'Go to the Bookcase'

I heard an echo in something I wrote the other day, a dependent clause, inconsequential in itself. It nagged me, like a commercial jingle from fifty years ago playing in my head. The harder I dredged to recover the source, the deeper it sank. I let go and an hour later it bubbled to the surface. Something from Eliot’s Four Quartets, poems I first read shortly after the poet’s death in January 1965 and barely understood. The phrase was almost verbatim and I intended no allusion, overt or masked, so I deleted it. 

We like to think we always know what we’re writing, but the act is so complex and draws on so many places within us – including buried memories --  that we can be surprised by our own words. I won’t get Yeatsian about it but I like the sensation. When I’m looking for the correct word, I relax and see what comes. Then I glimpse an interior database of meanings, sounds and rhythms. That’s what I’m interfacing. 

A young writer just sent me a list of questions, mostly practical in nature. Do I read my work aloud? Do I let others read it? Do I edit along the way while writing or do I wait until I’ve reach at least a tentative conclusion? I answered and, as always,  suggested he read the great writers who preceded us. In his case, given the sort of work he wants to do, Jonathan Swift.      

 

An interviewer asked William Maxwell: “What should an inexperienced writer do who feels the need of editorial guidance?” He replied: “Go to the bookcase. From reading, you learn how the good or the great writer does it.”

 

[See Maxwell’s 1982 interview with Gerald C. Nemanic in Conversations with William Maxwell (ed. Barbara Burkhardt, University of Mississippi Press, 2012).]