What is it that elevates a piece
of writing from good to excellent? There are graspable signs, I know. Here’s a
loose litoverlap to explore the question:
From The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss (2007, Pan):
On
Sunday, late in the afternoon … A cold fog had settled over the valley, and the
trees on the surrounding slopes were soft gray shapes against a white
remoteness; so when a horse and rider came off the hill, they seemed to take
their form out of the ground, and only slowly became something he recognized.
(p 122)
From The Brothers of Gwynned quartet – Afterglow and Nightfall by Edith Pargeter (1989, Headline):
But
it was no more than deep of dusk, … when I saw a small knot of horsemen
galloping towards me in purposeful haste, and made out one who led, and three
who followed. It was then twilight but with that gleam about it that draws
light from every outline, so that flowers shine like faint lamps,* and faces
have the pure pallor of saints, and though the foremost rider showed under his
blown cap of black hair only such an oval of light for a countenance, yet by
his seat in the saddle, and the set of his shoulders and head, I knew him … (p
692)
I admire Gloss’s writing, and this
example is not intended at all to serve as a comment on the two authors’ bodies
of work, nor as a proposition that only one thing, or just a few things, makes
for great writing. But here I think Gloss is good and Pargeter is even better at
evoking the image of a horse and rider coming into focus in the observer’s view.
Why is that?
Gloss, like many writers, brings the
weather into the scene to help the reader feel and picture what the narrator is
describing. More importantly, and skilfully, she adds depth to the description
by using the weather to support her idea that the horse and rider seem to have
been created by the earth because of the chilly fog. ‘Out of’ is
the signpost for the first notion, and ‘so’ indicates the second.
The link between the horse-and-rider
and the trees is strong, as confirmed by the semi-colon – Gloss doesn’t need to
add ‘too’, as in ‘they too seemed to take their form out of the ground’, in
order to align the indistinct, mobile shapes with the stationary ‘soft gray
shapes’. And thus the implication is made: Trees grow from the ground; in ‘cold
fog’ horse and rider grow from ground. Figuratively, she’s suggesting that trees
and horse-and-rider are intrinsic to the earth. This implication supports
Gloss’s presentation of Martha Lessen, the book’s protagonist and the rider in
this passage, as an authentic cowgirl whose life story is rooted in the austere
American West of the first half of the 20th century.
To a lesser extent, Gloss also
seems to link the horse and rider with the fog itself. The fog has ‘settled’ – we
get the impression of sinking, of descent. So, too, is the horse and rider’s direction
of movement. They don’t crest the hill; they’re not seen silhouetted however
indistinctly against its top. They ‘came off’ it, which in my view means that
they have been descending it and are at the bottom, or have perhaps even left
it behind, by the time the man recognises them. ‘He’ is Tom Kandel, as we learn
from the start of the paragraph from which this extract is taken. He’s more of a
secondary character, but no less finely portrayed for it.
In their ground-form, horse and rider
are as yet unrecognisable to Tom the observer. Gloss uses the word ‘something’
not ‘someone’, so she is not simply saying that Tom doesn’t (yet) know who the horse
and rider are. For a while he doesn’t know what
they are. Are they trees, which appear to be moving? Are they some alien, unknown
form? Only slowly, as they come closer to him, do they shed the impression that
they are ground-forms and are they revealed in their true form. In themselves they
have always been what they are: an obliging horse and a tough but gentle-handed,
likeable young woman, as we learn from the rest of the story. But in those
chill, foggy moments they are something else, something unknown, because Tom sees
them as such. The observer and the image or form he sees are thus linked. Gloss
could have failed to put him into the scene. Then it would be just us observing
the horse and rider’s approach. But who would slowly recognise them? Not us, we
know already what they are. If Gloss had ended the sentence: ‘... out of the
ground, and only slowly became something recognisable.’, the image would be less
powerful.
In the next sentence Tom recognises
who the horse and rider are. And it becomes clear why Gloss put him into the
scene: The horse that Martha is riding is the horse he bought for his young son
(for whom Martha is breaking the horse in), and he, not Martha, is the scene’s focal
point. Three pages earlier the omniscient narrator has begun introducing him,
and now his connection with Martha is quietly, subtly established.
A page later we learn that Tom
had been experiencing the fog as ‘a shapeless, shadowless vagueness’ (p 123) in
which he had felt so terribly alone that when Martha draws near he tries, with some
apparently random conversation, to make her stay with him. But she’s busy and
must get on, and soon Tom watches ‘the shape of [her] on the horse soften and
whiten and sink down again into the formless ground and leave no trace’ (p 124).
So she and the horse return from where they had come – up from the ground, down
into the ground. An additional element here is that this figurative movement
mirrors the more literal movement Tom will shortly be making, because as we have
been told a few paragraphs earlier he ‘was forty years old and in a little over
two months he would be dead’ (p 123) (of cancer). (My quoting the statement
here lends bluntness to it that belies the calm, practical yet poignant manner
in which Gloss presents it.) His acute loneliness and sense of dislocation
within the fog therefore don’t come as a surprise.
I have one negative criticism: The
image weakens a bit, I believe, in Gloss’s phrase ‘a white remoteness’. Before
and after that phrase I find the scene easy to imagine. But ‘remote’ is more
powerful as an adjective; the use of the word as a noun, along with the
indefinite article, is a smudge on an otherwise clearly and finely portrayed
picture. Still, Gloss’s is one of the kinds of writing that I like. Each
sentence means something. Whichever attribute(s) it has – whether it’s clever
or striking or evocative, for example – it is effective not just in itself. One
can pick out a few seemingly plain, innocuous lines, and they turn out to be significant
to the story as a whole. Which implies that every other line in the novel is
equally useful and valuable. Each sentence has a contribution to make, be it palpable
or more subtle.
Gloss fictionalises the life of
an American cowgirl of the early 20th century. Pargeter fictionalises the life
of Llewelyn (‘first and only true Prince of Wales’ (p ix)) and his family, of
the early 13th century. Pargeter’s narrator is Samson, son of one of the
waiting-women of Lady Senena, Llewelyn’s mother. Samson and Llewelyn are born
on the same day of the same year, and they grow up together, separated by their
differing social positions, with Samson always willingly serving Llewelyn in
one way or another – as ‘clerk, servant and friend life-long’ (p 611). In the
extract, Samson has been sent to search the northern Welsh countryside for
Llewelyn’s younger brother, David. At this concluding stage of the quartet,
Llewelyn and David are fighting their final battle with each other over how
Wales should be ruled. Samson’s expectation of having to ride ‘well into the
night’ (p 692) on his search is confounded by his finding that at ‘no more than
deep of dusk’ David rides towards him. A hint that the man approaching him is
David is given in ‘one who led’.
Though the horsemen are coming
towards Samson fast, ‘in purposeful haste’ on their way to the same place to
which Samson has been sent to bring David, they have not yet reached him. He
has time to take in his surroundings, and does so with sensitivity
characteristic of the rest of his 820-page narrative. The sun has set, and he
notes that one kind of dusk has followed. There are other kinds, his experience
of which is indicated by his use of ‘but’ and ‘that’ – ‘It was then twilight but with that gleam about it …’. He acknowledges that a lessening of light
may seem always to characterise this time of day, but suggests that in this event
the dusk is different, because light is still present. Also, this kind of dusk
is not unique or uncommon. He refers to ‘that gleam about it’, not ‘a gleam’ –
he’s speaking of something which he’s seen before, with which he’s familiar and
perhaps believes his reader to be as well.
It’s not stated outright but we
can deduce the scene: Silhouettes are becoming more visible than features. Some
of the things Samson sees, the less distinct things further away from him – the
broader landscape, the oncoming riders, the horizon – are backlit by the
reflection of the sun’s rays through the atmosphere. The slightly more distinct
things, those that he would see closer around him if he looked into the
foreground, also glow with the reflected rays: Flowers appear to give off a
light of their own.
Human faces in this kind of dusk,
though, are pale almost to sickliness. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of
ideas that Pargeter gives here, in ‘pure pallor of saints’. ‘Pure’ is most
often used positively, to suggest something that is clean and clear, not mixed
with anything and not sullied by anything. ‘Pallor’ subverts that suggestion,
as it tends to be used pejoratively, to imply ill health. ‘Saints’ returns us
to the idea of purity, because people who are pure and saintly are believed to
be moral. Samson is not actually saying that David’s face has the pallor of a
saint, and therefore David is a saint. Instead I think Pargeter is providing
the notion of dedication, of a fixed purpose – the kind of commitment that a
saint gives to his or her religious cause. Samson is deeply dedicated to
Llewelyn, and to Wales. Samson is acting on the orders of his lord, who is just
as devoted, if not more so, to his country. David, though his approach is
different, is fully committed to Wales.
Pargeter may also refer to saints
to suggest inaccessibility, to imply a person or people who are removed and
remote. Saints begin as regular people, but become extra-ordinary, and
therefore out of direct reach, once their higher status is proclaimed. At this
distance and at this time of day, David’s face shines even softer than flowers,
it has enough reflected light simply to show itself as a face (Samson states ‘a
countenance’, not ‘his countenance’). It is rather by the way he moves and the shape
of his body that Samson recognises him. Here the backlit silhouette is implied
as well – the manner in which he sits in his saddle, and the position of his
shoulders and head, are revealed by the reflected light. And when David does
reach Samson, he stops only momentarily. He is so intent on his purpose that he
smiles at Samson ‘distantly, as though [Samson] had come between him and a
dream’ and ‘showed but like a shadow’ (p 692), before he gallops onwards. His
inaccessibility is emphasised.
Of course there’s more to all of
this. The quartet is lengthy and detailed, with another testament to Pargeter’s
proficiency being the fact that Samson’s narration never slips, never loses the
thread of the tale. There are many reasons behind Llewelyn, Samson and David’s
actions, which I don’t want to and could not go into here. Perhaps this hinders
my enquiry. But I feel the quoted lines are able to speak for themselves in
terms of what I’m concerned with examining.
So what precisely is it that
raises Pargeter’s passage above that of Gloss? Gloss’s words are a little
plainer – she uses less figurative, more descriptive, language (‘late in the
afternoon’, ‘cold’, ‘soft’, ‘gray’, ‘white’). She directs our focus on the
effect of the weather on a particular
observer and objects of observation, albeit presenting them at first as
unrecognisable. She tends to state outright while giving her idea about the
horse and rider. That is to say, she uses the word ‘seemed’ (‘the horse and
rider … seemed to take their form’) to indicate that she is actually making a
suggestion. In less capable hands this would result in poor writing, in telling
more than showing. But as we’ve seen, Gloss’s ideas have value and depth, and
they can only be conveyed through the words she has chosen to put on the page,
which means that those words have value and depth as well.
Pargeter’s language, by contrast,
is more figurative, more allusive – her words are a little more adorned (‘deep
of dusk’, ‘gleam’, ‘draws’, ‘faint lamps’, ‘pure pallor’, ‘saints’). While providing
her ideas about the observer and the horse and rider she doesn’t state anything
outright. That is to say, she doesn’t indicate that she’s making suggestions –
she just makes them. She does this by presenting flowers in general (not a particular flower, or some flowers, but
potentially all flowers), and people’s faces in general (not a particular person’s face, or some faces, but
potentially all faces), and by linking them not directly but by association
with the observer and the object of observation.
In my more personal view,
Pargeter also puts into highly evocative words something that I’d been
inarticulately aware of. She makes more accessible, more ‘tangible’, things about
twilight that had occurred to me only dimly, non-verbally, and thereby gives me
the opportunity to picture and understand them better. Finally, there’s also my
purely personal preference for her setting. Gloss encloses her characters in
fog, her scene mostly obscures, whereas Pargeter presents her characters in twilight
that is presented as lucid, her scene clarifies.
Pargeter’s is another of the
kinds of writing that I like. It’s not the same as Gloss’s, evidently, but I
admire it for the same reason: Each sentence is significant; each sentence
contributes to the story as a whole.
*
And here’s another loose litoverlap, the idea of how something can give off light
in the very instance of less light: Pargeter mentions flowers shining ‘like
faint lamps’ in the dusk. In her poem ‘Words for the Body’ (2001, Knopf), Anne
Michaels’s narrator mentions ‘a jar of flowers’ making ‘its own fire’ on a ‘rainy
morning’ (p 43).
