Dos Passos

That's a quote from my 1945 copy of First Encounter a book that's actually a reprint of his first novel One Man's Initiation.It was written about WWI and he had it reprinted in the middle of WWII.  He meant it politically as he did most things.  John Dos Passos had his career ruined by politics, but it was he who was so overtly to be political When the tides shifted on McCarthy, he failed to roll back.

"Red sweating faces, drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with the struggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces were the only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed mud-coloured bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky." 

In that short quote he uses a lot of repetition. Repetition is a tool. Over-use is common, but Dos Passos was a master. He first describes each noun as it passes except "ground."  Red faces, hard rims, ... then does not describe the ground. But then used that ground to describe everything else: putty colored mud, mud-colored bodies, mud-colored sky.  It's perfectly balanced.

Fante and Bandini

I am not the first person to blog about this book. Hard to say who was first but the best was over at Mooks and Gripes.I however, fixate on a single sentence. It's what I do here.  This book was made into a film in 1989. I've never seen it.  It is probably the best known of John Fante's books.

The book was first published in 1938.  You cant tell. There's nothing dated about the language. It was reprinted in 1983 by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press.

"The world of inanimate things found voice, conversed with the old house, and the house chattered with cronish delight of the discontent within its walls."

Brilliant anthropomorphizing.the phrase "the world of inanimate things" is particularly powerful. They do have their own world wholly separate, silent and insentient. We are be-ing, and they are certainly not. Here he used it all to characterize the absence of a person, this is reflected by a secondary character projecting this sense of absence onto the inanimate.

Bruce Chatwin

"Mosquitoes bit the hard parts of my fingers."

Bruce Chatwin wrote that in Niger in 1971. The lines were published posthumously in 1993 in the book Photographs and Notebooks.  It's only 8 words but it says so much. It reminds me of the more famous six word sentence by Hemingway.

He avoids calling them callouses a charge word with a lot of connotations that are no longer there. Their presence indicates his hard living and manual labor. The mosquitoes are plural, not singular.  he's out-numbered, and that he passively lets them bite indicates either patience, indifference or masochism.

It's what I'd expect from the author of In Patagonia.

Words Are Tyrants

"...words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all."

 -W. Somerset Maugham.  (The Summing Up)

What can you add to that?  The Summing Up was his autobiography and his statement on the world as he knew it. I have a nice old hardback copy from 1938. He'd write another 26 books in the next 24 years strangely putting it in the middle of his career. His biggest most enduring books The Razors Edge and Of Human Bondage weren't published until 1944 and 1946 respectively.  So in reading his words it is doubly interested to read what he thought of words, and most especially his own words. More here.

Larrouy, Maurice

Maurice's name appears nowhere in the book. he is credited at the time merely as "Y." It's a collection of letters, one half of an exchange between two men each serving in WWI aboard a different ship. We are left with only one half presumably because one of the ships was sunk. The reciprocated letters went down with him. It's all public domain now. You can get this book "the Odyssey of a Torpedoed transport" free here.

"They were exhausted. Some of them almost died, they were spitting blood. And as they were cold, bronchitis and inflammation of the lungs had set in. The only physician they had was Fourges, which means none at all. As a remedy he gave them rum in hot water, for our medicine chest had soon been emptied. Three of them died, which is not many, say the officers. We threw them overboard into the Atlantic with a sack of coal at their feet to make them sink."

Maurice had a gift for nearly awkward understatement. In an odd way that communicated many of the things that were otherwise left unsaid. Turn of the century British writing is usually very stiff, even dull or drab. these are personal letter and they have a more informal feel that helps keep the truth poignant.

Outerbridge Reach

I've remembered part of this quote for 18 years and finally tonight put together what it came from. I dont recall how I came to possess the book, Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone, but I recall it was brand new when I read it.

"On the drive they passed a burning cane field and Indian cattle grazing under swarms of flies among ruined vines. The earth was blood red, the vegetation fleshy. Everything was death and fecundity."

It was the perfect words twisted into another meaning. Death and fecundity are used in biology to describe life cycles. In reality I think everything is death or fecundity, but Stone wrote what he meant. Ultimately his book Dog Soldiers was better, but never more elegant than this..

Rebecca West

I don't know a damn thing abotu Rebecca West. Black Lamb and Grey falcon was published in 1940. Mine is a hard copy from 1944. the beast of a book is 1,150 pages long. But from this one book alone I knew she was fervently political Black Lamb.org described her thusly:

"A vivacious, politically-committed woman, West began writing in radical periodicals while still a student at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh and took her pen name from one of Ibsen’s emancipated heroines. Her early novels and critical studies, excellent in themselves, nevertheless seem preludes to her masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon..."

So here we have that very book and it is as they say.

"...If I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years I would always hear "No, there was fear, there were our enemies, without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death."

Giscombe

Giscombe is a poet first and foremost. I don't care for much poetry, and not his in particular; just poerty at all. Where I find allegory and metaphor very descriptive, I find poetry to be code. I find no pleasure in reading or writing in code. So C.S. Giscombe is not one I'd have encountered had he not branched out into prose. I bought this book for $3 because I liked a single passage and afterward read it and went onto enjoy it as a whole.

Into and Out of dislocation is a book about a hundred things: America, Canada, blackness, genealogy, teaching, writing, history, travel, research, sex, good food, bad food, drinking bourbon, mass transit, bicycling... It's disjointed like Saroyan. But skillfully tied together by a tight first-person narrative. The single quote follows. The italics are his, the bold is mine.

"I'm here to reclaim him, I wrote in my journal that winter in Fort George. This is the dry hump of kinship, my arrival at the public dock at Germansen Landing or Fort George or the mouth of Quesnelle to reclaim his ass. "

Sudden Sea

R.A. Scotti has great one-liners. it's very strange to think that her career began in writing spy and detective novels. Her prose isn't dense, it reads easily but then she'll drop a stone into your drink. She uses them artfully using them to slam on the brakes or the accelerator. In non-fiction it's unusual in it's poetry.

"All along the Northeast coast, riled by the wind, the sea became magnificent and mad."

It's simple and visual and it works with the alliteration. The clausulas are different but the near-rhyme is interesting. I like alliteration because it's difficult to use and when you fail you sound foolish. It's very satisfying when it works; and this works.