Icepicks and Chainsaws

Recently I've been reading both John D. MacDonald and Ross MacDonald novels, close together. At the moment Ross reigns supreme and JDM is in the shade. Maybe in a few years that pendulum will swing back the other way; I certainly hope so.

At any rate, something stood out reading the two back-to-back-to-back. Both are writing in the late 60's/early 70's, and both Lew Archer and Travis McGee share a certain world-weary, nihilistic, these-kids-these-days way of looking at the world. They deal with it in different way, but there's not enough different about these two heroes to justify the strange shift in favor.

The difference I see is in the writing. More specifically, metaphor.

Ross MacDonald uses metaphor like an icepick, where John D. MacDonald uses it like a chainsaw. Both write elegant, vivid, wonderful metaphors, the kind of images that stick with you a long time after you put their books down. RM uses metaphor like Ali jabbing in his heyday: sticking and moving, sticking and moving. JDM, think George Foreman and his knockout cross...

Right now I'm reading The Underground Man, and it's peppered with lovely little images, a yellow-tinged sky like cheap paper darkening in the sunlight, a pair of pistols gleaming like strange blue jewels, shadows of palms like splashes of dark liquid on the pavements. No one is super-haunting, but like Ali and that jab, the cumulative effect is telling.

JDM's style was more about the single powerful image: that poor, strangled girl with her Long Lavender Look, the showdown under that Dreadful Lemon Sky, walking off into that Lonely Silver Rain. This guy doesn't ladle on the poetic imagery, he picks one single, resonant image and lets it shine. And yeah, that image is usually powerful enough that it gets picked for the title. There are exceptions, sure, but the point remains: when it came to metaphor, JDM went for the knockout punch.

Come to think of it, this reminds me of an older mystery-author pairing: Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler. Chandler peppered his work with such classic lines as 'she had the kind of body to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window' and 'he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.' Hammet gave us the Glass Key and Red Harvest.

I'm guessing these days, the jab is in fashion, more than the cross. If you're the sort of writer who uses layer on layer of imagery to build a haunting effect, that's awesome. And if you're the sort to go for a single, powerful image, the kind that stays with the reader *years* after covers close, you might have a harder time getting your foot in the door. But if you develop that technique to its fullest, you just might blast that door off its hinges...

Language

Language is a storyteller's right arm. A knight's sword. A dancer's limbs.

Its use is also all but impossible to teach. Mostly, we ape the writers we admire, widening and narrowing our range of imitation until we are left with something that is 'us'. A natural way to learn, but we have to be careful to sample widely. And beautifully.

To learn language, image, rhythm, I read poetry. A poet can strike your soul the way a master swordsman cleaves flesh: you don't see the cut, only feel the blade lay open the bone...

"Behold, the grave of a wicked man"

by Stephen Crane

Behold, the grave of a wicked man,

And near it, a stern spirit.

There came a drooping maid with violets,

But the spirit grasped her arm.

“No flowers for him,” he said.

The maid wept:

“Ah, I loved him.”

But the spirit, grim and frowning:

“No flowers for him.”

Now, this is it —

If the spirit was just,

Why did the maid weep?

Smooth-talking Irishman

A Poet To His Beloved

I BRING you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams,
I bring you my passionate rhyme.

William Butler Yeats

Steve here: Yeats is another of my all-time favorite poets. He had that distinctly Irish gift for the flow of language, and wrote on every subject from love and death to the politics of his day.

I don't write poetry myself. I just love the use of the language, and the occasional metaphor that strikes a deep note on the dark bells of the soul.

Seems to me, one of the best things we can do as writers is to read plenty of poems, then ignore them. There's a lot of poetic influence in writers like James Lee Burke, Walter Mosely, Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly. None of them ever let the language get in the way of the story, though...

The Lonely Street

The Lonely Street

School is over. It is too hot
to walk at ease. At ease
in light frocks they walk the streets
to while the time away.
They have grown tall. They hold
pink flames in their right hands.
In white from head to foot,
with sidelong, idle look--
in yellow, floating stuff,
black sash and stockings--
touching their avid mouths
with pink sugar on a stick--
like a carnation each holds in her hand--
they mount the lonely street.

William Carlos Williams

(Steve here): I don't pretend to know much about poetry. I can't start to tell you why one line ends here, and another there. Nor why the poet chooses this, rather than that.

They teach me to hear the music in the language. They show me images that strike the soul and linger a lifetime. They make me a better writer.

And sometimes, sometimes a poem uses feather touches of language to brush against a feeling so delicate, so ephemeral, that to grasp it directly would kill it.