{"id":73602,"date":"2014-07-07T15:54:06","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T19:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73602"},"modified":"2014-07-07T17:03:26","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T21:03:26","slug":"speaking-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/07\/speaking-american\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking American"},"content":{"rendered":"

The varying temperaments of British and American storytelling.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ready_to_portage_around_Lower_Basswood_Falls,_07_1961_(5188003652)\"<\/a>

Lower Basswood Falls, Superior National Forest, July 1961.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1890, a thirty-seven-year-old Scot named James F. Muirhead arrived in America with the intention of carrying out an extensive survey of the republic for the \u201cBaedeker\u2019s Handbook to the United States.\u201d Muirhead spent the next three years traveling to almost every state and territory in the Union, approaching his vast subject matter with none of the condescension often expressed by Victorian Englishmen of the era. In 1898 he published The Land of Contrasts\u2014A Briton\u2019s View of His American Kin<\/em>, which he considered to be a \u201ctribute of admiration and gratitude.\u201d His colorful chapter headings show the range of his interests: \u201cAn Appreciation of the American Woman,\u201d \u201cSports and Amusements,\u201d \u201cAmerican Journalism\u2014A Mixed Blessing,\u201d and \u201cSome Literary Straws.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that last chapter, Muirhead attempts to throw some light upon the \u201crespective literary tastes of the Englishman and the American.\u201d While he notes the grammatical wrongness of the American idiom\u2014at least to his ear\u2014in phrases such as \u201ca long ways off\u201d or \u201cIn a voice neither could scare hear,\u201d he is most interested in \u201cthe tone, the temper, the method, the ideals\u201d of an American writer. He singles out William Dean Howells\u2014who challenged American authors to choose American subjects\u2014as \u201cpurely and exclusively American, in his style as in his subject, in his main themes as in his incidental illustrations, in his spirit, his temperament, his point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what does it mean to have an American point of view? Muirhead keeps trying to put his finger on this elusive quality: \u201cMr. Howells \u2026 possesses a bonhomie<\/em>, a geniality, a good-nature veiled by a slight mask of cynicism, that may be personal, but which strikes one as also a characteristic American trait.\u201d And then: \u201cTo me Mr. Howells, even when in his most realistic and sordid vein, always suggests<\/em> the ideal and the noble.\u201d <\/p>\n

More than a century on, the question of what marks literature as American is even more complicated. I\u2019ve had cause to ponder this question from a very practical perspective, as a British journalist\u2014albeit one who has lived in New York City for the past twenty years. My book\u00a0Falling Through Clouds<\/em> tells a very American story, about a young father from Minnesota who struggles in the wake of a private plane crash that killed his wife, badly injured his two daughters, and forced him into a legal battle with a major insurance company; to me, the very name of that company, Old Republic, conjures up vintage images of Jimmy Stewart\u2013era capitalism.<\/p>\n

Aside from the obvious vocabulary differences\u2014 \u201cwindscreen\u201d to \u201cwindshield,\u201d \u201ctrainers\u201d to \u201csneakers\u201d\u2014I faced a bigger problem when I started reporting the book. My main character, Toby Pearson, narrated his story with such economy, with such a flat affect shorn of sentiment, that at first I wondered if I could ever capture the momentousness of what he\u2019d suffered.<\/p>\n

Consider how Toby related this dramatic scene to me when I asked how Grace, his four-year-old girl, recalled the plane crash: \u201cShe said that she did not remember mommy yelling or crying or anything. She only remembered that they were in the clouds and flying along and then a big jolt and suddenly they were on the ground. Then she undid her and Lily\u2019s seatbelt and moved away from the fire. They did not know where Mommy and Charlie were and were scared.\u201d It seems to me that these run-on sentences capture the inflection and thought process of a child, but this simplicity, this apparent artlessness, was how I first received the story. This is the raw material. Toby told me about going to the store with his youngest daughter, Lily, who\u2019d had to wear a facial mask to help heal the scars from the burns she received in the crash. What was that like? \u201cLots of staring, heads turning, at the stores and anywhere we went. It was pretty tough for me to take since I think I noticed it more. Little kids would point and stare \u2026 Several times adults were very rude and one time in particular a guy said, \u2018Oh my God, what happened to her? Why does she look like that?\u2019 This was in the cereal aisle.\u201d<\/p>\n

I felt the urge, at first, to overwrite Toby\u2019s experience with more superlatives, and heighten the rhetorical style. But this would have been dishonest. The brevity of his expression belied a powerful, emotional subtext. It wasn\u2019t in the words exactly, but beneath them. The simple juxtaposition of the cruel comment with the cereal aisle, to me, already says enough. I realized that for my narrative to be truthful, I had to reflect the way Toby spoke\u2014this wasn\u2019t just a question of style, of changing words. It was tied up with the way Toby saw the world, and the way he survived. It was contained emotion. There was a virtue, a moral force even, in the brevity of his expression. Adjusting to this was almost like learning a new musical language. Maybe this is what Muirhead was getting at when he sensed, in Howells, \u201ca good-nature veiled by a slight mask of cynicism.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was conscious that this language was American, or at least from a certain, central part of this American continent\u2014the Midwest. I read and reread books, admittedly not all from the Midwest, that would help me understand and refine this voice, this way of seeing: Russell Banks\u2019s The Sweet Hereafter<\/em>, William Maxwell\u2019s So Long, See You Tomorrow<\/em>, Joan Didion\u2019s The Year of Magical Thinking<\/em> and Blue Nights<\/em>, Truman Capote\u2019s In Cold Blood<\/em>. But what did they all have in common?<\/p>\n

Thematically, they all deal with a sudden death; they belong mostly to the small bibliography of grief. But something else drew me in, too, something to do with their tragic mode of regard and the way it is presented, often with a spare, sure sense of narrative, reflected in a colloquial voice, free of affectation or even excitement. \u201cThe story is sad, primal, deeply American. The writing is as clear and sharp as grain alcohol,\u201d is how Daniel Menaker describes William Maxwell\u2019s So Long, See You Tomorrow<\/em>, which is set on a farm in rural Illinois. And although the book is fiction based on fact, the stripped-down style was the music I recognized. It seemed to match the way Toby spoke about his story.<\/p>\n

I called Menaker to better understand what he meant by this phrase, and to see if he would elaborate further on the \u201cgrain alcohol\u201d characteristic of American writing. He agreed that the Midwestern aspect seemed to him one of the crucial elements of this voice, which he identified in the work of Samuel Hynes, the Chicago-born writer who served as a Marine Corps pilot during and after World War II and later wrote two memoirs (The Soldiers\u2019 Tale<\/em>, and Flights of Passage<\/em>)\u2014\u201cvery clear and very direct, without being overwrought.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s as if you were looking through a clear sheet of ice at very hot water \u2026 the way to see it clearly is to retain control,\u201d Menaker said. Thus, for example, in So Long, See You Tomorrow<\/em>, Maxwell writes: \u201cBoys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally.\u201d To me, what lowers the temperature of this devastating insight is the \u201cfrom time to time.\u201d Another example with a similarly flat affect, from Maxwell: \u201cMy mother died two days late of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Menaker said this kind of expression is not only lucid, but pellucid<\/em>: \u201csomething just shines right through.\u201d When asked how he achieved this effect, Maxwell likened the reality of what he wanted to express to \u201cpolished stones underneath the streams you can see from the surface. You don\u2019t necessarily have to pick them up, but you can see some hard substance underneath the flowing water of the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

So a clean line of prose laid over a thought or a feeling was the Maxwell way. Is that the American way? Certainly Mark Twain has it; and Alice Munro\u2019s work\u2014although she\u2019s Canadian\u2014is often heartbreaking in its pellucidity.<\/p>\n

Suddenly the geographical precision of my point is sprawling beyond Central Standard Time. But perhaps it doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s the sensibility that counts, the tension that exists between the underlying reality and the cool, simple flow of the phrase. And it can be used for comic effect, too, as in Garrison Keillor\u2019s weekly monologue about Lake Wobegon, \u201cwhere all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average\u201d; and as in the black comedy of the Coen Brothers\u2019 Fargo<\/em>, in which the local police chief, Marge Gunderson, apprehends the homicidal Gaear Grimsrud and scolds him mildly for his kidnapping and killing spree: \u201cSo that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there? And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper? And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little money. There\u2019s more to life than a little money, don\u2019t you know that?\u201d It\u2019s that tonal flatness, and Marge\u2019s placidity in the face of such bloody events, that makes this funny, and very American. I found, during my reporting for Falling Through Clouds<\/em>, a similarly black-comic moment when a reporter insisted on designating Toby Pearson the \u201cSecond Luckiest Person of the Year,\u201d because his children, while badly injured, had survived a plane crash. First place went to a group of cooks who\u2019d won the lottery.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

An English writer\u2019s relation to the geography of Britain feels familiar. It\u2019s not exotic or particularly dangerous, unless you\u2019re talking Heathcliff and the North Yorkshire Moors; there\u2019s always the reassurance of a church, or a pub, or a field of daffodils just around the bend. But the vastness of the American landscape opens up possibilities, thrilling and threatening, for a writer. At the beginning of In Cold Blood<\/em>, when Capote sets the scene for the murders in Holcomb, the land becomes mythical, overwhelming, fearsome: \u201cBut then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises\u2014on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles.\u201d There\u2019s a grandeur to the landscape that can\u2019t be matched in Britain, a reminder of our contingent status in the larger scheme of things. (In England, we have the graveyard to remind us of this.) American writing often gives us a macro view of the land, the geospatial sense of endlessness. In A Thousand Acres<\/em>, Jane Smiley spends considerable time describing the location of the Iowa farm where the action is to take place: \u201cAt sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on Country Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road \u2026 Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant, at the southern edge of the farm.\u201d Smiley is as precise as Google Maps\u2014and we see that the landscape is going to surround this story.<\/p>\n

When I came to write about Northern Minnesota, I travelled up the North Shore, by Lake Superior, and saw the vast iron-ore ships waiting to enter the harbor at Duluth. I was never more aware of American mythology when I drove up Old Highway 61\u2014the road that runs from Bob Dylan\u2019s home state to the Mississippi Delta\u2014to the edge of the Superior National Forest, outside of Grand Marais. It was here that Toby Pearson and I kicked through the leaves to locate the crash site where the small plane went down, where his wife and brother-in-law died, and where his two girls were found alive. The forest is so vast\u2014three million acres\u2014that to be inside of it defies one\u2019s ability to comprehend it. The pilot who spotted the wreckage of the aircraft from the air, against all the odds, told me he had no doubt that \u201cgoing down in Superior National\u2019s ocean of trees was just as bad as disappearing in the middle of the Atlantic.\u201d<\/p>\n

To me, it\u2019s also this sense of scale that marks a book as American. I asked the British writer Piers Torday for his take on some of these differences. Torday\u2019s inventive children\u2019s adventure The Last Wild<\/em> was recently published in the U.S.\u2014this eco-thriller, as it\u2019s been called, features a forest\u2014\u201cthe ring of trees\u201d\u2014 where the hero encounters animals that have survived a deadly disease. And yet, somehow this wild wood doesn\u2019t feel like an American wild wood. Why is that? Torday suggests it has much to do with his childhood reading experiences\u2014everything from Kenneth Graham to C. S. Lewis to Roald Dahl. \u201cThere\u2019s a set of stylistic tropes in our children\u2019s literature that feel instinctively British to me. The belief that there\u2019s almost no misery or ailment on earth that can\u2019t be remedied by a hot cup of tea\u2014or supper set on a tray, buttered toast warmed by the fire, curtains drawn tight and small wooden doors firmly shut against the world\u2014whether in Bag End or a beaver\u2019s dam. A yearning for idealized Edwardian domesticity is still very powerful today, that suggests high adventure on a manageable domestic scale is a recurring characteristic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cManageable domestic scale\u201d seems to be the key difference here. Our woods often have people, or talking animals, living in them. I understand what Torday means, since I also grew up with these same books, in those same woods. But there\u2019s another fundamental difference: the American predisposition to look forward to the future rather than back to the past. \u201cI think British writing hovers in constant insecurity over its relation to the modern globalized world. This is part of its appeal and charm to the anxious\u2014not least young children,\u201d Torday said. \u201cBut perhaps we are too ready to draw on the balms of the past rather then seriously address the dilemmas of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent essay in The New Yorker<\/em>, Adam Gopnik observed that \u201clucid writing is the sign of a moral state.\u201d Hard truths, he argues, need to be spoken plainly. This makes sense. Humbert Humbert\u2019s famous line in Lolita<\/em> springs to mind: \u201cYou can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.\u201d Obfuscation is suspect. Strunk and White\u2019s famous instruction to \u201comit needless words\u201d isn\u2019t just a journalistic mantra; it\u2019s almost a moral code. I had this in the back of my mind when I wrote my story of the Midwest. I was writing in a different kind of English. It was morally incumbent on me to get it right.<\/p>\n

Damian Fowler is the author of <\/em>Falling Through Clouds: A Story of Survival, Love, and Liability<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The varying temperaments of British and American storytelling. In 1890, a thirty-seven-year-old Scot named James F. Muirhead arrived in America with the intention of carrying out an extensive survey of the republic for the \u201cBaedeker\u2019s Handbook to the United States.\u201d Muirhead spent the next three years traveling to almost every state and territory in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":720,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[142,4846,14522,869,1362,14521,139,13630,8015,2705,14523,75],"class_list":["post-73602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language","tag-america","tag-britain","tag-dan-menaker","tag-english","tag-joan-didion","tag-landscapes","tag-national-identity","tag-reporting","tag-strunk-and-white","tag-truman-capote","tag-vastness","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSpeaking American<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Damian Fowler on the varying temperaments of British and American storytelling.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/07\/speaking-american\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Speaking American by Damian Fowler\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 7, 2014 \u2013 The varying temperaments of British and American storytelling. 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