.
Like the “Slow Food Movement,” aimed at countering our tendency to gobble down mass-produced, unhealthy meals, Prose’s intention is to have us slow down our reading habits, to taste each word, every sentence of a well-written story. She would have us sample broadly from a menu that includes old classics and new works, sharpening our senses and our ability to decipher and discern. She recommends a satiation in literature that sticks to one’s ribs and feeds one’s soul. Our mental health, as individuals and as social beings, may very well depend on it.
The suggested bibliography at the end of Reading Like a Writer is rather humbling to anyone who considers herself already well-read. Culled from all the examples she uses throughout the book, she calls it a strange selection, generated backwards. “If I’d sat down to write a list of 117 of my favorite books, it might have been a very different list. It just so happened that each one of those books was useful for providing an example of something I wanted to talk about in the book… On the other hand, I don’t think there would be any harm in actually reading all those books.”
For writers, the instruction is to read great works in order to learn how to write well. Practicalities like grammar, punctuation, and how to line edit one’s own work can be taught effectively enough. Nurturing the creative impulse to write and honing the craft to the level of artistry, however, requires a lifelong commitment to reading. In her first chapter, Prose says, “I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue…. What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.”
To date, Prose has to her credit fourteen works of fiction, five works of non-fiction and half a dozen stories for young people. She is currently engulfed in the writing of a new novel. As to the challenges of writing in opposite genres, Prose says she doesn’t necessarily have to focus on one genre to the complete omission of the other in order to do each successfully. It’s possible, and sometimes preferable, to have both in progress at once. She describes the more linear requirements of researching and putting down something factual as being a kind of relief whenever she finds herself in the very un-linear fog of a novel.
“I can’t write fiction for more than three or four hours a day…. It’s exhausting. Non-fiction is a very different kind of writing. You don’t have sudden revelations about some huge thing you’ve left out [as you do writing fiction], because you already have all this information. Whereas, writing a novel—and I’ve been working on this one forever—and just two days ago I realized something about the characters, something they didn’t have, and I realized I have to go back and do the whole thing over. Which is fine with me, it just takes more time.”
She maintains this revelatory breakthrough doesn’t usually happen writing non-fiction. You just write the book with the information you’ve got. “It’s a lot easier somehow. The surprises of fiction—even though you know it’s going to mean another huge investment of time and you’re that much further away from finishing—they’re fun, too. They’re like windows opening up.” Meanwhile, creating the environment in which such revelations of imagination can emerge requires more. “Non-fiction is something you can do whenever you want to, if you’re not too exhausted. With fiction, you have to have quiet and peace and long periods of time and space and lack of interruption and concentration.” In terms of the quality of attention needed to produce an end product, Prose considers non-fiction to be much more “elastic.”
The promotion of Reading Like a Writer has been especially good for Prose. She contrasts events like the one at CMF against a book tour undertaken to market a novel. “It’s harder with novels. Book tours can be very draining and heartbreaking, really. This book has been different; it’s been kind of great…everywhere there are passionate readers who want to talk about books and reading. It’s been very encouraging for me, almost always energizing.” As an indication that reading is still a vital pleasure for many people (despite what contemporary publishing industry types might lament), the response Prose has received for her efforts is gratifying.
With the current popularity of memoirs—it seems as if everyone has a past they think is worth excavating, and that readers have an insatiable, voyeur-like desire to know about other’s lives—I asked if she has considered writing one. Other than including personal anecdotes of her dual mothering and teaching careers in various articles she’s written over the years—how to get your kids to eat vegetables, how not to teach writing to MFA students, that sort of thing—she admits having no desire whatsoever to chronicle her life. “I’d rather make things up or find out things.”
Prose divulges her passion for the more academic discovery that takes place when writing non-fiction. Currently finishing a piece for Harper’s about art in Germany during the Weimar Republic (in conjunction with an exhibit titled Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: see www.metmuseum.org), she’s exposed herself to the material thoroughly by viewing the paintings themselves, and by attempting to understand historical events and the cultural context that produced them. The learning process that goes into research engages her—and in contrast, writing about her own childhood would seem “useless.” She enjoys reading a good memoir, though. Mentioning Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, wherein the author recounts the deaths of six relatives in Nazi-occupied Poland, she says, “I kept bursting into tears.” Such is the effect of a good book.
In the last chapter of Reading Like a Writer, Prose quotes Isaac Bashevis Singer as having once said, “If Tolstoy lived across the street, I wouldn’t go meet him.” The inference is that the work itself is what matters, and we needn’t “take tea” with the writer in order to understand and appreciate the words on the page. As for me, and probably for all the others at the CMF Readers & Writers Series event, meeting an accomplished writer and sharing in her wealth of insight—about books, reading and writing—are invaluable experiences.
Baptized by the cold drizzle coming down from the January clouds instead of snow and inspired to immerse myself in this new booklist, I drove away from Prose’s home that Sunday morning, rededicated to whatever deity it is that graces us with the written word and the intellectual capacity to enjoy it fully. Hallelujah.