How to write in a book

One of the unsung side benefits of researching a nonfiction book is the stuff you learn that never makes it into the finished product. Reading one of C.S. Lewis' letters inspired me to revamp my note-taking, specifically the way I mark up books. I know some people regard writing in books as a sacrilege, but it's unavoidable in my profession. Much of the time the books are advance reader's copies (ARCs), unproofed printings for the convenience of journalists and booksellers and not "real" books to begin with, if that's any consolation.

Most critics are moderately obsessed with methods for taking notes on their reading. At minimum, you need a way to flag important points and the passages you may want to quote, as well as to jot down any thoughts of your own.

My former colleague Dwight Garner (now one of the New York Times' daily reviewers) showed me the method I used for years. Hesitant to deface the book itself, he'd flag passages with a tiny dot in the margin. You wouldn't notice these dots unless you were actually reading the book, as opposed to leafing through it, but you can find them when you're looking for them. He'd write down his own notes (and sometimes quote passages) with page citations on a steno pad that he kept with the book. Steno pads are about the same size as a hardcover book, which makes them easier to tote around with it than a letter- or legal-sized pad.

I used this method for years, and as a result had a huge stack of scribbled-up steno pads. Not sure why I saved them, beyond my reluctance to toss the result of so much work, and the fact that they did contain a lot of information. Eventually, I threw them out because they weren't at all useful. It was impossible to find the notes for any particular book among all the pads, and even then they were hard to decipher after an interval of even a month or two.

I adapted my new method after reading Lewis' description in a 1932 letter of how he "indexed" a book, in this case, a work of French history:

To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end-leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder -- considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books -- why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

It's so typical of Lewis not to recognize that for most people photographs and scrapbooks -- mementos of their own lived experience -- are categorically different from books they'd read! For him, reading a book was at least as vivid an experience as a seaside holiday or birthday party.

I've adapted this method extensively. I underline passages, then in the margins I flag them with symbols indicating which category they fall into: major points, likely quotations, useful facts (dates, ages, places, etc.), and anecdotes (any colorful fact or detail that can be dropped in to make the review more lively). Other readers -- such as students -- who have other needs might, of course, want to use different categories. Along the top of the page, as a sort of "running head," I will sum up in a sentence or two what that page has to say. (In a biography, for example the running head "Tormented at boarding school" would top a page describing what the poor guy suffered in that environment.) If there's no room for my own thoughts at the top of the page, I jot them down on the endpaper.

This method has several advantages. First, it keeps my notes and the book itself together. Second, it's much easier to skim the book as a refresher or when looking for specific facts or passages later, while I'm writing. (This is even easier if I use color-coded highlighters, though I'm usually not that thorough). Third, the notes amount to an improvised outline of the book. If I'm feeling ambitious and/or want to preserve a kind of digital index of the book for possible future use, I can transcribe them to a text file on my computer, which can be added to a searchable collection of documents. Direct quotes can also be added to my personal file of interesting/inspiring quotations.

True, the book is ruined for other readers after this, but if I intend to keep it, in some ways it's even more useful to me. I can almost instantly find passages that I dimly recall reading years earlier. Doing this sometimes makes me feel selfish and profligate, because I do wind up discarding most of the books I review. (I live in a small apartment.) I try to remind myself that there's a long history of writers' marginalia and no one loved books more than C.S. Lewis did. If he could reconcile his conscience to it, so can I.

Great Literary Dogs: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

I'm not sure why exactly I decided to pick up this 1889 book a few months ago (probably it was the recommendation of Polly Shulman), but having finally gotten around to reading it, I'm so glad I did. It's ridiculously funny. Originally commissioned as a travel book for people who liked to take boating trips on the Thames, it morphed into an account of the holiday taken by three young hypochondriacs with the goal of alleviating their imaginary ailments.

A little of the humor has dated (about how turn-of-the-century people posed for photographs, for example), but most of it has aged remarkably well. It's pretty classic stuff -- misadventures in putting up a tent, getting lost in a hedge maze, lying fisherman -- but perfectly executed. (I don't like fisherman jokes, but the one about the guy who resolved to exaggerate his catch by 25 percent but then ran into trouble because he never caught more than three fish was pretty good.) Some of the best parts are about Montmorency, the dog brought along on the trip, a fox terrier, who like most terriers regards the water with deep misgivings. The subtitle of Three Men in a Boat was used by Connie Willis as the title for her 1997 novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Montmorency is what can only be called a Bad Dog, but fairly typical of the terriers I have known:

To hang about a stable, and collect a gang of the most disreputable dogs to be found in the town, and lead them out to march round the slums to fight other disreputable dogs, is Montmorency's idea of "life;" and so, as I before observed, he gave to the suggestion of inns, and pubs., and hotels his most emphatic approbation.

...

Montmorency's ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at. If he can squirm in anywhere where he particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not been wasted.

To get somebody to stumble over him, and curse him steadily for an hour, is his highest aim and object; and, when he has succeeded in accomplishing this, his conceit becomes quite unbearable.

He came and sat down on things, just when they were wanted to be packed; and he laboured under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted. He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying-pan.

Harris said I encouraged him. I didn't encourage him. A dog like that don't want any encouragement. It's the natural, original sin that is born in him that makes him do things like that.

...

We went downstairs to breakfast. Montmorency had invited two other dogs to come and see him off, and they were whiling away the time by fighting on the doorstep. We calmed them with an umbrella, and sat down to chops and cold beef.

...

Throughout the trip, he had manifested great curiosity concerning the kettle. He would sit and watch it, as it boiled, with a puzzled expression, and would try and rouse it every now and then by growling at it. When it began to splutter and steam, he regarded it as a challenge, and would want to fight it, only, at that precise moment, some one would always dash up and bear off his prey before he could get at it.

To-day he determined he would be beforehand. At the first sound the kettle made, he rose, growling, and advanced towards it in a threatening attitude. It was only a little kettle, but it was full of pluck, and it up and spit at him.

"Ah! would ye!" growled Montmorency, showing his teeth; "I'll teach ye to cheek a hard-working, respectable dog; ye miserable, long-nosed, dirty-looking scoundrel, ye. Come on!"

And he rushed at that poor little kettle, and seized it by the spout.

Then, across the evening stillness, broke a blood-curdling yelp, and Montmorency left the boat, and did a constitutional three times round the island at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, stopping every now and then to bury his nose in a bit of cool mud.

From that day Montmorency regarded the kettle with a mixture of awe, suspicion, and hate. Whenever he saw it he would growl and back at a rapid rate, with his tail shut down, and the moment it was put upon the stove he would promptly climb out of the boat, and sit on the bank, till the whole tea business was over.

Cinematic fiction and "Rebecca"

Although Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End is mostly a book about aging, it includes some interesting remarks about fiction. (Athill was a literary editor in England for many years.) One thing she wrote intrigued me:

Even the run-of-the-mill novel of today is much more sophisticated and interesting than that of my early youth, not to mention those popular just before the First World War.

Athill has a lot of these books, originally bought by her parents, lying around the family house she inherited in Norfolk. They were the bestsellers and critical successes of their day, and so Athill is well-positioned to refute the reflexive opinion that today's fiction is always worse than the past's. She finds that the best of these novels "seem ponderous and verbose, over-given to description" and then observes, "what a lot about cutting from here to there we have learned from the cinema!"

From the extracts Athill quotes, I'm sure she's mostly right, but recently, while reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), I came to a section describing a long, hot drive from Manderley (in Cornwall, more or less) to a village outside London. The four characters making the trip take two cars; one of them wants to implicate another in the death of the title character, and they are all traveling to interview a doctor who treated her and may be able to shed light on the situation.

This trip goes on for a few pages and isn't at all eventful, but it's a part of the book I remember vividly:

People were walking about in cotton frocks and the men were hatless. There was a smell of waste-paper, and orange-peel and feet, and burnt dried grass. Buses lumbered slowly, and taxis crawled. I felt as though my coat and skirt were sticking to me, and my stockings pricked my skin.

And so on. They have to stop for meals and coordinate the two cars. They spend a half a page fruitlessly asking people on the street to point them to the doctor's house. Etc.

Rebecca is a suspense novel, and its cinematic equivalent would eliminate all this tedious getting from one place to another. Consequently, someone writing a novel like Rebecca today, aiming for the higher end of the psychological suspense genre, would also leave it out. Yet it's so effective in du Maurier's hands. The narrator believes that the doctor will tell them something that will ruin her life, so the drawn-out banality of the journey is a kind of torture for her. Du Maurier makes the reader feel that peculiar mixture we've all experienced of wanting to get it over with and wanting to never arrive to hear the bad news. It's a little like what I imagine waiting on the verdict in a criminal trial must be like. A film could never quite pull this off without either coming across as pretentiously experimental or forcing itself out of the suspense genre entirely.

The drive through London makes the novel richer and moodier, and while Hitchcock's film version of Rebecca has its own distinctive atmosphere, it's a different quality. The novel feels more like a lived experience (however outlandish a lot of it is) than a dramatic spectacle, because that's something fiction is better able to do than film.

Sister Carrie

I’ve just finished reading Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a novel I’ve been curious about since reading his An American Tragedy over 10 years ago. I’d somehow acquired the idea that Sister Carrie was the story of a climbing femme fatale, sort of like Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair, but this isn’t the case. Carrie is not a schemer, but a small town girl who comes to Chicago, is dazzled into longing by sumptuous department stores and the glittering crowds in carriages and theater lobbies and whose inchoate yearning for something more or something better leads her to become the mistress of first a salesman, then a married affluent restaurant manager.

The manager, Hurstwood, has his own yearnings, and winds up leaving his family and embezzling money in order to leave town with Carrie. They go to New York, do all right for a while, but then he loses his stake in a bar downtown and gradually slips into depression, unemployment and penury. Long before he hits bottom, Carrie leaves him and begins a stage career, where she finds success and independence.

The last parts of the novel had an effect on me similar to that of An American Tragedy; I can still remember where I was sitting and how the light looked on the afternoon I finished reading about Clyde Griffith’s final weeks on death row. When I had to pause, I’d return to the novel with a kind of reluctant compulsion. The sensation of dread and doom tinted everything else I did at the time, and I sometimes contemplating stopping because it felt almost unbearable. Sister Carrie, with that long, painful depiction of a man sinking into poverty and hopelessness, with the final scenes outside of a Bowery flophouse, is a particularly hard book to read now, knowing that so many people who have been laid off are facing similar, if hopefully not so severe, trials.

Dreiser has a reputation for being an awkward writer, prone to moralizing authorial commentary and graced with no felicities of craft. He’s the quintessential poor stylist/great novelist, although some today might argue that such a thing is an oxymoron. A beautiful style and technical perfection are more and more regarded as the sine qua non of the great novel. I don’t agree. To me, the novelist’s ability to envelope me in his imagined reality, to harness my imagination to his and to make the continuation of the reading feel as essential as the conduct of my own life is a gift that overwhelms other considerations. I would rather read clumsy old Dreiser than any member of the far more numerous tribe of great writers/poor novelists.

What Sister Carrie reminded me of most, however, was the HBO series “The Wire,” in that the characters are similarly subject to forces beyond their control. This novel, like An American Tragedy, does hinge on a single, crucial act or decision that completely transforms the character’s life and seals his doom; the characters in “The Wire” often don’t even get the chance to make that sort of decision. But the piteous spectacle of people trapped by their circumstances, and the sense of encroaching doom is much the same. I can’t say with utter confidence that I recommend this novel -- mostly because it’s so heart-rending -- but I don’t hesitate to call it a great one.

The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken

I plan to continue adding titles to the Books for Kids page on this site, and when I do, I’ll flag them here as well.

I read a few Joan Aiken books as a child, most notably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but my interest never condensed into outright fandom. The hugely talented writer Kelly Link has recently revived my interest in Aiken. Kelly, with her husband, Gavin Grant, runs Small Beer Press, a publisher of many terrific titles, including collections of Kelly’s own short stories. They just put out The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories, which brings together all 24 of the stories Aiken wrote about the Armitages over the course of her life.

The Armitages (Mark, Harriet and their parents) live in a seemingly ordinary English village, but are in fact frequently visited by magical events, particularly on Mondays. Herds of unicorns turn up in the garden, the next door neighbor offers lessons in witchcraft and Mark gets enlisted in an aerial dogfight with a dragon on the way home from the dentist’s office. Throughout, their parents remain unflappable, if occasionally testy, in the very best British style.

If you have kids you like to read aloud to, or know someone who does, I can’t recommend this book more highly as a holiday gift.

Signs and symbols

Desmond and Nini have gotten to the point where you can’t always be sure which cultural symbols they understand. It makes conversations with them weirdly disorienting. I might need to explain that a crate with a red cross painted on the side dangling from a parachute is full of “medicine and band-aids” for sick people, but other, seemingly more sophisticated markers they already know about. Recently, Desmond was studying the images in Olaf Hajek’s beautiful cover art for The Magician’s Book, and pointed to the figure of a faun:

Desmond (with great authority) : That’s the god of nature.

Laura: How do you know that?

Desmond: You can tell because he has animal legs.

Laura: But where did you learn about him?

Desmond: From a book.

Laura: What kind of book?

Desmond: A music book.

Laura: Do you mean a book with music in it, like with songs that you can sing?

Desmond (patiently): No. A book about music.

The same day, I asked Nini which of her books she would like to jump into if she could.

Nini: You can’t just jump into a book, Laura.

Laura: You can’t?

Nini: Some of those books are just no sense.

Laura: Like which ones?

Nini: Like moomintrolls: (Derisively) Are they real?

I was taken aback to meet such sweeping empiricism in a four-year-old who only a few months ago had to run out of the room if you told her a story with a wolf in it. The same girl who famously brought a puppet show about those very same moomintrolls to a complete halt with her shrieking hysterics when a (by all accounts very mild) puppet “monster” appeared. I made a feeble attempt to defend the magic of make-believe, but she was adamant.

Nini: You can’t jump into a book Laura. Look, I’ll show you. (Opens up a picture book on the floor and jumps on it.) Now you try it.

Laura: No.

Nini: Jump on the book, Laura! Jump on the book!

Laura: I’m not going to jump on that book in these boots. It will tear the pages.

Metafiction in the 16th Century

I've nearly reached the end of Don Quixote, the second half of which frequently pauses to take pot shots at Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (a pseudonym for an individual who has never been identified), who published a bogus sequel to the novel’s very successful first part before Cervantes was able to complete the second.

At one point, Don Quixote and Sancho meet one Don Alvaro, a character from the spurious sequel. Since Don Quixote has already denounced the Avellaneda sequel as “lies,” it’s disconcerting to have a figure who appears only in that text suddenly show up in the authorized, “true” version of the story. Don Alvaro does not recognize either of the two men, even though he claims that Don Quixote is “a very great friend of mine,” yet when Sancho explains that his companion is the real Don Quixote and that he is the real Sancho, Don Alvaro instantly believes him.

Don Quixote implores Don Alvaro to publicly testify to the fact that he has never met them before and that they are not characters from the bogus sequel, and Don Alvaro replies,

"That I will do most willingly, though it amazes me to find two Don Quixotes and two Sancho Panzas at once, as much alike in name as they differ in demeanour; and again I say and declare that what I saw I cannot have seen, and that what happened to me cannot have happened."

Or perhaps he can testify to not even existing in the first place, since Don Quixote claims that he is part of a false fiction, as opposed to the real fiction written by Cervantes?

Vampires

An essay I wrote on vampire genre fiction appears in the Wall Street Journal today. This was set up by my publisher as part of the promotional effort for The Magician’s Book, rather than because I have any special interest in the topic, but I nevertheless wound up being fascinated by and impressed with how much metaphorical water the vampire continues to carry. I sampled books from several series, ranging from the shockingly terrible (Christine Feehan’s Dark Prince, readings from which provided much entertainment at a weekend house party) to the charmingly entertaining (Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison, about a Buffyesque bounty hunter). 

I was particularly struck by how hierarchical fictional vampire societies are. There’s invariably a rigid chain of command, with older “master” vampires at the top, and the younger vampires (usually the ones the master “made”) more or less compelled to obey him/her. One of the series I read has a vampire “senate,” but the leadership doesn’t appear to be elected, just assumed by the naturally more powerful masters. The plots often hang on the intrigues and conspiracies generated by this sort of social order. 

This did leave me wondering if these stories are as popular outside the U.S as they are here. Besides all the obvious and much-discussed erotic aspects of the vampire motif, it also seems to be a rich symbol for hereditary aristocracies and the idea that people are destined by “blood” to assume certain roles in life. (The special inborn destiny is also a popular theme in fantasy literature, from The Once and Future King to Harry Potter.) Most Americans espouse democratic ideals, but I suspect a lot of us are also at least a little fascinated by dukes and counts, let alone princes and princesses. Our political order is a product of the Enlightenment, and it’s fighting tens of thousands of years of human tradition that is probably rooted in something more primal than reason: the hierarchical nature of many primate social groups as manifested in the desire to believe that our leaders are innately invested with their power. If vampires represented repressed sexuality for the Victorian readers of Bram Stoker's Dracula, I think they also speak to the repressed aspects of our political imagination, too.

DFW memorial

I went to the New York memorial service for David Foster Wallace last night. Several people read (from Wallace’s letters and work) and spoke -- his editors, his agent, his sister and fellow writers: Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Donald Antrim, Zadie Smith, Mark Costello and Don Delillo. It was the kind of experience that reminds you of the most essential and primitive value of a writer: his or her ability to articulate what you feel and think better than you can yourself at the time when you most need those thoughts and feelings to be spoken.

Mark Costello, Wallace’s oldest friend and author of the excellent novel Big If, described his college roommate brushing his teeth in Timberland boots and obsessively searching the campus for a lost hoodie given to him by his mother. He recalled the college-age Wallace as a “mind in splendid overdrive,” and offered a brilliant, diagrammatic description of what it’s like to try to connect to a friend who sometimes has trouble seeing you for who you are because he is caught up in an internal geometry of isolation and self-loathing. Zadie Smith read a fiercely thoughtful meditation on Wallace’s understanding of writing as a gift that comes in the form of asking that you give more of yourself as a reader. George Saunders did that miraculous thing (my favorite among all writerly abilities) of saying something infinitely complex in the simplest language, devoid of cliche: “He went around waking people up.” Donald Antrim told us that Wallace had made an important phone call to him when he was at a crisis point in the midst of a suicidal depression and then read an excerpt about leadership from Wallace’s essay on John McCain. The most powerful to me was Jonathan Franzen’s recollection of his friendship and colleague-ship with Wallace and of their conversations during Wallace’s last days. I won’t even try to quote that one, since the whole thing was of a piece, and left everyone present pierced through. Bonnie Nadell, Wallace’s agent and an old friend, said she would try to collect all of these writings in print, and here’s hoping she’s able to. 

It was a wrenching night, since I had more or less recovered from the immediate sorrow of his loss, and hearing this brought it back fresh. I barely knew him, but I had always counted on having his work to write about. That was never easy, but as Zadie Smith’s speech suggested, it was the sort of challenge that brought out the best in others. 

Afterwards, at the reception, several people mentioned to me that Wallace’s favorite book was The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I knew that he’d assigned the book in some of his classes, but hadn’t realized it ranked so high in his estimation. At some point, I hope to find out more about that at a later date, and will post it here if I do. 

Meanwhile, here is the memorial I wrote the day after David Foster Wallace’s death.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Jim Hynes’ most recent list of recommended reading for Halloween has inspired me to post a new page to this site, the introduction I wrote a couple of years ago to the new Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

Jackson’s short novel is one of the creepiest and most unsettling works of fiction I’ve ever read. The 1963 film version, The Haunting is equally great (avoid the 1999 remake at all costs). Essential to the success of the film is how effectively the exterior location, the Ettington Park Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon, conveys the malevolence of Hill House (which, like all of the scariest haunted houses, is in New England). It’s one of my dreams to spend a night (preferably a dark and stormy one) at the Ettington Park Hotel --if I dare...