The Way the World Works

  (2001)

  I Said to Myself

  One day I saw a groundhog eating a clover blossom. It chewed it up quickly and then, in the quiet that follows a swallowed mouthful, it lifted its head up and froze, listening for danger. There wasn’t any, so it moved forward to the next stalk. Its fur was kind of baggy, but sleek. I looked at its childishly ineffectual paws, and then I remembered that a month earlier I’d seen two big groundhogs sunning themselves in another part of the yard, down by the rhubarb. They’d had tails that looked like the handles of Revere saucepans. “I wonder if this one has a tail that looks like a Revere saucepan, too,” I said to myself, waiting for the creature to turn a little so that I could see its hindquarters. In a minute, it did turn, and I was able to verify that the tail was black, whereas the rest of the animal was a light brown, and, yes, it had a curve that looked quite a lot like a saucepan handle, though without the little metal ring at the end.

  “Ah, good, that’s confirmed,” I thought, turning away from the window. Or did I think that? For I hadn’t actually said to myself, in an interior whisper, “Ah, good, that’s confirmed.” Really I’d just made a quick mental nod—not even a grunt, but just a sort of pleasant checking-off of the box next to a momentary visual curiosity directed at the groundhog’s tail, conjoined with an image of a matte-finish handle in profile. Words had had little to do with it. Still, if someone had asked me what had gone through my mind just then, I would have gestured at the window and talked briefly about the groundhog anatomy, and then I would probably have translated the mental checking-off moment into spoken English as “Ah, good,” etc.

  It was cheating, in a sense, true—but what choice did I have? The gulf between words and thoughts is unbridgeable, and yet we must bridge it constantly. One way writers have developed to circumvent the problem is to report all thinking indirectly. Here is the sort of substitution you can make:

  DIRECT: “I just don’t know anymore,” I thought.

  INDIRECT: I was no longer entirely confident that I knew.

  If you’re a novelist and working in the third person, the change can work something like this:

  DIRECT: “That hurts,” Ed reflected.

  INDIRECT: Nothing that Ed had ever experienced had prepared him for the anguish of that syringe.

  You see? A paraphrase acknowledges itself as close to but not identical with the thing (in this case the thought) that is phrased, and for some writers, a well-formed paraphrase is entirely sufficient.

  It’s more than movies offer, after all. The poor movie director: What does he have to work with? Things like grimaces and winks and head tosses of various kinds, and camera angles. A writer can say, “Hope died within him.” The director, on the other hand, must have the actor sit on the floor and look desolate while the camera moves in—in movie code, the fact that the person is sitting on the floor signals that a low point has been reached, a point so low that even the comfort of a chair is unwelcome. Or a movie will have the despairer suddenly become enraged, which is more filmable: he sweeps some figurines off of a shelf and then, after this release, sinks to the floor. Or the hopeless person will bounce a ball expressionlessly against a garage door, or toss acorns into the river: the moviegoer translates this mechanically repeated activity as “the numbness that follows despair.” The music helps a lot, too.

  How clumsy, how broad, how expensive these cinematographic sign-systems seem, when compared to the dental trays full of pryers and pickers and angled mirrors that are the fiction writer’s rightful inheritance. Any mind Tolstoy wants to enter, he enters. It costs him nothing but a drop of ink. In fact, merely by using indirect thought-reportage, Tolstoy can enter two minds at the same time:

  But for all that, as is often the way with men who have chosen different callings, though in discussion each of them might justify the other’s career, at heart he despised it. Each believed that the life he himself led was the only real life and the life led by his friend was nothing but an illusion.

  All the camera angles in the world couldn’t help you here.

  And yet Tolstoy wasn’t content merely to offer indirect thoughts. He was one of our very best introspectors, alert to uncatalogably fine gradations of moral compromise and motivic ambiguity, and sometimes he wanted us to overhear mental states rather than to read secondary paraphrases of them. So he has his characters think, “We shall see,” or “Oh dear!” or “Where was I?” or “Can it really be true?” Sometimes their inner voices are quite chatty:

  ‘If this is the case,’ he said to himself, ‘I ought to think it over and make up my mind, and not let myself be carried away like a boy by the impulse of the moment.’

  Sometimes they are jealously chatty:

  ‘I cannot be made unhappy because a despicable woman has committed a crime. I merely have to find the best way out of the painful situation in which she has placed me. And find it I shall,’ he said to himself, his face growing darker and darker.

  Did Tolstoy believe that his characters really said this sort of thing to themselves? I can’t believe that he believed it, any more than Shakespeare believed that people make life-or-death decisions in blank verse, with one hand on their chest and the other held out sideways. I believe that if I were able to tap Tolstoy on the shoulder and ask him why he had written these particular lines this way, he would say to me, “Well, I was trying to record what my characters would have told me if I had been able to tap them on the shoulder and ask them at that instant what words were in them.”

  Actually, though, Tolstoy would probably say to me, “I have no patience for questions of this kind. Leave me now to walk barefoot among the birches.”

  In any event, Tolstoy is, fortunately, not the only writer to understand that the reader’s bond of sympathy and intimacy with a character must be reinforced, goosed slightly, every so often, by a directly quoted brain-whisper. The character must say things that only we, and nobody else in the book, can hear. It doesn’t have to happen much.

  Some children’s writers do it well, and there’s pedagogy in this, perhaps: quoting thoughts is an efficient way of teaching how to match spoken language with invisible states of mind—it’s like holding up an apple you can’t see and saying “apple.” Masters of the ghost story, too, rely on the technique to create a quick shudder, as in this from M. R. James:

  ‘What should I do now,’ he thought, ‘if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings?’

  Note the punctuation in these passages: they have quotation marks. These writers evidently felt that, as with real speech, psychic speech needs visible delimiters to set it off from its surroundings. (In the original Russian, Tolstoy used little French-style brackets, but the effect of enclosure is the same.) I have spent some hours recently foraging around in paperbacks, and I can report that practically all the big-name writers through 1930 or so—people, I mean, like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis—felt the need to put their characters’ thoughts within quotes from time to time. (Sinclair Lewis: “She said to herself, ‘As though I cared whether I’m seen with this fat phonograph!’” Willa Cather: “She remembered him and said to herself: ‘I don’t think I ever heard a nicer voice than that boy had.’”)

  Now writers don’t do this. I asked a copy-editor friend how the literary world was punctuating its thoughts these days, and he polled some copy-editor friends of his. One wrote back: “I haven’t seen quotation marks on thoughts in at least five years.”

  Why did they die out? Joyce and Faulkner—they’re at the root of it. Ulysses has great blobs of transcribed thought, but the quotation marks themselves are lacking:

  Mr Bloom moved forward raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Timeball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s Parallax. I never exactly understood.
There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.

  Not only are the quotation marks gone, but there is no obliging tag such as “he reflected” or “he said to himself” inserted after the first interior sentence to help us keep track of where we are. “Oh, good,” said Joyce’s readers to themselves, brushing Hi Ho cracker crumbs from their laps, “now all the artificial barriers can come down, and interior and exterior reality can ooze together into one sense-perceptual fondue.”

  But, again, did Mr. Bloom actually, literally think, “There’s a priest,” followed by, “Could ask him”? I can’t imagine that he did. Mr. Bloom’s eye lighted on a figure in clerical dress—a visual, not verbal, mind-event—and the possibility of asking the figure a question briefly arose and was dismissed within him. Joyce’s way looked new, but he was doing what the traditional novelists did: hanging out raw, wet harvestings of visual and emotive protoplasm to dry on grammatical clotheslines, the only difference being that there is in Ulysses a great deal more dried protoplasm. Bloom’s thought-residues are (once you get into the swing of the book) sometimes startling and beautiful, but they aren’t any less artificial than when, say, M. R. James has a character mentally scope out, within quotes, his evening plans. In fact, they’re more artificial. Here’s how M. R. James did it:

  ‘I might walk home tonight along the beach,’ he reflected—‘yes, and take a look—there will be light enough for that—at the ruins of which Disney was talking.’

  Joyce would twist off the knobs of the quotation marks and render the passage something like this:

  The beach way. Might walk home tonight. Disney said the ruins? Templars’ preceptory. Knights in Jerusalem, looters, really. Cries of the maidens. Having their way. Light enough for that.

  And then, while the literary classes were still chewing over this development, Faulkner began an aggressive program of italicizing. Here’s a snip from Light in August:

  That was two years ago, two years behind them now, thinking Perhaps that is where outrage lies. Perhaps I believe that I have been tricked, fooled.

  What was a modernist to do? There was simply no way to reconcile Joyce’s austere depunctuation with the booming self-importance of Faulkner’s typography. Both were excitingly modern, and yet they pointed in opposite directions. Thought transcription was thrown into a state of uncertainty from which it has not yet recovered. Some went naked—

  I too have done my share of social climbing, he thought, with hauteur to spare, defying the Wasps. (Bellow, Herzog)

  To the gallows I go, she said to herself, and had another large drink. (Drabble, The Realms of Gold)

  —while the post-Faulknerians, such as Tom Clancy, reached for italics, which are punchier:

  Julio stood and shouldered his weapon. There was a slight but annoying tinkle from the metal parts as he did so—the ammo belt, Ding thought. Have to keep that in mind. (Clear and Present Danger)

  Sometimes, though, those urgent forward diagonals turned out to have a little too much punch, forcing the reader to interpret a shy, fleeting brain-state as if it were roared out in a hoarse whisper:

  He fumbled his latchkey into its slot, thinking: Now she’ll ask me why I lock my door and I’ll mumble and stumble around, looking for an answer, and seem like a fool.

  In roman type, within quotation marks, this thought-quote could easily be Tolstoy; in italics, however, it is from Stephen King’s The Stand, page 516.

  I suppose there’s no single correct method, but I sometimes wish that the old way would come back. I miss the clarity, the lack of fuss, the innocence. So here’s what I propose. Let’s use quotes for spoken dialogue, as usual, and—once in a while, if it makes sense, not excessively—let’s try using them for interior speech as well. Those who feel ambitious could experiment with double quotes for dialogue and single quotes for thought, since part of the problem is that double quotes sometimes look too heavy to fence off delicate interior states. But that distinction isn’t necessary and it may actually cause further confusion—so, no, skip that. If the words in the thought really do have force and punch, by all means use italics, but if they don’t, don’t. And if you would prefer to use only indirect thought-discourse, fine. Just don’t utterly rule out the blameless embrasure of those curlies. Here’s something I came across in Winnie-the-Pooh:

  Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?”—and sometimes he didn’t know what he was thinking about.

  I’m with Eeyore.

  (2002)

  Defoe, Truthteller

  I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year on a train from Boston to New York. That’s the truth. It’s not a very interesting truth, but it’s true. I could say that I read it sitting on a low green couch in the old smoking room of the Cincinnati Palladium, across from a rather glum-looking Henry Kissinger. Or that I found a beat-up Longman’s 1895 edition of Defoe’s Plague Year in a Dumpster near the Recycle-A-Bicycle shop on Pearl Street when I was high on Guinness and roxies, and I opened it and was drawn into its singular, fearful world, and I sat right down in my own vomit and read the book straight through. It would be easy for me to say these things. But if I did, I would be inventing—and, as John Hersey wrote, the sacred rule for the journalist (or the memoirist, or indeed for any nonfiction writer) is: Never Invent. That’s what makes Daniel Defoe, the founder of English journalism, such a thorny shrub. The hoaxers and the embellishers, the fake autobiographers, look on Defoe as a kind of patron saint. Defoe lied a lot. But he also hated his lying habit, at least sometimes. He said the lying made a hole in the heart. About certain events he wanted truth told. And one event he really cared about was the great plague of 1665, which happened when he was around five years old.

  A Journal of the Plague Year begins quietly, without any apparatus of learnedness. It doesn’t try to connect this recent plague with past plagues. It draws no historical or classical or literary parallels. It just begins: “It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland.” The “I” is not Defoe, but an older proxy, somebody mysteriously named H.F., who says he is a saddler. H.F. lives halfway between Aldgate Church and Whitechapel, “on the left hand or north side of the street.” That’s all we know about him.

  H.F. watches the bills of mortality mount—he keeps track—and he debates with himself whether to stay in town or flee. His brother tells him to save himself, get away. But no, H.F. decides to stay. He listens. He walks around. He sees a man race out of an alley, apparently singing and making clownish gestures, pursued by women and children—surgeons had been at work on his plague sores. “By laying strong caustics on them, the surgeons had, it seems, hopes to break them, which caustics were then upon him, burning his flesh as with a hot iron.” H.F. hears screams—many different kinds of screams, and screeches, and shrieks. In an empty street in Lothbury, a window opens suddenly just over his head. “A woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, ‘Oh! death, death, death!’” There was no other movement. The street was still. “For people had no curiosity now in any case.”

  At the plague’s height, H.F. writes, there were no funerals, no wearing of black, no bells tolled, no coffins. “Whole streets seemed to be desolated,” he says, “doors were left open, windows stood shattering with the wind in empty houses, for want of people to shut them; in a word, people began to give up themselves to their fears, and to think that all regulations and methods were in vain, and that there was nothing to be hoped for but an universal desolation.”

  What do we know about Defoe? Very little. He was one of the most prolific men ever to lift a pen, but he wrote almost nothing about himself. Not many letters have survived. Readers have been attributing and de-attributing Defoe’s anonymous journalism ever since he died, broke, in Ropemaker’s Alley, in 1731. He was almost always writing about someone e
lse—or pretending to be someone else. There are a few engravings of him, and only one surviving prose description. It’s unfriendly—in fact it was a sort of warrant for his arrest, printed in a newspaper when Defoe was wanted by the government on a charge of seditious libel. “He is a middle-sized, spare man,” said the description, “about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown-colored hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” Anyone who could furnish information leading to his apprehension by her majesty’s justices of the peace, said the notice, would receive a reward of fifty pounds.

  We know that Defoe, late in life, wrote the first English novels—Robinson Crusoe in 1719, about a lonely sailor who sees a man’s naked footprint on the beach, and Moll Flanders in January 1722, about a woman who was “twelve year a whore.” We know that he was born about 1660, the son of a London butcher or candlemaker named James Foe. In his twenties, Daniel went into business as a hosier—that is, as a seller of women’s stockings. Trade and speculation went well for a while, then less well, and then he had to hide from his creditors, to whom he owed seventeen thousand pounds. He was rescued by friends on high, and began writing pamphlets and poetry. Soon he was running a large company that made roofing tiles—and the pamphleteering was surprisingly successful. He added a Frenchifying “de” to his name. In 1701 he produced the most-selling poem up to that time, “The True-Born Englishman,” which hymned his native land as a motley nation of immigrants: “Thus, from a mixture of all kinds began / That het’rogenous thing, an Englishman.” Another pamphlet—in which, several decades before Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” he pretended to be a rabid high-churchman who advocated the deportation or hanging of nonconformists—got him clamped in a pillory in 1703 and sent to Newgate Prison.