the pathological causes of the physical and moral personality

The saguaro in the distance are stiff as salt shakers, the rabbits hunch over the spring weeds in the evenings with their mouths down and the whole head shaped in silhouette upwards into the listening ears; the mesquite trees sing with unseen bees. A pair of young ground squirrels came over the wire fence into the back garden and the dogs proudly worried them to death. After two hundred pages of Jean-Yves Tadié's Marcel Proust: a Life as translated by Euan Cameron, I looked at my notebook and realised that the only excerpt I had written down was this:

In the army the proportion of Jewish doctors was average. One notable doctor was Michael Lévey, a GP and author of a well-considered Traité d'hygiène. This dealt with personal hygiene (the pathological causes of the physical and moral personality) -- he even covers the subject of "nostalgia" (among the French expeditionary force in Greece, in 1831), which, "once diagnosed, can only be cured by repatriation"

I was melancholy, thinking of home, and then I read Guy Davenport's essay on Montaigne's travel diaries, the man from Bordeaux journeying through Europe and having inquisitive discussions with strangers, for he was curious and intelligent and would "talk with people in every level of society, from children to cardinals," proving that he was "a wide-awake traveller," which made me anxious, oh no, I thought, "I don't question people, look at me, I have been in Arizona all this time and I do not question the Americans enough, I am not Montaigne," which made me yet more melancholy, and then I wondered what I could do to be more questioning and curious and similar to the dead Frenchman in his arctic ruff, the obvious answer right now being, "Go to a part of America where there are more people to talk to," as the desert south of Phoenix is not exactly the Greffulhe salon or Flinders Street Station or even our old local St Vinnies, where a man once turned to me in the corner and said, "Have you read this? It's fantastic," and the book he was holding was the Da Vinci Code.

Conversation here often seems to revolve around other people's damaged knees, or the medicine they're taking, and when they last saw the doctor, all subjects that might have interested Montaigne, who was suffering from kidney stones. "Montaigne's constant scrutiny of his urine in a chamber pot, his colics and dizzy spells, his ability to drink heroic amounts of hot sulfurous water, locate his journal in a time when the body was still part of personality." The body is part of the personality out here in Arizona Desert Location X where we are staying, or at least part of the public persona, for nobody here is anybody without a wrecked joint or a headache. Even one of the dogs suffers from a crippled leg and goes around with one front foot dapperly turned sideways. Montaigne would have had endless things to talk about. All I ever seem to manage is an occasional splinter which is not even in the same league as these failing knees and kidneys, and besides, the number of tetanus shots I had before coming here will keep me protected from the consequences of splinters more or less forever. I am a massive gurgling tank of anti-tetanus medicine. No splinter can do me harm unless it enters my bloodstream, whirls through the waterslide of my innards and penetrates the wall of my heart. I have a vague memory that when I was very little someone told me about a man who had died like that, but then they also used to tell me not to go barefoot or else I would get bilharzia, which, in suburban Melbourne, was actually impossible.* My Nanna's sister died of a mosquito bite.

Proust, who was sick for most of his life, liked to ask questions. Tadié writes: "As we have seen, Proust never stopped asking questions and investigating, either because he lacked experience of the world (though he would behave similarly where inversion was concerned) or because he wished to substantiate certain things: hence the importance of his relationships, entirely literary ones, with these glittering society ladies; he blended their stories or or character sketches with those he obtained through his reading: everything was put to use." Then again he also quotes Proust's friend Anna de Noailles: "Let there be no mistake: Marcel Proust was not asking questions, he did not obtain information through contact with his friends. It was he himself who, in his meditative silence, was posing questions to himself, which he later answered in his conversation, in his actions, in his books." But Tadié sees him on a yacht and presents evidence for his side: "Proust used to like chattering to the crew, whom he persuaded to talk about their lives."

Proust was anxious for other reasons, afraid that he would end up like Eliot's Casaubon, labouring for years on projects that would turn out to be useless just when it was too late for him to correct them. Do we ever really find out how stupid we are? Casaubon was ignorant of the German thinkers who had surpassed him, and when Will came along with news of the surpassing Germans he refused to listen, avoiding a relevance paradox but perishing in misery of a heart attack or was it a stroke? See where jealousy gets us. Proust was jealous in love but not intellectually close-minded in the Casaubon way. He wrote against Symbolism (in an article, Contre l'obscurité) but he knew what it was (although the Symbolist Mallarmé disagreed, responding, "I prefer, in the face of attack, to retort that some of our contemporaries do not know how to read").

Dickens was a primitive thinker, suggests Wuthering Expectations, comparing Hard Times to Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, but he was creative -- a different kind of intelligence -- and (this is my addition) he had recreational activities of terrifying vigour. "Most of the major Victorians are exhausting to contemplate, Dickens even more so," wrote Bill Tipper as he reviewed Michael Slater's Charles Dickens. "In his later career, after finishing a major work, he would unwind by hauling Wilkie Collins or another friend along as he hurled himself up a mountain." He went for miles of walks by day and by night, something which at this moment I would willingly do as well, but we tried that the other week and behold, another rattlesnake, shaking its maracas and winding itself up into an S like a grey tie dropped on the floor, ready to fling out and fix itself into our legs.

Our dry countryside is full of rattlesnakes and no walkers but the English countryside is full of walkers and no rattlesnakes. Jane Austen's people put on their boots and set off, "a walk to Meryton was necessary to amuse their morning hours and furnish conversation for the evening," the Famous Five were always going on rambles, and Dorothy Wordsworth went out with her brother Wm, striding across the hills and and talking to "an old man, almost double, he had on a coat thrown over his shoulders above his waistcoat and coat."

His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce and he had not the strength for it. He lived by begging and was making his way to Carlisle where he should buy a few godly books to sell. He said leeches were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they have been scarce -- he supposed it owing to their being much sought after, that they did not breed fast, and were of slow growth. Leeches were formerly 2/6 [per] 100; they are now 30/.

-- which makes me think, all of a sudden, of Mark Tredennick in his Blue Plateau, learning about the Blue Mountains west of Sydney from some local farmers, and recording their conversation in a dialect so strange and antique that I had the feeling he'd transcribed it all out of Barbara Baynton, or that the characters from Baynton's stories had come forward into the real world to guide him around the countryside there, taking him out on their horses and drinking billy tea, and that perhaps they would conduct him down a cavern in the earth and there they would go through the different circles, until, finally emerging, they would travel up a slope he had never seen before, and encounter Beatrice accompanied by green dancing wallabies in a chariot drawn by a six-foot echidna. A mysterious figure with two heads taps him on the shoulder and says, Hello, I'm Ern Malley. Dialogue from life must be transformed by the author, not merely transcribed, says Tadié somewhere in this biography. I remember reading the page, but can I find it again? I can't.

INTERVIEWER
Is anyone writing your biography?

GUY DAVENPORT
I have no life.


-- from an interview in the Paris Review.

* Or anywhere in Australia. The person who was giving me this warning had once been shown a terrifying educational film, but the film was filmed in Africa.

a dispenser of bric-a-brac

In a post a little while ago at ANZLitLovers a rule was quoted, "Omit needless words" and another one "Murder your darlings" -- "Puritanical" said the writer who was discussing those rules, "As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits," which are my feelings too, "but," I thought, "what are needless words? What is a needless word?" Some people say that suddenly is a needless word, and others advise against really and very, or anything else that makes a writer seem undecided, but David Foster Wallace used really and very and all kinds of vagueness, and he -- see -- like this:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really me. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him, or something like that.

Wyatt Mason, quoting that excerpt, goes on:

The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking (“unbelievably”; “really” used three times in the space of a dozen words; “something like that”) coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood (“as though the driver were”). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly employed in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose—

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

—the edit removes more than “flab”: it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation. Wallace was seeking to write prose that had all the features of common speech.

Not only Wallace, but George Eliot and hundreds of others -- all speaking -- here's Felix Holt, the Radical:

It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined tastes!

Omitting needless words:

Facts rarely hit the medium required by our opinions and tastes.

Which "discards the furniture of real speech," and so Eliot's style is hamstrung. What is that style? She goes along talkingly and slips you sharp ideas along the way: she has a sage chat. Elsewhere in Felix she gives us a sentence about Mrs Transome's embroidery. The sentence starts with the kind of dimity that would get itself described as use of needless words: "A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs Transome's life" -- and then, without altering the essential furniture, she cools into something like anger, the whole temperature of the sentence grows colder and brighter, or else (depending on your inner reading-voice) sours -- "that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor anyone else wanted, was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman." And ah, we've gone from platitudes about this embroidery to what it really means for Mrs Transome: she is wasting her life, she is trapped. 'Soothing' enters like a transit station between the chirpy mood of the beginning and the more sarcastic and melancholy mood of the end. The needless words are needed, they're part of the journey from platitude to point.

Compare the feints and hesitations of a good actor. If the actor recited their lines from beginning to end without pause, without inflection, would we understand what the lines meant? Yes, but they would become unfelt and unthought, in other words, inhuman. The actor would not be an actor, and a writer who does not act is not a writer: writers act, it is one of their jobs. And they are the script too, and all of the scenery. 'Needless words' in Wallace and Eliot aren't the meaning: they indicate the thought behind the meaning. Humanity is the aim, not words or needless words.

Christina Stead, lover of folk tales and Arabian Nights and other richness, of course she can be trimmed --

The distribution began. Sam made himself a dispenser of bric-a-brac, with a pin pot here, a matchbox there, a napkin ring beside, and a snuffbox neighbouring, and again a pin pot, according to the choice of men and women.

into

The distribution began. Sam dispensed the bric-a-brac, with a pin pot, a matchbox, a napkin ring, and a snuffbox, and again a pin pot, according to the choice of men and women.

And there, the voice that bounced along in singsong time has been hobbled. Well done you. And as a reader I conclude, that there are no needless words, or: no category of needless words, no box containing very and really and other things that can be eliminated from sentences as if elimination were a magic potion swallowed or a juju worn with fidelity to make problems go away. It seems to me that the only answer for a writer is to find out what they should write like, and write like it, and then they will be able to use 'very' as much as they like; no one will care. Which is difficult, or I assume that it is, and it would be much easier if you could identify needless words in the way you register the presence of rats or possums in the ceiling and then have them exterminated, but it's not that simple, or it doesn't seem to be.

Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me, that, with every precaution you take against such an evil, you put yourself into the power of the evil.

says Emerson. The "trick" to writing, says Mark Tredennick, is

to heighten it with an art that’s true to one’s own nature; that makes your writing sound like itself, like someone speaking ...

In an essay I read recently in Spectrum, David Malouf reflected on the intimacy that grows in good books between a writer and a reader. He said something that a writer like me takes great comfort from; for I am a writer who gets bored fast with narrative—especially my own. There are readers like me, I’ve come to realise; David Malouf thinks they are the truest readers. What a reader really means, if I may paraphrase Malouf, when she says she couldn’t put the book down, is not, or not just, that she couldn’t wait to find out what happens next; what she means is that she couldn’t bear to break the spell of the writer’s telling—of the book’s voice. Great writing, even good functional writing, compels us more by how it speaks than by what it says. The real narrative of the best books may be how the reader is changed and moved by the music, by the enchantment of the voice of the work.

I don't have that Spectrum essay, but here's Malouf saying a similar thing on ABC radio:

Well I've come to the conclusion that in the end what people are actually interested in, in writing, is the actual writing. They may not necessarily say that to themselves but when they choose one writer rather than another, it's the particular music of that writer that they're responding to, the particular tone of that writing, the particular density with which detail occurs in that writing, the span of sensory stuff in that writing.

When is a word unneeded? When it's being used poorly. When is it being used poorly? When it doesn't contribute to meaning or to the illusion of thought. All this advice boils down to is: write well. Which is marvellously unhelpful.