Author: Amory Crane

This past week the fates conspired to divert me from that most urgent and vital of my occupations — that is to say, matters literary — and in so doing have deprived me of those few pleasures as I am currently afforded. For such purposes they contrived a state of affairs whereby manual labour was not only a request likely to made but, ultimately, required of me. I know of course I should be glad of it; for no doubt the interminable lifting of heavy furniture contributed greatly to my current diet of calories, and one is in any case conscious that even if a momentary lapse has been allowed to occur in one’s search for a wife, that the discerning eyes of prospective Mesdames would never be so reckless. Nevertheless, I would be lying were I not to say it was the persistent thought of returning to my study which kept me going through all the unremitting hours of physical tedium. Such visions as I could muster had something of the thirsty man’s of an oasis about them. Each time I believed the labours near completion, new obstacles would rise to take their place. The visions would then quickly dissolve. Such, indeed, were the components of my mirage in those wasted hours: the creased and tattered pages of all my books, the reclining chair, the spilt and scattered shavings of various pencils, the heap of empty ink cartridges, the list of titles which I am to review, and the ever-increasing piles of notes, all of which lie beneath a veil of stale tobacco smoke and make up the accoutrements to my daily feast of words.

Alas, the fates have a rich and eager cruelty. For on the final day of these brawny labours, lifting yet another heavy burden, I pulled a muscle in my back. After much agony in getting there, I was forced to retire to my bed. At first, perhaps selfishly, I saw this as an opportunity. My column was due after all, and this state of affairs would at least allow me to write unmolested by even those most ordinary and ubiquitous of claims upon my time. There remained just one impediment: a taut and lingering pain in the upper regions of my back. In order to effect its relief I took a muscle relaxant which, we might say, was so efficient as to remove the pains and stresses of life entirely. The result was that for the remainder of the weekend I lay about near incapacitated in something like an easeful stupor. What all this says about matters of human psychology, and on whether our stresses and anxieties act like hard props on which our daily lives rely, I have little clue. Yet, wavering in and out of something approximating consciousness, I nevertheless managed in my more wilful moments to reach for whichever books came to hand, and to read from them in fevered bursts.

That said, I could not concentrate for long on the sociology textbook from which I have been periodically reading as of late, nor on the poetical works of Dryden, whom I love; yet, as it happened, E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which has lain beside my bed for some time now unread, unopened since my undergraduate days, seemed in its conversational address and appeal to a subject with which I am intimately engaged to offer a worthy companion in my convalescence. Between then my little relapses into oblivion, I read a chapter or two of that series of transcribed lectures and reminded myself of what in turns both impressed and disappointed me in the work when I read it the first time, picking it up in those heady days when I first seriously approached the business of novel writing. Such phrases as I half-remembered still struck me as judicious, and perhaps even more charming on reacquaintance. ‘The novel is sogged with humanity,’ is surely an apt and delicious description, and Forster’s readings of various writers as astute as they are provocatively curtailed: ‘Moby Dick is full of meanings; its meaning is a different problem’. Certainly the pleasure of such a work is in its litany of barely disguised prejudices, and in testing them one finds the subtle amusement of bolstering the defences of one’s own. I confess I lean towards Moll Flanders over Robinson Crusoe for much the same reasons as Forster does, and disagree vehemently with his assessment of Henry James, though find his arguments instructive in coming to a deeper appreciation of The Master’s achievements. Nevertheless, what intrigued me most is Forster’s approach; and not only that, but the manner by which he illustrates it.

Forgoing what he describes as the sphere of the scholar, who because of his alleged mastery of facts ‘can contemplate the river of time,’ Forster opts instead for a means by which the novel can be seen not as a series of interlocking and consequential events, each one leading inevitably into the next, but as a single object with many sides. This lends the series of lectures its title: Aspects of the Novel rather than Instances of the Novel. For what concerns Forster is less a progression of artistic movements — sentimentalism, romanticism, realism, symbolism, naturalism, modernism —and how each makes its mark upon the form; but rather to boil down his subject to its very essence, and to confront his audience with the question of what, among this vast, vital, and heterogeneous form, is intrinsic to its existence. That the results are mixed, or perhaps it is more charitable to say perfunctory, is of little consequence for these purposes. For what struck me even then in my stupefied state was how unique a mode of approach it perhaps is. Or, if not exactly unique in the approach, then at least unique in its isolating quite so thoroughly what differentiates the manner by which a practicing novelist or short story writer reads from that of an academic.

I alluded above to the manner by which Forster illustrates this difference, which is worth quoting:

Another image suits our powers: that of all the novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation… [Imagine] that all the novelists are at work together in a circular room.

Certainly this is a charming image, and one which subtly describes the concerns of the active writer. For what sits at the forefront of his mind when he steps from his writing desk to retrieve a novel is how did this fellow get his effects? How does he move me so? These are questions all novelists begin by asking themselves before attempting to unpick the writing which has so moved them, and may just be what coalesces with that adolescent desire to scribble and prolongs it for far longer than perhaps is prudent. For in reading Jane Austen one minute and Brett Easton Ellis the next, the writer looking to learn has little interest in the exact manner by which the realism of Balzac begot that of Flaubert, or any other similar questions — not unimportant questions either — but is merely attempting to divine what there is to be learned from a close appreciation of their arrangement of words. It does not matter to the writer that Henry Fielding died over 270 years ago, and that the concerns of his day differ vastly from those of our own. On the one hand, he wrote in the same form as does the writer of today, and wanted to move his readers by the same manner of producing a long story in imaginative prose. On the other, we ask ourselves whether those concerns were, in fact, very different from our own, when, like Forster does to the form itself, we reduce them down to their chief essence. That one can read Tom Jones and be moved suggests not. The writer takes heart in this even more so than the common reader, who finds it astonishing that such men of times ancient can move them as much — perhaps even more so — than the chief passions of their own lives, for it means they are teachers whose words remain fresh. So while the image of all the world’s writers, past, present, perhaps even future, sitting in a circular room and composing their works simultaneously is obviously antithetical to good scholarship, it nonetheless serves a purpose. Put simply, it discloses the permanent presence not only of past works in a writer’s life, but of the perennial concerns beset by all men who take up the task of composing fiction. 

It was all this that I was pondering, between sleep and reading, when, in a break from both I was scrolling my X feed and happened upon a post whereby someone had shared the preparatory sketches of an artist — I forget which. This struck me, and made me realise something the painter has over the writer, in that there is a particular charm in viewing the way in which a painter works up his effects in multiple instances. To see a cherub, or a series of faces, or even floating limbs upon the page — studies for a larger composition, say, or even an earlier and more swiftly composed iteration of a later theme — can have its own aesthetic pleasure. Yet it is also enlightening from a pure layman’s perspective, which is to see the manner by which a painter goes about producing in constituent parts the canvas by which we are, in the end, so moved. I wondered then whether there was some means of replicating this in the mode of writing and I hereby share an experiment. 

Readers of mine might well know I am an aspirant novelist myself. The subject of my current work need not bother us here, but instead I had in mind sharing a brief glimpse of a work suspended (perhaps abandoned) for the purpose of showing the manner by which I introduce a character and ‘get her in’ on the page. This may be of interest — I will not claim benefit — for the simple reason that unlike a settled work, these are the still conditional words, and variants thereof, of a work currently in progress. They are not, as the words of those who make up our pantheon of heroes, like holy gospel, but were written fairly recently, and whose effort to effect I can still recall. Here then is my little sketch or ‘study’ of a character who plays a part of much significance in the plot.

The scene is thus: two men, one young and just out of university, one middle-aged and a priest, have just met in the courtyard of a church, and after a brief exchange find themselves walking the same way down a country lane.

Then, slowly, like the first steps towards a restful dream, a sound entered the universe that Miles could neither locate nor recognise, though he had heard it innumerable times before. It was a series of clacks, staccato, jaunty, rhythmic, growing louder and more pronounced, and he wondered if a line of cricket nets had not been erected surreptitiously in the next field.

The priest, wiping the sweat from his brow, stood on his toes to investigate. Straining further, he leaned forward until he was in danger of being swallowed up by the vegetation. Then he said:

‘Is that. . . Ah yes!’

A dark bobbing dome loomed over the confusion of hedge. For a moment Miles thought a seal had surfaced and begun paddling gently across a dark green sea. As it climbed the slope, a short precious nose, hardened by concentration, turned on them like the prow of a ship. The priest waved. A slender arm mirrored the gesture. Finally, a horse trotted proudly into view, snorting like an old steam engine pulling into station. When it cleared the corner its rider’s lips swelled to an unaffected smile. The priest stepped back, calling out:

‘Afternoon, Molly.’

The young woman sat atop this vast beast brought it to a stop in front of the two men, stood as they were at the side of the road. She was dressed in a blue quilted gilet and riding breeches, and pulled back from beneath her helmet was a glistening sheaf of pale hair the colour of winter barley, blown across her shoulder like a fox fur. It was hard, later, for Miles to put in words what then passed through his mind as he stood watching this young woman enter his life. What before was absent was now as present as the sun; what was everything had become the merest setting of a jewel. Landscape became portrait. For the scene which only a few moments earlier had beguiled him was now supplanted by the long shapely legs in pale silhouette against the burnished flanks of her horse; by the certain, confident poise of her back and arms; the high athletic bust; and, beneath the rim of her helmet, the large dark eyes that wore the unblemished sheen of long concentrated exertion.

The question — the only question then — that I must ask the reader here is can you see Molly? Does she, in fact, live? This question has a few facets to it. For instance, many readers will notice this is a moment of elevated register and consciously rhetorical. We are certainly made to understand this is a meeting of much import, and its significance is brought to bear on the text by Miles’s feelings for the girl, both in that moment and perhaps, as indicated, in recollection. The question then becomes one not just of ‘can the reader see Molly’ in this little moment, but does she live while being fixated by this elevated tone, which is, after all, a reflection of Miles’s own vision?

I leave that for you, dear readers, to decide. For much as I would like to unpack this scene further, it strikes me that the most enticing part of such sketches as I described earlier is their very swift, incomplete nature — fragmentary, even. I suppose if I were to leave you with only one question, and it is the very question I ask myself when reading this paragraph, and all those I am composing for my current novel, it is this: what is the effect being produced? This is no idle question even for so brief a passage. For the reader has an advantage over the writer. He can read along, swept away by the pleasure in the plot or setting, or even something as diffuse as the personality of the writer shining through the page, and only afterwards, at the end of a chapter, or the entire book, might ask himself what indeed was its chief effect upon his mind. The writer has no such luxury. He must agonise over every word and comma, conscious he must attend to the smallest of minutiae as well as the overall picture. The poet at least, as recompense for his labours, can have his every word and syllable attended to. Alas, how much work goes into the merest sentence which is passed over without a second thought. . . .

Oh yes, pity the poor novelist!

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.