Never Before, Never Again

Never before, never again

Spring evening by the sea

The same as other days

Yet not the same

This bird, these clouds, this tree

Never before, never again.

Waves continuously lap the shore

Soporific, rhythmic, eternal,

Yet never precisely the same as before.

The sky, the clouds, the light

Each moment of this unique dusk

Approaching night.

Dear busy mind,

Filled up with thoughts of times ahead,

Of times behind.

Stand still now, in this perfect moment,

Be tranquil, make this moment mine.

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

During his tenure as a staff writer for Time and the New Yorker, John McPhee has also produced 33 books. The writing courses he's taught at Princeton have been both generator and source of plangent observations about how to tackle the problems all writers share. This collection of essays highlights frustrations, insights and techniques.

For writer's block, there's the Dear Mother technique, in which you share your feelings of ineptitude and despair in a letter to Mom, insisting that "you are not cut out for this type of work." After whining and whimpering, you mention that "the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around, but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat." You go on like that "as long as you can." And then you go back and delete the salutation, the whining, the whimpering, "and just keep the bear."

The racehorse Secretariat brings us to a topic covered in the essay called Frames of Reference. Do your readers understand what you are referring to? This thorny question involves locale, culture, history, demographics. And it's changing all the time. Although students of Brookline high school in Massachusetts recognized Woody Allen, Muhammad Ali, and Winston Churchill, only a quarter of them had heard of Waterloo Bridge, Norman Rockwell or Truman Capote. Only one was aware of Laurence Olivier, and none had heard of Calabria, Churchill Downs, Bob Woodward or Samuel Johnson. Makes you feel old.

Also in the title essay, McPhee posits a "four-to-one ratio in in writing time," and explains the "psychological differences from phase to phase." Once the dreaded first draft has been laid down,  problems with the writing "become less threatening, more interesting." But first you must "blurt out, heave out, babble out something--anything as a first draft." No matter how incompetent you feel -- and "To feel such doubt is a part of the picture, important and inescapable." The box technique for editing is fascinating; I intend to try it when I reach that pinnacle of achievement, Draft 4 -- that is, if I ever finish blurting out the first draft of the novel I'm working on now.

The same essay contains some fascinating and arcane stories about how editing is done at The New Yorker. That includes tales of the first copy editor, Eleanor Gould, whose sage editorial advice was memorialized by inventing the verb to Gould. The copy editors who have come after her have "lived in her shadow" and "lengthened it."

Other tidbits offered involve the usage of further (degree) versus farther (distance), the silent 's' apostrophe, and demonyms -- Haligonian, Liverpudlian and Minneapolitan are on his A list. "The Chicago Manual of Style is a "quixotic attempt at one-style-fits-all for every house in America--newspapers, magazines, book publishers, blogishers." John McPhee's book is not merely a learning experience, it's a delightful read.

A Match Made for Murder by Iona Whishaw

In the latest Lane Winslow novel, Iona Whishaw elegantly carries off a feat rarely attempted by mystery writers: she marries her sleuth to the aptly named Inspector Darling.

As the genre demands, the honeymooners' Arizona idyll is fraught with danger. Even as tension mounts, a signature moment of light humour evokes a smile. When his captive asks a hired thug why he's driving her out into the desert, his sharp reply inspires her rueful reflection that she's "in the thrall of a sarcastic kidnapper."

Lane and Frederick Darling are surrounded by marital discord. A visit with Frederick's old colleague the Chief of Police reveals cracks in his marriage. Then at the inn where the Darlings are staying, Lane witnesses a fatal shooting, motivated, we eventually learn, by greed and jealousy.

While the Inspector honeymoons, in King's Cove, Sergeant Ames fumbles his current romance. In the course of investigating a strange murder, he stumbles on some delicate emotional territory that sours his relationship with Tina. Themes of emotionally bankrupt marriage and male violence against women arise again, and evidence turned up in the investigation challenges Ames to face certain uncomfortable realities.

Set in the late 1940s, this novel portrays the immediate post-war period, a time when women enjoyed far less freedom than they do today. Breaking the silence around sexual politics in The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir summarized with brutal clarity. "Man-the-sovereign will protect woman-the-liege." But in exchange for material protection and personal responsibility, she must "forego her liberty and become a thing." Male dominance feeds on female powerlessness.

In sharp contrast to this sad stereotype, the unflappable ex-spy Lane Winslow and her husband demonstrate the health of their newly forged union. In one scene, we see this through an honest discussion of their failings and imperfections. He opens up to her about his mortification at having been '"taken in by a slick, arrogant man.'" She responds by reminding him that in her youth she "wasted years on a man just like that," adding that he should not reproach himself since '"being dazzled and fooled can happen to anybody."'

Unlike many other war veterans, this couple are consciously aware of their demons of memory, and they work at coming to terms. When Lane relates a recurring war nightmare and shares her feelings of guilt about the events that inspired it, she discovers that opening to Frederick's perspective helps her achieve a kind of peace that diminishes the power of the traumatic memory.

In the post-war era, veterans frequently indulged unmanageable rage and guilt by violently lashing out. Women were brutalized, dark-skinned people victimized, and civil power structures echoed pyramid-style military hierarchies with their demand for unquestioning obedience.

For the male antagonists in this story, the ravages of suppressed emotion feed into fits of rage and violence, racist attitudes, and the unhealthy will to power at the expense of other people's rights and freedoms. Tacitly tolerated, the crime of rape saddles women with years of secret shame and self-recrimination.

As her fans have come to expect, Iona Whishaw tells a cracking good story while offering the reader many other satisfactions. Set seventy years in the past, this novel raises issues that remain sadly current as daily news media report on similar social ills.

Fortunately, good stories sustain the soul. Reading about Lane and Frederick gives me hope, and I am heartened by the thought that "the long moral arc swings toward the good." Let us hope that the rise of COVID 19 accelerates the increasingly critical human understanding that we are all one.

Love is Blue by Joan Wyndham

This rare book was well worth the search. By turns sharp, hilarious and heartbreaking, the voice of memoirist Joan Wyndham is filled with contradictions. She's a devout Catholic with divorced parents. Adhering to conventions inculcated by her mother, she attends art school and frequents concerts, galleries and theatres as well as mass and confession. On the rare occasion her artist father turns up, he takes her for a meal and then drinking at club after West End club.

Intelligent, convent-educated and artistic, Joan is 17 when the war starts. The RADA, to which she's already been accepted, closes indefinitely, putting paid to her plan of studying to be an actress.

Aware of her innocence, she's also guiltily determined to enjoy experiences the church forbids.

Along with jazz and wild parties, she discovers men. Innocent but filled with enthusiastic curiosity, she plunges into the convention-defying lifestyle of Bohemian London. After experimenting with some benzedrine found at her father's flat, she goes on to get the drug prescribed so she can drink copiously without feeling drunk. Experimenting with sex, she runs through a range of men from immature egotistical artists to depressed refugee philosopher-poets. She develops a special fondness for a gloomy sculptor, a German Jew who's terrified the government will intern him - and he does end up spending much of the war in a camp in Australia.

All that's before she gets involved with the displaced fighting Norwegians on Shetland and the RAF. As the war progresses, she interacts with a "conchie," and watches other artistic friends go to war. The mad party scene filled with art, jazz, booze, sex and drugs doesn't end, but continues in a different form when Joan joins the WAAF, and embarks on a whole new set of adventures.

One volume of a three part memoir of Joan Wyndham's life during WWII, Love is Blue offers an intimate glimpse of wartime life. Based on diaries the author wrote at the time, this volume is rich with details of cafes, bars, slang, mores, clothing, food and sketches of colourful contemporaries. We follow Wyndam through Chelsea and Soho, then on to Preston, Shetland, and Inverness.

The final scenes set down a living record of one woman's reaction to the shock of the liberated concentration camps, the exhilaration of VE day, the somber numbness of VJ day, and the emotional commemorative events that followed the end of the war.

In this deceptively simple journal format, Joan Wyndham portrays the great issues of her time. Refraining from comment, she allows readers to judge for themselves what to make of the rigid class system, the social expectations of women, the casually dismissive terms used for out-groups, and the devastating effects of war on the people caught up in it.

In his book of short essays, Colum McCann offers some practical advice along with meditations and philosophical reflections on the writing life.

One thing he insists on is that fiction writer must get to know their characters with absolute intimacy. This way, the author automatically knows how they'll react in any situation, and thus ring true on the page. Indeed, authors owe them a debt for "ringing the doorbell of...imagination."

Tom Joad, Nick Gatsby, and Leopold Bloom are real, "or at least as real as the seven billion people in the world that we haven't met yet." Remembering a funny story, I'd like to add Jane Eyre to that all-male list. Touring in England, a Dutch-born philosophy professor called Peter (of Liberal Studies at SFU), was reading old headstones.

Seeing the name Jane Eyre gave him a jolt. Excited, he called to his wife, also a fan of the Bronte novel. "Come and see who's buried here."

She read the inscription, then looked up, puzzled. "But our Jane Eyre is not real." Peter realized his mistake, but the world had shifted. That moment of emotional elation followed by rapid deflation stayed with him, a reminder of the power of fiction and imagination.

Imagination, says McCann, "gives us access to the "deepest darkdown things." The powerful force of language is "for saying the things we knew, but hadn't yet made sense of." Calling mystery "the glue that joins us, the author exhorts writers to do all they can to make the reader "the most complicit eavesdropper."

Commenting on structure, McCann says stories, "rely on the human instinct for architecture," with stories filling the the structurally sound container "slowly built from the bottom up." Yet this foundation must remain the author's secret. No reader will want to see "the foundation, or the wiring behind the walls, or even the architectural plans." As for endings, he believes a story "should finish in the concrete, with an action, a movement to carry the reader forward."

Stories require research, yet he warns that facts are "mercenary things," and texture is "far more important." The secret is finding the odd detail "that only the experts might know." Then "use it, but don't draw too much attention to it."

Though the title seems to address the book to young writers, it is well-known that many novelists are on the far side of fifty, who are by no means excluded. Using "young" is a literary reference; within the covers the author speaks to all who want to write, in tones that vary from kind encouragement to this sharp warning. "The most destructive force in your life is liable to be the unwritten story." No matter your age, "The work matters. The story needs to be told."

He also calls attention to the difference between writing non-fiction and writing fiction. You can liberate your stories when you stop writing "directly about yourself." Paradoxically, only then will you "have written yourself. And you're the only one you can, or should change."

McCann offers an intriguing exercise on getting to know your characters. "Dear (character)," you write, "Why don't I know you?" Adapting this to "Why don't I know you better?" I wrote her answer quickly by hand. In ten short minutes I learned an astonishing amount of new information about my character. How? 'Tis a mystery. But I believe the indirect trick involved in this exercise gives access to the subconscious inner world where the story is already complete.

Maisie Dobbs: A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs is a psychologist and investigator. Beginning with Winspear's first eponymous novel, (originally meant as a standalone), she rises from her original low station.

Her life as a Cambridge scholar is interrupted, she becomes a WWI nurse, an investigator's assistant, and eventually, principal of her own investigative agency. Along the way, she experiences tragedy, friendship. and romance.

Mystery author Lee Child finds Maisie a well-rounded, evolving character whose stories he enjoys. He feels she shares the kinship of non-conformity with Jack Reacher.

Set in the early 1930s, this book deals with the rise of Nazism, communism, and peace education. Now an independent investigator, Maisie is called in by the Secret Service, and also receives another interesting proposal.

Reading this meticulously researched series in no particular order, I've been with Maisie Dobbs in London, India, Gibraltar, Canada, and of course, Chelstone. I've ridden along in her red MG, and imagined the more sedate and less conspicuous Siddeley she later acquires. Through the stories, I've learned something of the plight of WWI veterans without pensions, the terrible treatment of "conchies," conscientious objectors to war, and the social unrest of the 1930s. I've also learned a bit about how the Spanish Civil War affected Gibraltar, and something of the community of Sephardic Jews who live there.

I aim to keep on reading her stories, learning at the same time.

Earth Day: Evening walk on the Serpentine Dike

Dusk on the dike

Open your nostrils

Receive the fragrance of burst willow buds
Breathe spring-steeped air.

Tread lightly:

Hear your own soft footfalls
Feel them reverberate from soles to crown.

Overhear the cadenced conversations of geese

Flying low over the marshlands
Whoosh of wings audible against air.

Catch the splash of squalling ducks

As they swim, see the perfect vee behind each
Traced on the glass-still water.

Scent coming rain

Feel the first hesitant droplets touch your hair.

Sense elusive memories

Connecting this walk with years of other walks.

Feel beneath the feet

The uneven shape, the wild mud and grass-clad body
Of Earth our Mother – familiar, beloved.