Early and late

Last week I promised to share a few paragraphs from my first Palanca-prizewinning story, “Agcalan Point,” which I saw again recently for the first time in 35 years. I’m going to do this not to praise myself, but precisely to show how artificial my voice was back then, and how it’s changed since, by way of talking more generally about how writers and their words change over time.

Here goes:

“Approaching Ginbulanan harbor from the west, as it is the only entry the sea leaves open short of tearing your craft apart with its sunken teeth, the traveler meets Agcalan.

“From afar you perceive a decrepit Spanish fort more than a thousand feet above the bobbing horizon, thickly overhung with clouds in the month of August. From that crown Agcalan plunges madly downwards into jagged slivers of gray sandstone into the sea, carpeted by a fine silken spray.

“Treachery lurks but a fathom below; ships passing this point must have crews of redoubtable courage. So far from the open sea, so near to land — and there the danger lies, to founder on some ill-anchored reef or be crushed against the immutable cheek of Agcalan.

“Agcalan has always been there, and you have only seen it now. It has seen everything, and you know nothing, a speck of flotsam in time and space, and you are overwhelmed. There is majesty in the primeval, some godly attribute magnified by the prism of the transparent mind, and it is here.”

Now let’s a do a little self-analysis.

Note the tone and setting of the story. It doesn’t happen on a typical Tuesday on a city street. It starts on the swell of the ocean, wrenching the reader from the familiar. We are introduced to a “decrepit Spanish fort,” suggesting a bygone era, cloaking the piece in a mythic mist. This effect is reinforced by words and phrases like “thickly overhung,” “redoubtable courage,” “ill-anchored,” “majesty in the primeval,” “godly attribute,” and that last mouthful, “the prism of the transparent mind.”

Those lines will probably get past or even be liked by an impressionable audience. But looking at them now, as the 56-year old reader rather than the 21-year-old writer, I can sense a certain stridency, a palpable anxiety to be taken seriously, which seems easiest to achieve with the use of windy, resonant, polysyllabic words.

It’s the bane of wet-eared writers, this notion that big words and foggy settings will get you far. It’s an understandable crutch, especially when you don’t feel too confident about your material — or haven’t found it yet; a retreat into the romantic past provides a good excuse for mock-heroic prose and a touch of melodrama. I find myself having to tell my students to unlearn this tendency by, among others, asking them to throw their thesaurus away, especially when the only reason they turn to it is to find a fancier word for something as basic as “talk” (expostulate?) or “walk” (perambulate?).

For comparison, here’s a scene from a story I published in 2002, when I was 48: “Some Families, Very Large”:

“Finally they emerged into a street with one side lit up like a carnival and smelling like flowers. Boys Sammy’s age ran from one end of it to another, and men and women sat in chairs on the sidewalk, smoking and chatting, scratching their ankles. Vendors sold fried bananas, jellied drinks, and duck eggs on the street. It seemed incredibly alive, this nook of the city, and Sammy soon understood why: it was a street of funeral parlors all in a row, and even Christmas saw no let-up in business here.”

Note how narrow my field of vision has become, and how much simpler the words are. Here I try to get mileage not from my vocabulary nor from the exoticism of the setting, but from the irony of the situation — of how places of death can be so full of life, even and especially at Christmastime.

Indeed this movement from the exotic to the familiar seems to be a trajectory that many writers go through as they mature. Take a look at these lines from a poem titled “Night Music” written by the British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) in 1945, when he was 23:

Only the sound

Long sibilant-muscled trees

Were lifting up, the black poplars.

And in their blazing solitude

The stars sang in their sockets through the night:

“Blow bright, blow bright

The coal of this unquickened world.”

Notice anything? Now here’s Larkin again, 13 years later, in 1958, with “Home Is So Sad”:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go…

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Not only has the language become radically simplified (note how all of the words in the first line are of just one syllable); the imagery is now pointedly domestic. “That vase,” such a seemingly plain phrase, carries tremendous referential power, implying some experience we don’t know but whose emotional significance we can infer, in a way that “the coal of this unquickened world” just can’t manage.

 Such shifts in vocabulary are, I suggest, merely the ripples on the surface of the ocean. The real changes occur much deeper, in the writer’s growing appreciation of the complexity of seemingly simple acts, statements, and figures. The maturing writer realizes that verbal virtuosity is the easiest and cheapest trick in the book, and that only with the genius of a Borges or a Nabokov can big words regain and reassert their grand precision.

The change may not even be in the words but in the sensibility, which can be a subtler spoor to track. I remember a professor of mine from graduate school — a tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking Shakespeare scholar named Russell Fraser — who gave us one of the most maddeningly difficult final exams I ever came across. He gave us two blind passages from Shakespeare — certifiably obscure, nothing like “To be or not to be” or “Friends, Romans, countrymen” — and asked us: “Which is early and which is late Shakespeare, and why?” We had to argue our answers purely on the basis of the text and what context we could generate from it, trying to imagine what an aging bard would feel like, and how the weight of the years would convey itself in his words.

The next time you read works by the same author, look up their publication dates, and see if you can sense any change in his or her language, outlook, or style. Come to think of it, I suppose some of us actually get worse with time, but that’s for another column.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.