In the Heart of the Heart of the Prose

Read the following passages, each by a different American writer, all born in the 20th century or late in the 19th century:

“Of the literary arts, the one most practiced in Draperville was history. It was informal, and there was no reason to write it down since nothing was ever forgotten. The child born too soon after the wedding ceremony might learn to walk and to ride a bicycle; he might go to school and graduate into long pants, marry, move to Seattle, and do well for himself in the lumber business; but whenever his or his mother’s name was mentioned, it was followed inexorably by some smiling reference to the date of his birth. No one knew what had become of the energetic secretary of the Chamber of Commerce who organized the Love-Thy-Neighbor-As-Thyself parade, but they knew why he left town shortly afterward, and history doesn’t have to be complete.”

“We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene maps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen. Of course, it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. The old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn’t afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn’t any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she’d been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She’d wake up if the cat sneezed, she said, but then she’d sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we’d know for an entire day beforehand what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.”

“Outside was a magic night of crisp twinkly stars, snow-muffled cottages and white trees. Aunt Lois drew the sled down the middle of the icy pavement, for the sidewalks were filled with drifts. This was indeed growing up, Marcia felt, to be out after bedtime in the dead of night and in the middle of the street. She sat in front of the sled with Lena’s legs around her and a blanket tucked around them both, their breath curling out in the frosty like smoke. Sounds were grown-up sounds, too, at this hour; the constant jangle of engine bells, a warm jolly sound that cut through blizzards and darkness like a dog’s welcome bark. Aunt Lois’ arctics crunched swiftly over the snow, and the snowflakes whirled like tiny stars around the street lamps. Down the street they could see their house with all the lights on, downstairs and up, as if it was Christmas Eve. Night was the best time of all to be outdoors, they thought, especially in winter and in London Junction where the smell of train smoke mingled with the snowflecked air and tickled the nose. Darkness, snow, smoke and stars made a special London Junction smell, just as mittens and their wool mufflers drawn tightly up to their noses and moist from chewing had a fuzzy snowball taste.”

I suggested yesterday that you read “The Prose Sublime,” so it seemed only fair that I reread Donald Justice’s essay. Good prose from poets, even good poets, is rare, and good prose about good prose from poets is even rarer. Perhaps this should not be surprising, for prose and poetry are radically different disciplines, and what is virtue in one (concision in poetry) may prove a damning fault (anemic minimalism in prose) in the other. It’s helpful to remember Justice’s subtitle: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” The sublimity he describes, admittedly, is mysterious and probably highly subjective, resistant to clinical criticism.

For instance, he cites a Hemingway passage as embodying this quality, and I don’t see it. Justice writes, “Intense clarity: one-dimensional – everything rendered on a single plane. Whatever beauty the passage has – and it has as much as any passage of this scope can probably bear – depends less on the words themselves and the care taken with them than on this very sense that great care is in fact being taken.” Justice’s liking for this passage may be related to his age. He was born in 1925, when Hemingway was already creating his mythology and assuming the stature of a deity among readers, writers and critics. I was born 27 years later, and Hemingway to me has always sounded mannered, phony, precious, sometimes embarrassing.

Speaking of a passage from Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White, Justice says “the plain style of it I find quite unofficially beautiful as well. Such a passage seems hardly to bother with understanding at all; it is a passage of unspoken connections, unnameable affinities, a tissue of associations without specified relations.”

To varying degrees, the passages I cited above share these qualities. I chose them because all come from novels I enjoy and value highly. Only afterward did it occur to me that all three are set in the American Midwest, as is Anderson’s. The first comes from Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell, 1948; the second, from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2004; the third, My Home is Far Away, by Dawn Powell, 1944. Maxwell was born in Illinois; Robinson, Idaho; Powell, like Anderson, in Ohio.

In isolation, Powell’s passage suffers. Its beauty is sabotaged by sentimentality (“fuzzy snowball taste”) bolstered by cliché (“twinkly,” “a warm jolly sound”). But the whole is far better than the parts. Powell was a born satirist at war, in My Home is Far Away, with a story rooted in nostalgia and pain – her own childhood. She is a less exquisite writer than the others, but no less talented and enjoyable.

The Maxwell and Robinson excerpts work in isolation and as tiles in the bigger mosaics surrounding them. Both share the plain style pointed out by Justice, which can probably be traced, at many removes, to the King James Bible. Both passages are tightly controlled yet natural sounding. Both resonate with the Anderson passage, as Justice describes it:

“In it, connections, if any, remain unstated; likewise meanings. As used to be remarked of poems, such passages resist paraphrase. Their power is hidden in mystery. There is, at most, an illusion of seeing momentarily into the heart of things – and the moment vanishes. It is this, perhaps, which produces the esthetic blush.”

A story or novel made up exclusively of such passages would probably be unreadable, but so would a story or novel without any. To see into the heart of things is a fleeting gift.