Writing is all rhythm, cadence and weight.
Different from speech, it is still concerned with sound, with plosions and stops. With the bright ring of verbs and the grounding heft of certain nouns.
Writing is the magic that allows our species to read each other's thoughts.
Because most of us acquire a sufficient fluency, we tend to take it for granted. As basketball coach Bobby Knight said, we learn to write in the second grade, then go on to greater things. Writers get stuck in the muck of words, paralyzed by options, humbled by the power that might be unlocked by proper sequencing, accent and restraint.
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," Thomas Mann wrote in Essays of Three Decades.
I do not know how fast Jo McDougall writes or how many choices she considers before settling. But if you flip through her new book, In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems (University of Arkansas Press, $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper), you might be struck by all the white space, all the blank territories left untracked. This suggests a certain deliberateness to McDougall's work, a parsimony of language that suggests minimalist carefulness. Her poems are generally brief, her words generally plain and unadorned, gray stones strewn in a snowy field.
But read them -- voice them -- and they become life itself somehow, the nattering of neighbors and the depthless grief of strangers stunned and wandering toward heartbreak. She writes people. Her particular gift is to, in a few attenuated lines, grant them grace and dignity.
In his foreword, the poet Carl Adamshick compares the collection to "a city, with many of its occupants doing daily things, sitting on the stoop with coffee or folding laundry." There is something to that; reading the poems together put me in mind of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, although her characters are not petty or philosophical ghosts, but living creatures concerned less with summing up than with moving on, engaging the universal everyday. They have to deal with dead parents and dying children, with houses in need of renovation, with careworn yet still serviceable lives.
A Picture
In this picture
my mother younger than I am now
is in the kitchen,
singeing pin feathers over the gas range.
My brother is five and has not yet fallen
beneath the tractor.
There is a directness here that's absent from a lot of elliptical modern poetry; McDougall isn't quite terse but she is direct and it is difficult to imagine someone being confounded by her intent. The late Miller Williams, who influenced and took an interest in McDougall's work, used to say a poem's last line should "throw the reader through a windshield," and many of these meet that criterion. A lot of her endings snap off hard and bitter. Or wry:
Kansas Town When the Sun Goes Down
Nebraska
hums on the horizon.
Set largely in small towns where the Midwest bleeds into the South, In the Home of the Famous Dead collects 37 years -- from McDougall's first chapbook, Women Who Marry Houses, to 2010's Under an Arkansas Sky -- of remarkably consistent poetry. McDougall is a calm, humane and journalistically detached observer, not given to hyperbole or rant or special pleading. What prevails here is a grown-up equanimity, a transcendental sense of, if not peace, at least clean-eyed acceptance. Her poems provide comfort even when they sting.
McDougall has several readings lined up to promote her work, including April 25 at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock; April 28 at Fayetteville's Nightbird Books; May 16 at Little Rock's WordsWorth Books; and May 21 at the Museum of the Grand Prairie, Stuttgart. See jomcdougall.net for details.
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Some of us remember Thomas McGuane as a cohort of Peter Fonda and Sam Peckinpah, the best friend of Jimmy Buffett, a word-drunk gadfly whose tragicomic excursions evoked Terry Southern, Barry Hannah and Kurt Vonnegut, and whose real-life exploits earned him the nickname "Captain Berserko." After emerging as a rising literary star with his first three novels -- The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971) and Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973) -- McGuane cashed in by writing the screenplays for Rancho Deluxe and the Marlon Brando-Jack Nicholson fiasco The Missouri Breaks.
In 1975, while directing the screen version of this third novel, he met Margot Kidder, who would become his second wife. His first marriage failed in the wake of his affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley (who went on to write a kiss-and-tell memoir about her time with McGuane). McGuane and Kidder broke up less than a year later, while McGuane's first wife married his buddy Fonda. In 1978 McGuane published his fourth novel, the semi-autobiographical Panama, a remarkable (though by and large critically maligned) account of a creatively bankrupt rock musician who resolves to come clean and work, for the first time, "without a net."
Something changed after Panama. Maybe in response to the criticism, McGuane became a less rambunctious, more subtle and in many ways more compelling writer, although he has never achieved the kind of superstardom forecast for him. He lives mostly in Montana, on a ranch. He is an expert fly fisherman (his nonfiction work on his obsession, The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, is often cited as the best fly fishing book ever written) and a member of the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame.
He has been married to Buffett's sister Laurie since 1977. He comes out with a novel every few years, mostly set in a modern West, populated by laconic males by and large bemused by the universe and the exotic feminine creatures it admits.
His latest book is a collection of short stories set in Montana called Crow Fair (Knopf, $25.95) and it's as precise, balanced and keen as a $400 hunting knife. Pacing is a difficult thing to achieve in short stories, which often present as excerpts of novels never to be completed, but McGuane has a way of making them cohere, even when they end, as many of the stories in this collection do, on an unresolved note.
Typically they break us in on atypical American lives -- in "Motherlode," Dave, a man who makes his living artificially inseminating cattle, is sucked into a luckless man's desperation and decides to take a wild chance; in "The House on Sand Creek," a country lawyer learns to make do when his Croatian wife, who'd quit him and Montana for the old country, returns with another man's baby in tow; in "Weight Watchers," a bachelor construction foreman takes in his obese, profane father after his mother throws him out.
By turns nostalgic and devastating, "Hubcaps" tells the story of Owen, a lonely boy unsettled by the dissolution of his parents' marriage. "On a Dirt Road" starts out as a social horror story about meeting awful new neighbors, but pivots into a sad tale of marital exhaustion.
There's plenty of comedy that runs through these stories, but it's of a dark and quiet nature, true to restlessness of the disrupted souls McGuane catalogs. These stories put me in mind of the songs of Guy Clark and of James McMurtry's new album Complicated Game. All these characters are striving, struggling to keep it together on what, these days, passes for the American frontier.
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Kate Clanchy's Meeting the English (St. Martin's Press, $24.99) chronicles the adventures of 17-year-old Struan, an academically gifted but impoverished Scot, who arrives in London's Hampstead in 1989 to care for one of his literary heroes, esteemed Welsh playwright Phillip Prys, who was once one of the angry young men of Britain's literary scene but now has been locked into stasis by a stroke.
Phillip can blink an eye or raise a finger, maybe, not that anyone in the blended dysfunctional household -- which includes Phillip's "fat" 16-year-old daughter, Juliet; his once glamorous actress Welsh ex-wife, Myfanwy; his current wife and trendy artist, Shirin; his gay literary agent of Dutch extraction, Giles, and sometimes his ne'er-do-well golden son, Jake -- would notice. So it's up to the empathetic, earnest Struan to grant the old man (who was nasty enough himself, in his day) his dignity.
Clanchy, a poet who wrote a memoir, Antigona and Me, about her relationship with a Kosovan refugee neighbor, sketches these characters quickly and deftly, then pushes them out on stage to love lightly and recklessly as they flit about the suddenly powerless patriarch. Raw and earnest Struan turns out to be a catalyst who causes the "English" -- the joke is there are no genuine "English" here; everyone is an emigre or a poseur or both -- to change. Shirin's impeccable cool turns out to be a cover for her refugee's secrets; Juliet blooms -- in part because of a tentative romance with Struan's old English teacher, who has also come to London to make his fortune.
A coming-of-age novel packed with metaphoric heft, Meeting the English is a delightful, shimmering first novel about the limits of kindness and the restorative qualities of love that seems modeled on Shakespearean social comedy.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 03/29/2015