Murder Your Darlings'

...But my favorites, I must confess, are those brave little whistles: light, comprehension, truth...

...If you ignore the world and its people your art will interest itself in itself rather than in its subject...

...What has gone so wrong with Reynolds Price...

...He is trying to say that you cannot write fiction without becoming someone else, and that you cannot become someone else if you care only about yourself...

...Concealment of what...

...But, as many reviewers who liked A Generous Man noted, Price had learned his master's vocabulary and grammar so thoroughly that he wrote more as an imaginative extender than as a slavish student...

...When Eborn learns his dying mother has been taken to the Intensive Care Wing of a hospital, that name provokes the thought: "It seemed the title of a Russian novel...

...Whether plain or fancy, his prose can become a servant or an oppressor...

...Love & Work is about a university English teacher, Thomas Eborn, his wife, his mother and his work as a critic, essayist and novelist...

...His little darlings are gaudy but marooned, with no ideas to keep them company...

...A telephone didn't ring on page one, it "screwed deeper into [Eborn's] absurd command, absurd resolve...

...Allowing for a moment the fustian of screwed, why the absurd modifier for command and resolve, whatever they may mean in this context...

...A Generous Man, though it came perilously close to becoming a mere gloss on The Bear, survived the risks it accepted, fleshed out and reviewed Faulkner's mannerisms and enlarged the literacy of American fiction...

...This surrender, however, runs radical risks...

...A letter from his mother "seemed a letter from Lear's own hand...

...He thinks of himself as Cordelia, as Odysseus in Hell...

...A novelist, though, chooses to write, and it should lie within his competence to arrange words so that they will express what he means them to express...

...He is selfish, humorless and pedantic...

...he tells us his classroom remarks about Keats' death brought tears to a girl's eyes, though not the girl he'd have chosen...

...How might Price have satisfied these ambitions, if indeed they are his...

...All italics mine.—G.W...

...Such a man, who sinks significance beneath the numbing weight of jargon, is probably someone who speaks and writes against his will...

...Was and is...

...Eborn is not terrified, he is "furred with dread...

...What does sufficient room look like in the head...

...not because it is my wish or pleasure or source of income but because it is two deeply adamant things—my gift (forced on me by birth and growth) and my need (mined from me, by myself, to make those tools of defense and reconnoiter which my past, present and future demand—shields, mirrors, microscopes, telescopes...

...Sir Arthur quiller-couch once lectured his students against the temptation to compose purple patches: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press...

...He is never far from a reference to The Egotistical Sublime or Negative Capability...

...Consider the case of Reynolds Price...

...Frequently these words came in pairs or triplets, frankly sacrificing their precision to gain a mythy quality of resonance...

...Price spares his darlings, spoils them rotten, can't break away from them...

...If he decides that language itself is the enemy, his surrender to it can be part of the story his novel tells...

...You may think the phone was pleased to find it worked, or that Eborn, ungrammatically, was pleased it worked—not at all, it made a glad noise...

...Eborn didn't remember last night's dream, it "flushed downward through him...

...It is a brilliant passage, yet without the discipline and intelligence of its ending it would be ridiculous...

...And they spoil him back...

...When the language of Love & Work is at its purse-proud worst, when it gropes most, obscuring what it means to clarify, we may be sure we are hearing Price describe his hero rather than his hero describing himself...

...From the pulpit and his grandfather's Bible he learned the fulsome reach of the King James Old Testament—its bold oppositions of salvation and damnation, its swing and balance...

...Its words overwhelm the phenomena that motivate them...

...The language has second, third and fourth thoughts (microscopes, suggested by mirrors, suggest telescopes) but no thoughts new enough, or central enough, to justify Price's surrender to it...

...Price's new novel, Love & Work (Atheneum, 143 pp., $4.50), its language grotesquely swollen and vainglorious, diminishes literacy...

...Faulkner goes from was-not to is to was, Price from was to is, from past to present to future...

...Most of all he learned the value of repetition, the magic that comes of saying a word or phrase again and again until it loses its original meaning, passes through nonsense and out into a new field of signification...

...he makes the kind of academic joke that might be a provincial instructor's notion of learned teasing at King's College High Table: The "Romantic Movement was a function of beardlessness...

...To paraphrase a condemnation of one of the book's characters, Price has continued to read Faulkner—or has re-read A Generous Man?and has learned the skill of aping what he found there without discovering a reason to use that skill...

...The writer who labors to subdue language, clarifying and honing away all ambiguity and ornament, may write an unexciting novel...

...A bureaucrat may compose them so that they mean many things and thus evade responsibility for any single, possibly compromising, meaning...

...From the inflated, but startling oratory of Southern rural politics he learned to be comfortable with hyperbole...

...but the writer who lets words write themselves and sensation annihilate intellect, is apt to make a particularly visible fool of himself...

...Price writes of a boy dying beside a highway as follows: He "had begun a steady sound like a frail wire spun through his purple lips, high and diminishing, simultaneously...

...His ambition was truly Faustian: He found words too puny and tarnished for the world he wanted to build, so he beat them, pushed them, tore than apart, reassembled them...

...He judges his own essay to be "turbid concealment—as was all his work...

...Price's mysterious story of a young rural Southerner coming to age on a hunt managed, rather incredibly, to quicken the corpse of William Faulkner...

...He should know better...

...Let us hope he leaves them to waste away, unlamented...

...I think, and hope, Price is trying to show the futility of work without love, the obscenity of empty self-gratification and self-righteousness...

...His last novel, A Generous Man, was composed of winding life sentences loaded with supercharged words—love, honor, fate, pity, hope, terror...

...Faulkner suffered grand failures, but they were generally more notable for their grandeur than their failure...

...Indeed, Eborn seems to know himself better than Price knows him...

...At home the damned phone wouldn't be quiet, either its "rings screwed on in a lonely vacuum" (vacuums do have a way of being lonely) or "the phone in the upstairs hall worked, gladly...

...He smuggles scraps of unfinished critical essays into his blandest musings...

...He knows what such encrustation means, that it is both disease and symptom...

...Then there is the awkwardness of centerpiece and lean-limbed...

...A sound like a wire...

...I assume that the papers, and not Eborn, are tame as dogs, though the image is equally funny either way...

...The ritual of the hunt in Price's work called for a chanted language, unfastened to any particular time or local idiom...

...Perhaps purple gives the clue here...

...It is easier, after all, to say nothing than to say everything...

...Faulkner successfully transcended sense writing things like this in Absalom Absalom!: "When the brief all is done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse—the hats and pants and shoes which you drag through the world—and retreat since the gods condone and practice . . . the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats above the trameling and harried instant the: was-not:is:was...

...One way involves using two or more voices, one of them Eborn's, to set apart and emphasize the flatulence of the failed artist-teacher...

...One will suffice: Flagstad's Isolde ". . . flings her curse, more enduring than her love, like a wave at Tristan...

...The figure is vivid enough, God knows, but vivid for being ridiculously inappropriate...

...By placing chunks of Eborn's prose (from an essay and a novel) in italics, Price evidently had this tactic in mind...

...An oncoming car didn't appear over the hill, it "bloomed" there...

...The imagination, excited for its own sake, will be deprived of the power to create great conceptions...

...Eborn seems to when he refers to his poems as being "baffling—baffled—and crusted with exhausted metaphor...

...For Eborn, life leads irrevocably to literature, usually to someone else's literature...

...He memorizes poems to have an appropriate stanza at the ready against any eventuality...

...A whole in the heart...

...An ignorant man may unintentionally arrange words so that they say what he does not mean them to say...

...And language, lacking an objective correlative, becomes costume jewelry to brighten a whore's tired spirit...

...This oxymoronic barbarism has its kin in a comically ambiguous furry reference further on: "Now as he drove—papers by him, tame as dogs—he made in his head, sufficient room, the entire centerpiece of his novel, scene yielding scene in an order so rich, so lean-limbed, so beautiful in motion, as to guarantee final light, comprehension, truth...

...The novel was about sensation, not sense, so its rhythms were properly suggested by a sound and flow of words instead of an organization of thoughts...

...Is because it must be...

...The trouble is that Eborn's voice is never less eloquent than Price's, and his novel is better written...

...Price has hold of the sound of the thing but not its purpose: ". . . the sense of excitement, exultation, which paralleled the struggle in fear and hope (and occasionally blossomed for a moment at the end—before flaws and failure hulked into sight), this exultation became its own end and showed me finally that the action which produced this state was surely my work...

...A good hunch would probably send the critic back to Price's mentor...

...The order of those final three verbs, final four words, anchors the sense of a writer otherwise yielding to trance and dream...

...Murder your darlings...