How to write about war

Somebody had left many boxes of books on the sidewalk on 76th Street between Fifth and Madison, and as Susana and I were walking back from our run in Central Park we stopped and scooped up a bunch. One was a very famous war novel that I had never heard of until our friend Hazel in Carboneras urged it upon us, Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Another was a collection of short stories by Saki, pen name of Hugh Munro, whom I remembered from the delightful, chilling surprise of reading "The Open Window" long ago in high school.

I don't know how I had missed Birdsong -- a quick search on the 'net revealed that it has been a best-seller, there's been talk for years about a movie, and it has even inspired tours of the battlefields that figure in it. It really is a gripping read, especially those horrifying scenes from the trenches of France in 1916 and until the end of the Great War two years later. These are preceded and then intertwined with a kind of love story -- though "love" is an imprecise description for British infantry officer Stephen Wraysford's obsession with a vacuous, self-centered and dimly remembered Frenchwoman. No matter. Even the flightiest characters (including Stephen's Isabelle) are depicted convincingly. There is also a later story, set in 1978-79, about Stephen's granddaughter's search for mature independence and information about that grandfather. All of it clearly and sensitively related, though it is only the two terrible bloody years in France that really matter. Faulks has chosen to remind us of this war which (as his characters say and almost all real-life contemporaries said over and over) unleashed destructive forces so much greater than its predecessors -- including the cruel and bloody Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars that immediately preceded it -- that it changed the world.

So it seemed an odd coincidence to find in the same serendipitous heap of books on the sidewalk of 76th Street the short, poetic piece, "Birds on the Western Front," in Emlyn Williams' 1978 edition of Saki's Short Stories.

The other stories here (there are about 60 in the book, a small sample of Saki's voluminous output) are mostly clever, extended jokes, playing on and confirming a public school Briton's class prejudices. They are often annoyingly sexist, in the light, silly manner of situation comedy. In fact, what gives pleasure in reading Saki is the absurd situations leading to startling outcomes (as in "The Open Window"). The characters are simply caricatures, and they all talk alike, however devious their intentions. But-- "Birds on the Western Front" is something else.

The frivolous, supercilious Saki was perhaps a cover for a somewhat more serious Hugh Munro, foreign correspondent (1902-1906) and author of serious-sounding tomes on Russian history and the pre-1914 turbulence elsewhere in Europe. In 1916, at the age of 46 (rather old to serve), he joined the British Army (Royal Scottish Fusileers) and was soon killed in a trench in France. "Birds", which must have been written just weeks or months before his death, ingeniously describes trench warfare without looking at it directly. Instead, it is about the birds whose natural habitat has been destroyed by cannonade, bombs and machine-gunning, but still must find some scrap of something for nesting and carrying on the only life they know. This is a marvelously effective denunciation of the war, still fresh even after the angry sentimentality of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est” has begun to grate.

I wonder if Faulks was thinking of this short piece by Saki when he chose the title "Birdsong." If so, then maybe what he meant to suggest (with Saki) was that even through the worst horrors, life persists.

Here is my plot summary of and further comment on Birdsong, and rather less on Emlyn Williams' edition of Saki's Short Stories.

Photo of Ancre (France) after the battle from this website.

Holiday message from Roy Blount

This is too good not to share. I endorse the sentiments.

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Literary practice

Long before the Internet, my friend Karla and I used to exchange quirky and silly letters, she from San Francisco and I from New York. She always made her envelopes from colorful magazine pages, careful to find an appropriately allusive or absurd, image. We also went to a lot of trouble crafting our prose, each glad to have the other as audience for our literary practice.

I miss those weird images. But nobody fabricates paper envelopes for snailmail anymore, so I now have to look for her strange humor, her insights beamed intensely at some unexpected corner of experience, in her web page, Rabbits, Toyen, and so forth. And instead of typing up a letter and stamping it, I'll answer her comment on my blog (on re-entry to New York, below) here.

Yes, it's true, I'm back at work on a novel I worked on for a couple of years and then put aside for a couple more, after trying and failing to get an agent to represent it. It's now much better -- story easier to follow, the conclusion more satisfying -- and this time, if I don't engage an agent, I intend to publish it myself. My aim is to finish the revision before we leave New York (mid-December), because as soon as we get back to Spain I have to focus on finishing an entirely different book, one that's under contract, on a history of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) in Latin America.

The novel's working title is A GIFT FOR THE SULTAN. Here's the premise: In the summer of 1402, the stand-in emperor of besieged Constantinople, the nephew of Emperor Manuel II (who is off in Western Europe seeking aid), secretly sends a delegation to the Ottoman sultan with the keys to the city, a rich tribute of silks and gold, and a 13-year old princess -- Manuel's bastard -- for the sultan's son's harem, and this surrender package is entrusted to a dashing and violent Ottoman gazi (part bandit, part holy warrior) to deliver to the sultan. But before the gazi and his gang can complete delivery, the sultan and his horde are destroyed by Timur-i-Link ("Tamerlane") -- so the caravan of Greek-speaking, Christian urbanites and their treasure, including the young princess, and the rough Turkish horse archers led by the gazi are suddenly missionless in the mountains of central Anatolia, which has suddenly become infested by panicked deserters and survivors of the sultan's military disaster. And then... Well, that's what I'm working on.

It's all true, except the princess -- I made her and the gazi up, though both are plausible. Manuel II did in fact have bastard children (we even know the name of one of them, Zenobia), his nephew Ioannis did attempt to surrender in Manuel's absence, and the plot did in fact fail because of Timur's victory. (Christopher Marlowe's most famous tragedy is about some of these same events, but his version is much more fanciful.) Marriage of Christian princesses to Turkish chieftains had in fact become frequent in Constantinopolitan diplomacy, and gazis as wild as my guy were also real. What I'm trying to imagine is the relationships between frontier Muslim Turks and sophisticated Christian urbanites in this tumultuous period of confused and diffuse alliances.

New self-publishing possibilities

I've just discovered knol, a newly invented word which I suppose comes from "knowledge on line". It's all explained in the link I just gave you. Basically, it's a software program similar to Blogger but designed for posting longer articles that may be of more lasting interest. I'm intrigued by the idea, and expect that I'll be creating some "knols" of my own. In the old days, before Internet, I devoted a lot of time, energy and anxiety to writing queries and then articles to send out to editors at magazines and newspapers, and sometimes I would get published and paid, but more often I would not, and even when I succeeded (see my Notes & Essays for samples, or my C.V. for a more complete list), the pay was meager. For those of us who write for motives other than money, which (Dr. Johnson to the contrary notwithstanding) is almost everybody who writes seriously, this is an attractive alternative to sending articles to an editor. Maybe my first knol will be about self-publishing, what it has meant historically (I just read a life of William Cobbett) and what the new technologies may portend, for the publishing industry and for political and social thought.

Meanwhile, I'll keep blogging. I like the short, ephemeral form. Which may not be so ephemeral, since things posted on the Internet seem to last forever.

Newsvine & new media

I just discovered Newsvine & am using it in two ways: Posting articles to see if I get any more readers, and reading some of the interesting stuff they collect. (You can see my page, with the articles posted, here.) It's free and easy. Makes me worry about the future of news media, though. If newspapers disappear, or morph into electronic diffusion of free info, who's going to pay for serious investigation?

There will be a solution -- we humans have always found a way out of whatever jam we've created for ourselves -- but I don't yet see what it will be. Probably a mix of things: university-based think-tanks, foundations (like the Fund for Investigative Journalism only bigger?), or funds gathered by interested NGOs (which would include all the neo-fascists as well as the people we like). The changes in our world of information are immense. The pretense of objectivity of the select few papers (Le Monde, New York Times, El País, Herald Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a couple of others have always insisted on their independence), while maybe never more than a pretense, will erode to nothing. Maybe that's all right -- in a free-for-all of people shouting at each other, some few thinkers may be able to filter the sensible from the insane. Diderot did it, in the 18th century, so maybe we can too.

See Poynter article, Facing the News Business Model Crisis.

Freelancers' travails

A colleague in the National Writers Union forwarded this NYT column by Abby Ellin. When you can't think of anything to write, write about writing, or not writing.

Another NWU colleague writes:

When first investigating an unknown publisher or agent, always check at
least these three places:

National Writers Union (naturally)
Preditors and Editors
Writer Beware

It also wouldn't hurt to plug the name into the Google search engine, both for the web and for groups, especially groups, to see if there are any bad reports.

Another good place to check and to post a query is the sff.net newsgroup, sffNet WebNews.

Looking for e-zines

For the past few months, all my fiction energies were going into my novel, A Gift for the Sultan. Now it's time to come back up and try to get other work published. So I've been checking out the e-zines. Starting out with the ones I know because they've published me in the past: In Posse Review continues to be very attractive. Editor Rachel Callaghan published a fable of mine there in Issue 9, "Melliflua and the Fauns." The fable was written for a particular pre-adolescent girl, but with an adult subtext. Besides fiction and poetry, they publish short literary essays, so I just sent Rachel the note below, on the "fiction factory." Exquisite Corpse continues its manic existence. The Corpse published a short story of mine, "A lua no céu da Baía," in Issue 5, but it's not currently accepting submissions. But you don't want to hear all this. I'll just do what I have to do, and make a note if something happens. But check this out: When Literature Goes Multimedia.

For writers trying something new

For new writers or writers breaking into a new genre, Pat Gallant writes:

You might want to try Byline Magazine. They're a magazine for writers that sponsor monthly competitions in all genres. The good thing about them is if you win, they DON'T publish your work (you get credit and a cash award.), therefore leaving open the opportunity for first print pub. elsewhere. They're an excellent barometer of if a piece will sell. They're staffed by writers,editors, teachers, etc. and are sticklers for grammar, form, etc. which is a good thing. I found what I used to enter there, reflected editors' tastes. If Byline gave it a thumbs down, seems editors did , as well. What won was picked up by some great publications. Check out their website and good luck.

For writers--A colleague recommends

Writers in power

Yesterday's news of the retirement of Czech playwright Vaclav Havel from the presidency of the Czech Republic brought to mind other creative writers who have held political power: novelists include Benjamin Disraeli, several times prime minister of Britain; Rómulo Gallegos, briefly (1947-48) president of Venezuela; Sergio Ramírez, vice president of Nicaragua during the Sandinista government (1979-89), and no doubt others. Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) and Pablo Neruda (Chile, on the Communist Party ticket) both ran for president but lost, so they don't count.

All this reminds me also of the prophecy made by my 8th grade teachers, in a pre-graduation ceremony at Seventh Avenue Grade School in La Grange, IL: I was to become president of the USA. Now, you may think that unlikely, but I did make a start: last year I won national office, in the National Writers Union. Well, as I wrote when it was over, the job wasn't all fun, but it could have been a stepping stone. Anything could happen -- Gallegos and Ramírez weren't expecting the posts they got, and I'm not sure Havel was seeking it, either. So I'm wondering just what might be the chain of events that could thrust me into state power. Any suggestions?

Reasons for optimism

Happy new year! Reasons for optimism in 2003:
1) Hugo Chávez will probably survive the employers' strike in Venezuela, which is good, and will also have to pay closer attention to the demands of the middle class, which is also be good.
2) Luiz Inacio da Silva, "Lula," is sure to advance economic democracy in Latin America's largest country, Brazil.
3) The Russians' stupid repression of Chechens, and the Chechens' reckless assaults on Russians, may so exhaust the patience of Russian citizens that they force Putin to change policy or get out.
4) Good people in Africa will keep trying (against terrible odds) to make democracy a habit -- Kenya may be the latest example.
5) The Israelis will run out of ways to punish Palestinians and out of patience with their own aggressive settlers, so more of them will demand that the government seek peace.
6) Palestinians are running out of families willing to sacrifice their children in suicidal attacks, so more of them will be willing to respond.
7) My latest novel, just completed, will become a best-seller and a movie, which will make me and my friends very happy.