Reading Elmore Leonard.

I paid some attention when Elmore Leonard died, but the truth is that I'd never read any Elmore Leonard books. I toyed with the idea of ordering an Elmore Leonard book, but I hadn't pulled the trigger. But then I was tearing everything out of the bookcases in the room where we just redid the floors. My agenda is to get all our books onto the existing bookshelves, a process that's involved filling 8 shopping bags with books to be taken to Half Price Books for recycling.

And what the hell? I find an Elmore Leonard book. See:



Of all the Elmore Leonard books that somebody — not me — might have left in the house, I find "Bandits." This solves the problem of which Elmore Leonard book to order. I start reading "Bandits." I get about 15 pages in and I'm onto his game. Not saying it's not a good game. It is. Not putting down people who enjoy reading this kind of thing. I'm just saying it's not my kind of thing to read. If I had to write a novel — and I'm always getting ideas about novels that could be written — I'd get a bang out of writing like this. It's an easy way to fill out a lot of pages, even as you make your target readers feel that it's all very fast moving. I am not one of those target readers. For me, it's slow going.

What he's doing is: He has a story. Something that happened in the past. We're hearing 2 guys talk about whatever 2 guys would be talking about while doing whatever it is they're doing. In this case — in the case of "Bandits" — what they're doing is preparing a corpse for burial. So there's this whole sideline routine, telling us about some area of human expertise, which you could find out about in a couple minutes reading Wikipedia or stumbling onto an episode of "How It's Made." And as these guys talk, it slips out, every half page or so, some little dribble of information about whatever that thing was that happened in the past. You're supposed to care. What the hell happened? Who was this dead guy and who was that lady he was with and so forth. I'm just not the kind of person who cares.

A writer who wanted to take the trouble to write out descriptions of this and that might show us some event unfolding so we picture it, seemingly as it happened. But here, the thing already happened, and 2 guys are talking, while they're doing this other thing, which is an ordinary thing that's somewhat interesting to hear details about, preparing a corpse for burial. That's a great formula for having fun writing, and I know many readers find that fun to read. But I'm thinking: There's some damned thing that already happened, that could be told in a few sentences, and I'm supposed to hang out in this blather and catch the bits of the story as they float by. What's my motivation?

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.

Reprinted on the occasion of his death. After all the rules, he has one more rule, which purportedly sums up all the rules: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." I love that.

Of the more specific rules, I'm strangely fond of #6:

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

You can tell he doesn't just mean don't use “suddenly” and “all hell broke loose.” He means don't use any of the typical words writers use to nudge us to get excited.

I like Rule #10 too:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Here's the whole book, in case I skipped something.

"When have I ever criticized anyone’s fetish? I am a libertarian."

"Go right ahead — set up plastic figurines of 1950s-era moppets to bow down to in the privacy of your boudoir. No one will scold! Then whip down to the kitchen to heat up those foil-wrapped TV dinners. I still gaze back fondly at Swanson’s fried-chicken entree. The twinkly green peas! The moist apple fritter! Meg Ryan — the spitting image of all those perky counselors at my Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Gwyneth Paltrow — a simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs. I will leave you to your retro pursuits while I dash off to moon over multiracial Brazilian divas."

Says Camille Paglia, reacting to the Salon interviewer's question "Why do you come down so hard on skinny white girls? Your views on sexuality leave so much room for individuality, so why is it so bad if I am attracted to Meg Ryan or Gwyneth Paltrow?"

My first thought was: Who can talk like that — spontaneously spluttering alliteration like "simpering sorority" and "moon over multiracial" and sumptuously sprinkling images like field-hockey-stick legs and foil-wrapped peas and fried chicken? But then I saw that this was all done in writing: "I spoke with Paglia by email." Spoke, yeah. I get it.

All these words are well-chosen. So: "moppet." Was Paglia professing acceptance of sexualizing children? What "1950s-era moppets" could she be referring to? Just the girls she happens to remember from Girl Scout camp and college? The (unlinkable) OED defines moppet as "A baby; a young child, esp. a girl; a darling, a favourite (freq. as a term of endearment). Also (depreciative): a frivolous or gaudily dressed woman." Here are some historical examples:

?1608   S. Lennard tr. P. Charron Of Wisdome iii. xiv. 482   A simple instinct..according to which parents loue..their children, though deformed..and vse them like moppets, or little apes....
1746   P. Francis & W. Dunkin tr. Horace Satires i. iii. 64   Is he of dwarfish and abortive size? ‘Sweet little moppet’, the fond father cries....
1801   C. Smith Lett. Solitary Wanderer II. 10   While the most insipid moppet that ever looked in a glass is preferred to one of those reasoning damsels.

I'll assume she's referring to women — not children — but disparaging women who are thought cute because of their girl-like gestures and get-ups. Feel free to fetishize them, she says, claiming not to be criticizing and flattering herself for dashing and mooning and fetishizing the racial other, which she implies is not retro.

"No one will scold!" Oh, no? But she does scold, doesn't she? She claims superiority. Finding Gwyneth Paltrow sexy is like finding an old TV dinner tasty. But she's not criticizing! Far be it from her, a libertarian, to knock anybody's sexuality.

***

This topic of the difference between speaking and writing happened to come up twice on this blog yesterday. First, in "Like I said...," I quoted Janet Malcolm about the difference between the written word and the transcribed spoken word, which she calls "tape-recorderese." She says novelists and journalists continue to write dialogue in a form that we might receive as the equivalent of speech, but that has been changed and adapted into something more like the written word.

Second, I noted what some linguists had said about Elmore Leonard, that he used the "tough guy" writing style of telling the story through the dialogue of the characters. The criticism was that it forced him to restrict his characters to the kind of people who talk a lot and to miss out on more thoughtful, quiet types. If you look at what Janet Malcolm said, you can see a problem with this criticism, which assumes that the novelist renders speech the way it would occur in real life. In fact, there are all sorts of approaches you could use, within the "tough guy" style, to include non-chatterbox characters. The reader doesn't expect to read what a tape recorder would have picked up in real life. The reader will reject fakeness at some point, but written dialogue routinely departs from reality. It's expected, and — when it's done well — desirable.

And now we encounter Camille Paglia, writing her side of a spoken-word like dialogue, but veering way into the realm of the obviously written. She wants — I believe — to present herself as fast-talking, free-wheeling, sexy, wise and witty. But she went too far this time. It's just too neat. Too tidy. It had to be planned. It was the peas. The peas that gave her away. The twinkly green peas. Green wasn't enough. No! Had to be twinkly. Just couldn't resist. See, that's what I'm thinking. Twinkly green peas? Who says twinkly green peas? Who says simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs? She'd like you to think she says simpering "sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs." Once you start to notice that kind of thing, it's nothing but.

"Over the years, we've discussed Elmore Leonard at least as often as any other writer..."

Says Language Log (on the occasion of Leonard's death). What was it about Leonard's writing that caught the linguist's attention? There are a bunch of links to old posts. I clicked on "Elmore's Adverbs":

Yesterday I objected to Terrence Rafferty's description of Elmore Leonard's writing style as "no gassy speeches, just behavior in all its unaccountable variety"; and I even did a tiny stylometric experiment to support my impression that his characters -- the heroes as well as the villains -- are in fact unusually talky....

It turns out that I could instead have simply made an argument ad auctoritatem. Andrew Brown from Helmintholog sent in a link to his post "St. Elmore's Fire" (10/8/2005), in which he quoted this passage from B.R. Myers' review of The Hot Kid in the November 2005 Atlantic ("The Prisoner of Cool"):

Though pioneered a century ago by the English dandy Ronald Firbank, and then popularized by a man whose first name was Evelyn, the technique of letting conversation carry a story is regarded in America as the tough guy’s way to write a novel, and Leonard makes no secret of his pride in it. Unfortunately, it compels him (as it did Firbank and Waugh) to stick to talkative characters. This excludes the true professionals on both sides of the law, leaving us with small-time cops and ex-cons who rarely keep quiet long enough to seem cool. They’re street-smart for sure, but although the recurring interjection “The fuck’m I doing here?” certainly puts Sartre in a nutshell, no one seems to think about anything, at least not anything interesting.