How to Write Great

Oh, what the hell. Let's go for it. Let us speak about great writing — not brilliant writing or clever writing or, most tempting of all, exquisite writing. Let us speak of Quixote writing, Lear and Deronda writing. Honor, heroism, decency, justice and "Ah, love, let us be true to one another" writing. Gaah! The very words are marzipan to the tongue.

And yet, at the end of the day — our own or days in general — what else do we seek from our books? The verities need not be expressed gently, unambiguously or in rhyming couplets, but it is the verities that make us know ourselves. And you can swoon your critical head off over Joyce's bourgeois "Ulysses" and Robert Graves's girl-crazy "Ulysses," and still know in your acritical heart that neither holds a candle to the original wild sailor or even to Tennyson's old salt, who strove, sought and found, and did not yield.

When I start thinking this way, I wonder if I'm just growing old, and tired of modernity. Yet even when modernity was young, I was dazzled more often by clarity than by calculated difficulty, and pleased simply by someone doing a far, far better thing. It is always thus. Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes. (As if people were not strange enough.) The difference between invention and imagination is the difference between Mr. Ed and Swift's Houyhnhnms. One is a talking horse (of course); the other bears the burdens of civilization.

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening. Look at a point of land over which the sun is certain to rise, Coleridge said. If the moon rises there, so what? The senses are startled, that's all. But if we know the point where the sun will rise as it has always risen and as it will rise tomorrow and the next day too, well, well! At the beginning of "Hamlet" there can be no doubt that by the play's end, the prince will buy it. Between start and finish, then, we may concentrate on what he says and who he is, matters made more intense by our knowing he is doomed. In every piece of work, at one juncture or another, a writer has the choice of doing something weird or something true. The lesser writer will haul up the moon.

There have been times in literary history when writers steered clear of the great moral issues, but not completely, and never for long. The 18th century (Johnson, Gray, Cowper) had no problem telling people how to think and behave. The Romantics made the egotistical sublime, though Wordsworth's self was large enough for everyone. The Victorians opened things up again, as did T. S. Eliot a little later, with big pronouncements about the state of the world. Literature took to the confessional in the 1960s, when personal demons took over for universal evils. Yet while Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath shrank subject matter to the size of Czar Lepke and Daddy, we still could see the Us in Them. One might say that the shadow of the Big Bad Bomb made honor, heroism and the rest beside the point. But "Invisible Man" and "Doctor Zhivago" appeared while we were ducking and covering, suggesting that dealing with big themes in literature depends less on eras than on individual inclination.

So, let us speak of Fitzgerald, and of Jay Gatsby, who stood straight and sober in the drunken Twenties, and who, nutty as his yearnings may have been, really was great. And this was not because he was willing to take the wheel and the rap for the moral nitwit, Daisy. That was more gallantry than heroism. No. Gatsby showed his splendid colors in a quieter gesture, when he decided to stand watch outside Daisy's house after the hit and run, thinking to protect her from Tom — dear Daisy, who at that same moment was sitting across from Tom, over a plate of cold fried chicken, the two of them in the "natural intimacy" of their eternal conspiracy. Behold Gatsby, the hero of the useless vigil. Small wonder Nick does not understand when Gatsby dismisses whatever passed for love between Tom and Daisy as "just personal." The great Gatsby lives above the merely personal. Could there be any doubt that he was "worth the whole damn bunch put together"?

Roger Rosenblatt is the author, most recently, of “Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats.â€

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