American life had changed him. Now he loved hand tools–oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.

-Ha Jin,* A Free Life

I’ve started writing in English about ten years ago, when I found that English was the only language my friends wanted to read in. Even the Russian ones, from whom in America, just like from me, our native language bled out slowly. We’d sing and stop mid-couplet because the next word was a word we no longer knew. Like a parasitic chick of a cuckoo, an English word lay in our minds instead.

Some of us sought treatment–a few daily doses of Babel, Gogol, Chekhov, Mandelshtam, Tsvetayeva, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin. Others let the mother tongue dry and shrivel. Me, I’ve spent years trying to treat English like another variety of Russian. But English can’t do the things that Russian can. Rhymes don’t come easy. Word order isn’t a matter of tone and style, but grammar. An ear for Russian rhythms is useless. Sometimes, I ditched English and wrote in Russian, knowing I wrote for no one and that I was completely alone. At other times, I just got angry–at English and its ways, at my readers for not understanding, and at myself for failing to make them.

Then yesterday, somewhere between reading Ha Jin and reading Thomas Hardy, I realized that I’ve fallen for this tongue, this Anglo-Saxon Latin bastard that swells and prospers by plundering the languages of this world and taking their best words. I stumbled on this line of Hardy’s in “Neutral Tones”–”And a few leaves lay on the starving sod”–and realized I didn’t know exactly what the word “sod” means. So I went down the Oxford English Dictionary rabbit hole. Sod. Peat. Turf. Greensward. The distinctions between them are the kind of details I would have never thought of (a peat is a slice of soil taken from a bog, but turf must be taken from a dry patch of land; a sod is brick-shaped, a greensward is thin). And, of course, for most of these, the origin might be Pixie, might be Frisian, might be Dutch–but is mostly unknown.

We are alike, English and I. I am Ukrainian by birth and upbringing, half-Russian, half-Jew by ethnic origin and culture, and now an American by choice. I, too, am a mongrel. What better language could I have hoped for to write in?

* In the interests of full disclosure, mentioning now that Ha Jin is my former teacher.

On the cover of the second notebook, the handwriting of which he was so proud, a script abounding in curly, feminine flourishes, proclaimed the contents to be “The Private Diary of Perry Edward Smith”–an inaccurate description, for it was not in the least a diary but, rather, a form of anthology consisting of obscure facts (”Every fifteen years Mars gets closer. 1958 is a close year.”), poems and literary quotations (”No man is an island, Entire of itself”), and passages for newspapers and books paraphrased or quoted. For example:

My acquaintances are many, my friends are few; those who really know me fewer still.

Heard about a new rat poison on the market. Extremely potent, odorless, tasteless, is so completely absorbed once swallowed that no trace could ever be found in a dead body.

If called upon to make a speech: “I can’t remember what I was going to say for the life of me–I don’t think that ever before in my life have so many people been so directly responsible for my being so very, very glad. It’s a wonderful moment and a rare one and I’m certainly indebted. Thank you!”

Read interesting article Feb. issue of Man to Man: “I Knifed My Way to a Diamond Pit.”

“It is almost impossible for a man who enjoys freedom with all its prerogatives, to realize what it means to be deprived of that freedom.”–Said by Erle Stanley Gardner.

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in teh sunset.” –Said by Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian Chief.

This last entry was written in red ink and decorated with a border of green-ink stars; the anthologist wished to emphasize its “personal significance.” “A breath of a buffalo in the wintertime”–that exactly evoked his view of life. Why worry? What was there to “sweat about”? Man was nothing, a mist, a shadow absorbed by shadows.

But damn it, you do worry, scheme, fret over your fingernails and the warnings of hotel managements: “Su Día Termina a las 2 P.M.”

The view of blogs as anthologies of obscure facts masquerading as personal journals seems spot on to me. But so much of Capote’s writing is similarly revealing in this quiet, unassuming way. His choices have nothing exhibitionist about them. The words, when unusual, are simply right: Perry’s, the murderer’s, pastiche of scribblings is an anthology. In another passage, Capote describes the winter winds on the Kansas prairie as “razory.” The measure of how perfect his words are is that they seemed to have always existed. Here they are, the newly-minted clichés of our future. They immediately supersede all alternatives. What else can cold February winds be other than “razory”?

The other voices the book includes–Perry himself, as in the quoted passage, the town’s postmistress, the dead girl’s boyfriend–are always distinctive. Perry omits subjects for his sentences. His phrases are choppy. “But damn it, you do worry, fret…” : you can feel it’s Perry thinking at the end of that quote above on the basis of style alone–no quotation marks required. Other voices are different too. Myrtle Clare speaks folk; she calls her neighbors “lily-livered” and refers to herself as “this old girl.” Dick’s speech is covered by a veneer of obscenities and cockiness. He says things like, “there was mud up to your cojones.” They all have affectations. In contrast, the narrator’s voice seems natural and invisible, a kind of a glass Riker mount to better pin the specimens he collects to.

Then there are those perfect rolling rhythms. The sentences go on for miles, but I didn’t pause once because I had to reread. But Lord I wanted to. The difference between your standard style short stuccato sentences and Capote is the difference between driving through the always constant, even plains of Kansas and the lush, fluid landscape of the Rockies.

I could go on–about the masterful characterizations, the genius of structure, the sharpness of emotion–but maybe I should leave you some things to discover for yourself. Instead, I leave you with this quote from Capote from the Paris Review interview (a long chunk available here [PDF]):

“Do you read a great deal?”

“Too much. And anything, including labels and recipes and advertisements. I have a passion for newspapers—read all the New York
dailies every day, and the Sunday editions, and several foreign magazines too. The ones I don’t buy I read standing at newsstands. I average about five books a week—the normal-length novel takes me about two hours. I enjoy thrillers and would like someday to write one. Though I prefer first-rate fiction, for the last few years my reading seems to have been concentrated on letters and journals and biographies. It doesn’t bother me to read while I am writing—I mean, I don’t suddenly find another writer’s style seeping out of my pen.”

This is a cold war era joke.

At a press conference, NASA is presenting new inventions. One of them is a pen that will work in zero gravity. The next day, with the international press assembled, the Soviets respond. “The Americans have come up with a great new device. The engineering is astounding. The pen works great. We, however, have been using a different solution.” Here, the speaker holds up a lead pencil.

Since my desire to pursue a given idea is inversely proportional to the amount of equipment I’ve purchased for it, I’m holding out on buying more drawing equipment until I know this comic thing sticks. But tracing pencils without a light table is miserable.

So, here’s my own System D (which I’ve shamelessly stolen from the MAKE blog). As you can see from the photos, the pencil drawing is taped to the screen, the blank sheet’s taped over it, and the desktop color is turned to white. Works like magic. Now, if only I could figure out how to talk my laptop into not going into PowerSave mode and turning off the screen.

J has his own System D for going to sleep. He reads my Joyce and my Borges and conks right out. I don’t think he means as a criticism. Wilfrid Sheed doesn’t seem to think anyone has to:

“Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail,” is how Sam Johnson, blues singer, described the writer’s life. Then there was Joseph Conrad, comparing writing to carrying heavy bales under a low rope on a hot day. (I’ll admit reading Conrad can be like that, for all that it’s worth it. If “easy writing makes damn hard reading,” your hard writing can be a real mother.) [From “The Company of writers,” The Good Word & Other Words]

New strip going up tomorrow. Good night and good luck.