Bitter Sweet : Suite Française - A Writer’s Lesson

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It’s not that unusual in fiction for dramatic events in an author’s life to enter into the work of fiction that they are creating. It’s perhaps a lot less common when that real life drama is happening at the same time that the work is being written and that the tragic outcome for the author, in this case execution in a Nazi death camp, leads both to a sudden interruption in the narrative and to the manuscript only being discovered and published sixty four years after the author’s death. That alone is perhaps enough to make Irene Némirovsky’s book, Suite Française, an extraordinary story - not enough, perhaps, to make it a great novel and for that you have to add in Némirovsky’s incredible skills as a writer and observer of human behaviour. Given that she was writing the novel with an ever deepening sense of her own death at the hands of the Nazis it is all the more extraordinary that she handles their presence in her novel, and the occupation of France by the Germans, with such humanity and sensitivity and decides to tackle themes in the novel which are far larger than her own personal story.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road - the story of a father and son escaping from the North through a horribly desolate and scorched landscape and heading toward what they hoped to be a safer and less damaged South. The first part of Némirovsky’s book describes the exodus from Paris on the eve of the German invasion and there were many moments while I was reading this part of her novel when I thought of the The Road - a very different book but one that was also able to throw a brilliant light on how human’s can behave when all of the social and cultural props have been removed.

As this blog is about the English language I really concentrated in that post on talking a little about how the rules of English can be bent by an author to achieve certain effects. In this post, along the same lines, I don’t really want to talk about the story or even about the tragic real-life background which it so brilliantly describes - I really think that this is a bitter-sweet pleasure best left up to you as the reader. What I do want to have a quick look at are some of the notes in the Appendix 1 of the book which give an insight into Némirovsky’s writing process and which provide invaluable lessons for anyone who would like to write and that I am hoping all our English4Today Creative Writing Course students will read. Again, I am going to talk about one or two isolated notes that I found revealing about the writing process and after that I’m hoping that you will be interested enough to read the book yourself.

These notes are all taken from Némirovsky’s jottings for the Suite Française and are in Appendix 1 of the book. They need no extra comment from me so I have added them here for you to read and think about in terms of your own writing:

Treating her theme:

If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show but the prosperity that contrasts with it… Contrasts! Yes, there’s something to that, something that can be very powerful and very new.

…it’s like music when you sometimes hear the whole orchestra, sometimes just the violin.

What interests me here is the history of the world.

I must create something great and stop wondering if there’s any point

In spite of everything, the thing that links all of these people together is our times, solely our times. Is that really enough? I mean: is this link sufficiently felt?

On the one hand, I would like a kind of general idea. On the other … Tolstoy, for example, with one idea spoils everything. Must have people, human reactions, and that’s all…

What’s important - the relationship between the different parts of the work…..

All in all, make sure to have variety on one hand and harmony on the other…Pursuit - people in love - laughter, tears etc. It’s this type of rhythm I want to achieve.

The movement of the masses must give the book its worth.

What would be good all in all (but is it doable?) is to always show the advance of the German army in the scenes not seen from the perspective of the characters.

By unifying, always simplifying the book (in its entirety) must result in a struggle between individual destiny and collective destiny. Must not take sides.

The most important thing and most interesting thing here is the following: the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.

On research:

What I need to have:

• an extremely detailed map of France or Michelin Guide
• the complete collection of several French and foreign newspapers between 1 June and 1 July
• a work on porcelain
• June birds, their names and songs
• A mystical book (belonging to the godfather) Father Brechard

Comments on her text and characters:

1. Will - he talks for too long
2. Death of the priest - schmaltzy
3. Nimes? Why not Toulouse which I know?
4. In general, not enough simplicity

- keep it simple. Tell what happens to people and that’s all

… convince yourself that the sequences in Storm, if I may say so, must be, are a masterpiece. Work on it tirelessly.

I think I should replace the strawberries with forget-me-nots. It seems impossible tobring cherry trees in blossom and ripe strawberries together in the same season.

Adagio: Must rediscover all these musical terms …

This, as I’ve said, is a small sampling of her notes while writing Suite Française and I’d encourage you to get hold of the book and read both the novel and her notes to see just how carefully crafted the book is. In any case, I think that this sampling shows that the writing process is one of constant revision and questioning, testing of ideas, reduction of the complex to the simple and of careful research.

You may also be interested in:

• New York Times review of the book
• BBC article on the book and on Némirovsky’s daughter who ‘discovered’ the manuscript.
  
• Amazon page for Suite Francaise
• The Road : Previous post referred to above

Sentence Structure : Writing fuel-efficient sentences

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Question from Rima in the USA:

This sentence is driving us crazy! I realize it could be called compound, complex, compound-complex, or just crazy, but I have to ask: Is this sentence technically written wrongly?

“In Canada, the Smith family of Toronto, who wanted to replace their old automobile with a new fuel-efficient vehicle that could travel greater distances at the same cost, sought advice from another Toronto native, Ed Johnson, who assisted engineers in designing what became the Smith-Johnson automobile, which the Smiths used for all of their family vacations Holiday-Family-Destinations to travel as far as Mexico City, Mexico.”

What do you call a sentence like this?

Answer:

Hi Rima. Well, what I would call this sentence is ‘too long‘!

Good reasons for changing punctuation and structure can often be found by reading out loud - if you’re out of breath at the end of the sentence I’d say it needs changing!

It is compound and it is complex but more than anything else it is a jumble of clauses and sub-clauses that make it nearly impossible to focus on which clause refers to which subject and object. My advice would be to re-write the sentence into several shorter, clearer sentences. One way would be like this:

In Canada, the Smith family of Toronto wanted to replace their old authomobile with a new fuel-efficient vehicle that could travel greater distances at the same cost. They sought advice from another Toronto native, Ed Johnson. Mr Johnson assisted engineers in designing what became the Smith-Johnson automobile. The Smiths used this vehicle for all of their family vacations and to travel as far as Mexico City, Mexico.

In terms of the word count the paragraph is about the same but by breaking it up into shorter sentences we’ve been able to clarify each statement and provide an easier to read version of your ‘marathon’ sentence example!

The Road : Rolling Your Own English

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In previous posts I’ve talked about how English is a living, changing and very flexible language. Contributing to this is the way that writers often change, stretch and bend the framework of language - grammar, vocabulary and syntax - to make a better fit with their vision.If you are learning English as a second language it is important to remember this as you will often come across cases in literature, popular songs, poems and journalism where the ‘rules‘ of English seem to have been broken or bent way out of shape! I get a lot of emails from our members who are confused after listening to a song or reading a book and finding grammatical errors all over the place. This doesn’t mean that ‘anything goes‘ when you write English but it does mean that some writers will push vocabulary, grammar and syntax around to get it to do exactly what they want it to do.

A few days ago I wrote a post about Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on the phonetic alphabet and finished by making some remarks about another writer, Cormac McCarthy and his book, The Road, saying that I felt that we can use language to break outside of a straight and narrow interpretation of reality and experience; contrary perhaps to McLuhan’s belief that we are straight-jacketed by our language.

By the way, if you are a student taking one of the English4Today Writing Courses, or interested in writing in any way, then I’d recommend reading The Road as a perfect illustration of how ‘less can be more‘.

Now, I don’t want to turn this blog into a muddy pool of dull literary criticism (in fact, tomorrow I’ll turn back to some of the grammar questions that have been sent in as they are piling up again … apologies to those who are waiting for their answer). If you studied English literature at university or college you’ll remember how boring it is to listen to the critical dissection of a great novel or poem that has moved you and how difficult it is to shake the habit of dissection once you’ve had the training drilled into you. I mention this because the friends who lent me The Road made the mistake of asking me if I liked the book. I started to see that glazed look on their faces when I swung into the ‘linear and progressive’ etc. … the look that says, ‘How can I get to the door without him noticing!’ - so I’ll keep this short and try to strangle the desire to take myself too seriously!

So, I’ll start by saying read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for the story which is bleak, chilling, deeply moving and beautifully told, and perhaps stay clear of the language and literature ‘mechanics’ who just want to take it apart piece by piece. Which may, of course, mean that you stop reading this here and go get a coffee instead.

However, picking up my tools, what I want to look at is how McCarthy’s breaking of the ‘rules’ creates the atmosphere of the book and how breaking the rules can sometimes work!

The Road, very briefly, is the story of a father and son journeying south in an ash-covered, burnt and poisoned, post-apocalyptic world where almost everything that we know of our world has disappeared and where humans have been reduced to amoral, cruel, cannibalistic scavengers desperately trying to survive in landscapes where there is virtually nothing left to sustain life with the exception of rare scatterings of left-overs from the past.

McCarthy chooses to write this story using an equally startling and spare style. The paragraphs are short and almost staccato like, the dialogue reduced to very short sentences often with little content. Perhaps because all the points of reference for language - things, feelings, emotions - have gone and there is almost nothing left to say. McCarthy also changes the way we punctuate prose - pulling out another reference point - an effect which seems to flatten the dialogue making it as dulled as the landscape it echoes against. Have a look at this conversation between the father and his son:

After a while he said: You mean you wish that you were dead.

Yes.

You musnt say that.

But I do.

Dont say it. It’s a bad thing to say.

I cant help it.

I know. But you have to.

How do I do it?

I dont know.

What do you notice? Well, probably the first thing you noticed was that there are no inverted commas or speech marks telling us when a chunk of speech from someone starts and ends or breaking the writer’s description or comment off from the dialogue - it just isn’t there - everything, much like the landscape they are in, runs into each other and has a flat, sameness to it. McCarthy is breaking a pretty fundamental stylistic rule here but it makes the language do what he wants. The next thing you may have noticed is that the contractions are not marked with an apostrophe - dont, cant, mustnt. I don’t want to hammer the ‘why‘ of McCarthy’s intention - it’s perhaps better that you think about this yourself - but I do want to note, again, that the breaking of a fundamental rule of English grammar creates a new effect and isn’t, of course, a result of the writer not knowing enough about grammar. You may have also noticed that he does use the apostrophe for the contraction of ‘it is‘ to it’s - and in other parts of the book you can see that there is a real inconsistency in this ‘flattening‘ of punctuation. I don’t really have an answer to why he would write cant in one place and you’d in another. Maybe it is intended to show how language, like everything else in this new world, is mutating, being reduced, fragmenting - but again, this is something for you to decide after reading the book.

Early on in the book there is a short passage that describes what you, as the reader, feel all the way through the book:

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of the thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.

This is McLuhan’s world inverted where the word no longer points meaninglessly to a thing but where the thing no longer exists and the word, still existing, is rendered useless and meaningless. And McCarthy manages to make us understand this not only by using the words he has available to describe this terrible new world but by taking away from what we accept as perhaps timeless - accepted forms of grammar and punctuation - twisting them and reducing them in the same way as everything else in the landscape that they now have to inhabit and describe.

This is just a small glimpse into how McCarthy breaks the rules of English to deliver his story more powerfully. And, again, it is really to illustrate, for all of you worried English language learners, that the rules that surround the grammars of languages are not as inflexible as you may think and that it is in the breaking of them that great expression is often achieved.

I’m going to leave you with that and an encouragement to read The Road and to decide for yourself whether McCarthy is a great writer or desperately in need of one of our English4Today Grammar Courses!

Is the phonetic alphabet really that powerful?

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In an earlier post I talked a little about how an understanding of English grammar can take you a long way to being a better communicator and a better learner. In this post I want to take a quick look at some ideas that push the way we use language, or perhaps language uses us, to shape the world around us in very specific ways.A little while ago I was re-reading Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and came across his thoughts on the influence of the building ‘blocks’ of English - the phonetic alphabet. I thought I’d throw some of these in here even if you may feel they take the case for the power of the alphabet a bit too far!

Our alphabet, according to McLuhan, where ‘semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds‘ (unlike, for example, Chinese ideograms) is the ‘secret of Western power over man and nature alike‘.

McLuhan’s argument is that the phonetic alphabet breaks up into a linear and progressive mode experience that is, of its nature, not at all linear or progressive and that this is why:

‘ Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant,
and our military programs been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet
in their technique of transformation and control by making all situations
uniform and continuous.’

His argument is that our language is at the very heart of how and why we do things the way we do. It constantly shapes and dictates our actions and perceptions. It’s a bit of a knock against the argument that we have much of a free will , that we really have much control over the way that we perceive and develop the world outside of ourselves.

But is he right? There is a powerful collection of English poetry and literature that argues that despite being saddled with a phonetic alphabet that ties us to the linear and progressive we are able to use language to convey the timeless, the non-linear, and the deeply experiential and to express that more holistic universe that, according to McLuhan, our language stops us from fully perceiving.

McLuhan’s world where we have carefully constructed our complex reality around ‘semantically meaningless letters … used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds‘ is a place where language has to find a way to describe and organize reality as we currently know it - rich in species, objects and ideas and for which we have developed an extensive vocabulary to describe it along with other linguistic tools such as metaphor and allusion to reach into those areas that the linear and progressive can’t get into.

Later in the week I want to have a look at another book, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, where language, in the face of a post-apocalyptic world devoid of this rich diversity and variety, is stripped back to its bones and where most of the vocabulary that we use with such confidence is rendered meaningless or impotent. In many ways, this second book, redeems, language, our language, if only by showing what we would lose should it no longer be able or required to describe the complex fragile, world that we live in - linear and progressive or not!