Led astray by Suessian melody

by David Benjamin

“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

MADISON, Wis.—The craft of writing is on my mind lately, more than usual, because I’m scheduled to pontificate about it this week at a book conference in Newark. In my presentation, I’ll be trying to justify a lifetime of pecking away at a keyboard like a latter-day Bartleby afflicted with artistic pretensions.

It all started before I was actually able to read. I was seduced by Dr. Seuss. It happened on a first-grade field trip to the public library. The librarian read one of Dr. Seuss’ classics, probably Horton Hears a Who. What I heard, as I listened, was language used in a way I had never encountered, even in Mother Goose or the Brothers Grimm. It was verse turned into a complicated narrative, a sort of rhyming prose that made me want to mimic the author. I was convinced, without knowing, that a story, to best captivate the reader, requires a sense of melody.

There were hundreds of utilitarian and instructive books in that library that possessed none of the fluid syncopation I had heard from Dr. Seuss. But the Doc was my guiding light. From that day, I knew I wanted to a) read without being read to and b) write stories that could be—like the saga of Horton—set to music.

Within a few years, I was reading Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, whose most famous story ends with this snatch of free verse in dialect that’s as dense and rich as the black soil of the Delta: “‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox—bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’ en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers…”

Like Harris, or Ray Bradbury in his childhood masterpiece, Dandelion Wine, the conscientious writer hears and pairs in his or her mind sounds that are compatible, words which—aligned together—create a flow that suggests a lilt, meter and melody that would sound queer in practical conversation. The undercurrent beneath the surface, the winking whisper between the lines, is the writer’s education in poetry.

In high school, I was compelled to read The Great Gatsby. My teachers stressed the heavy symbolism of the book’s images and the psychology of Jay Gatsby, a tragic figure living a lie. But in my recent re-reading, I noticed that Fitzgerald’s story, in so many passages, suggests an epic poem. There are descriptions in Gatsby that evoke, for me, the verse of Coleridge and Vachel Lindsay. When I was young, reading books like Gatsby tended to reinforce my sense that prose is best crafted when its rhythm and flow reflect the writer’s romance with the cadences of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman.

One of my favorite example of this is the first ’graph of Raymond Chandler’s short story, “Red Wind,” which reads as follows:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge…”

This is as much a lyric as it is a set-up. It sings.

Prose and song have been intermingled since before the advent of written literature. The epics of ancient oral cultures, memorized and carried down through generations—Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—were stories recited, intoned and dramatized in lines of verse and fluid prose.

As a writer internalizes this imperative to weave melody into yarn-spinning, it becomes a nagging presence. It often asserts itself not in the first spontaneous draft but later, in editing and revision, as the fussy author searches for sour notes and clunky scansion.

This element is subtle. Try too hard and it turns to shmaltz. Serious readers can appreciate but not notice it. Inferior writers never figure it out. The palpable perception of poetry in prose reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart’s immortal definition of pornography. He confessed that he “could never succeed in intelligibly” defining it, “But I know it when I see it.”

I found an example of how this nagging presence affects my work in a write-the-scene essay about Las Vegas Avenue (The Strip). Here’s how my prosaic paragraph looked after I broke it into lines of unrhymed verse:

The Strip is a carny sideshow of costumed effigies…
I pass four phony Elvises in smudged white jumpsuits,
one faux Captain America,
a number of nylon-pile ’toons…
Yogi Bear and Astro Boy,
two Mickey Mouses, a headless Minnie
and one degenerate rodent who might be Mickey’s pedophile uncle,
eight fake bondage bimbos in policegirl bustiers and mesh stockings…
at least thirty counterfeit showgirls
in pasties, thongs, stilettos, synthetic feathers.
Following two in purple rooster-tails,
I watch ’til they turn.
On the right, a pretty teenage moon-face
beneath smears of black mascara and indigo gloss, lively eyes
and a species of freshness that Vegas hunts down and slimes.
I take no note of her body
though most of it’s exposed to the evening chill.
I picture goosebumps but
I also picture her grandparents encountering her here.
I see them hug her and ask if she’s getting enough to eat,
does she have a place to stay,
is she safe?,
as she whispers that she can’t talk long—
she’s being watched—
unless they pay to take a photo with her
in this misogynist nightmare of a tits-and-ass caricature,
and they wonder, do they want a picture of her,
like this,
with them?
I see them walking away chastened, bewildered
but hoping, saying—
probably not out loud—
she’s just a kid,
this will pass, she’ll be okay,
we’ll laugh about this someday.
But terrified that they’re wrong.