Chapter 124: Maybe One Day I Can Do That

A writer friend and I were talking about Ernest Hemingway. He’s a tricky subject in that conversations about Hemingway almost always follow the same trajectory: the extraordinary talent and output in his early years followed by decades of increasing macho strutting, misogyny, drinking, and despair that would end in his suicide in 1961. We limited our conversation to the beginning, when Hemingway, barely 30 years old, appeared seemingly out of nowhere with work that sounded unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

My friend sent me a New Yorker essay that Joan Didion had written in 1995 about Hemingway that began with the opening paragraph of “A Farewell to Arms.” 

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels…

Didion dissected the opening – 126 words, only one of which has three syllables, four commas and so on. She does so in awe. The essay goes on to consider what words Hemingway wanted the world to read, and which he decidedly did not. But what struck me was Didion recalling her discovery of that novel and those first words: I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself. 

Every so often successful writers are asked to cite the authors and work that inspired them; the New York Times Book Review does this periodically. The Didion essay, however, got me thinking of something more immediate and, in a sense, portable: the paragraph, sentence, passage, or line that young writers discover and, as with the young Joan Didion herself, leaves them thinking: one day, heaven permitting, I hope I can do that, too.

I had discovered just such a passage when I was starting out – a passage that I have carried with me ever since, still hoping to capture what the author did so powerfully and gracefully. That author was Joan Didion – yes, pay in forward – and I can recite a good deal of the opening of “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” by heart.

This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.  The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by way of the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place:   not the coastal the California  of subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mohave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalypts windbreaks and works on the nerves.  October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April.  Every voice seems a scream.  It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

Didion’s connection to Hemingway’s writing, and her writing’s subsequent connection to me, got me wondering whether young writers whom I knew also had their “maybe one day” passages. I began to ask around. One by one, they wrote to say that in fact they did. No two were the same. In fact, they varied widely: Journalism. Fiction. Poetry. 

Rather than try to compress what they said, I thought it might be interesting to read what they’d sent, the passages they carried with them.

* * * 

I have a ready-made answer, because I think about it all the time — the opening graf to “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” by Hunter S. Thompson:

I GOT OFF the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands … big grins and a whoop here and there: “By God! You old bastard! Good to see you, boy! Damn good … and I mean it!”

-James Schapiro

*

Not a huge fan of Paul Bowles, but this quote from “The Sheltering Sky” blew me away when I read it a decade or so ago. It captures something essential, in a clear manner, with easy words, outlining an idea that wraps around your mind and knocks around inside thereafter. And it’s universal.

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

-Diego Courchay

*

I have two.  

1) David Foster Wallace, first graf of the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I'm starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner's sickness for home. I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play.

I even remember where I was standing when I read this (my high school, first floor, northeast hallway). What grabbed me was the fluid mix of high and low registers— a style I'd never encountered before.   

2) Jon Krakauer, cover of Into the Wild

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt.McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter.

I mean, that's what's on the front cover. What I love about it is that it's 100% factual yet also deeply haunting, and for a 19-year-old kid, it was pure intoxication. (I remember where I read this, too: in the backseat of my friend's car, on the interstate.) I couldn't believe that Jon Krakauer's job was to report and write entire books like this one.

-Nicholas Phillips

*

I thought of passages that have stuck with me, this really great opening section came to mind. It’s perhaps the most ambitious lede on a sports story I've ever read—cosmic in its scope, yet also strangely personal.

From Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine. Opening of a profile of basketball star Kevin Durant.

Ok, why not, let’s start with the asteroid. Thirty-five million years ago, a giant space rock, two miles wide, came screaming out of the sky and crashed into Earth. It struck the eastern edge of the landmass we know today as North America. And it unleashed an apocalypse. The asteroid hit with the power of many nuclear bombs. It hit so hard that it vaporized itself and cracked the bedrock seven miles down. It incinerated whole forests, killed all life in the area, sent super-tsunamis ripping out across the Atlantic. You can still find remnants of the trauma (shocked quartz, fused glass) as far away as Texas and the Caribbean.

Where it hit, the rock left a scar: a giant smoldering hole more than 50 miles across.

Eons passed. The world turned cold. Glaciers started crawling down from the north, with irresistible slowness, inching their way toward the asteroid hole, grinding up the landscape, dragging boulders and carving valleys. Then they stopped. They started to melt. The glaciers bled ice water, and little trickles went rolling downhill, braiding themselves into rivers, seeking low places in the landscape.

-Brett Bachman 

*

I knew I had to share something by Rachel Aviv, most likely from her debut book. But I couldn't think of a specific line to pull out.  Then I realized that's precisely why I love her writing so much – for how quiet and unassuming it is. There aren't really any killer lines or zingers. That's not what inspires me, it's when you read her work. I especially love how in place of dialogue, she uses diary entries. These are stories about inner lives, reported and told with dignity.  

It's so clear to me that Aviv is drawn to a specific type of story because she connects to it on a personal level, and yet in its telling, she completely disappears into it. You don't see her at all, even though these stories are just as much about her as they are about her subjects. 

This line is from the epilogue to her book, Strangers to Ourselves: 

.... but she didn't know where to go from there. Despite her deep knowledge about her illness, she still felt unknown. "I suppose I am one of those people that thoroughly understands myself yet am a stranger to myself," she wrote.

-Anna Codrea-Rado

*

From the very first page of Ben Okri’s novel, Songs of Enchantment.

We didn't see the mountains ahead of us.  We didn't see how they are always ahead, always calling us, always reminding us that there are more things to be done, dreams to be realized, joys to be re-discovered, promises made before birth to be fulfilled, beauty to be incarnated, and love embodied.  

We didn't notice how they hinted that nothing is ever finished, that struggles are never truly concluded, that sometimes we have to re-dream our lives, and that life can always be used to create more light.

Upon initially reading this passage I couldn’t get the phrase “promises made before birth” out of my head. It makes me think about the legacy of my people, the generational curses and blessings that live within us and how we get free. I know there is a story waiting to be told from this passage—one day, I’ll write it!

-Zenique Gardner-Perry

*

A line that keeps me writing is, of course, from Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."

-Elizabeth Foster-Feigenbaum

*

Poetry and song lyrics have been my biggest inspiration in terms of writing, especially Leonard Cohen's recent "You want it darker". The opening lyrics in particular :

 "If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game

If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame

If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame"

His simplicity, his choice of words, but the meaning and heaviness behind them always had an impact on me. Sometimes you can say a lot without complicated sentences, without needing to add synonyms or metaphors or what not. As someone who learned English as a second language, this resonated with me and simply made me feel better about myself.

-Tamara Saade

*

I'll go with a line from Carmen Maria Machado's memoir, “In the Dream House”:

If you do as you are told, go to page 8.

Here Machado uses the choose-your-own-adventure trope and erases any space between the narrator and reader. One day I hope that I can also find unexpected and jarring ways to make my readers a part of the stories I tell.

-Sheena Romero

* 

This is one paragraph from the first chapter of John Steinback’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” I didn’t read it until my early 30s (no high school assignments, having grown up in Canada), and of course it had been built up immensely. You never know when things are over-hyped. But when I read it, I was blown away – by its humanity, its descriptive capabilities, its basis in reality, its poetry. I had never pictured the Dust Bowl before, and could never not do so after. 

“When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards. Now the dust was evenly mixed with the air, an emulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills.”

-Rachel Jones

* 

Can it be a poem? This one is like a masterclass in the power of a few carefully chosen words. “From We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. 

               The Pool Players.
        Seven at the Golden Shovel.

            We real cool. We   

            Left school. We

            Lurk late. We

            Strike straight. We

            Sing sin. We   

            Thin gin. We

            Jazz June. We   

            Die soon.

-Nushin Rashidian

* * *

If you’ve read this and thought: I have just such a passage, please do send it to us at delacortereview@gmail.com. It could be interesting to post some of them by way of inspiration. Let us know if it’s okay to use your name.

* * *

Speaking of young writers, if you are a fan of “Sex Education” you may have by now discovered a new character in Season Four: the writing teacher played by Dan Levy. 

I HATE this guy. 

Levy does such a good job of capturing this manipulative, needy, cruel person that my blood boils even after the credits roll. Levy’s Thomas Molloy is a type – the writing teacher whose method of instruction is akin to what happens to newbies at Parris Island: tear ‘em down and make ‘em into Marines. 

The tearing down of aspiring writers is a time honored tradition. Honored is not the word that comes to mind for me. It is the single worst way to teach people how to write. 

Yet, it endures. The results are the shattered dreams of generations of aspiring writers who are told they are not good enough. That they will never make it. That they lack what it takes…

I could go on but you take my point.

I had such a teacher in high school. And I suspect many of you did, too, and perhaps are still haunted by them.

Nothing good has ever come from a writer teacher discouraging you. Nothing. 

Ever.

So with thanks to Dan Levy for capturing the insidious evil of such teachers so deftly, I’d like to offer this advice: if you have, or have had such a teacher you are to ignore them. Nod. Say thank you. And forget what they say. 

Every good writing teacher I know has been encouraging. They have also all been very good and successful writers.

You want to be a writer. Be a writer. No one can or should be allowed to stop you. Don’t let them. 

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.