Roughen it Up

I was not a good writer in my younger years. I was stymied, arrested, by the wrong idea of what beauty is. I thought the language had to course, unstopping as a song. I decided that if a thought, a moment, a scene could not be expressed with some degree of my idea of beauty that it should not be expressed at all. It was always all about words for me, their sound and flow. I could not see beyond that fence.

But there is room, in writing, for the forcible, physical, coarsened, unfinished. For the gap, the pause, the uncertainty. It is a good thing, I think, to see the author's mind at work, and even now as I write I work against the subjugating reign of a certain kind of refinement. I try to write more, write bigger, toward a different kind of beauty. And I'm still learning.

Early this morning, while reading "Enameled Lady," Hilton Als' portrait of Katherine Anne Porter in the New Yorker, I came upon these words. They were instructive all over again.

It’s true that it’s almost impossible to get a toehold on much of Porter’s later work, owing to its high varnish: her characters can barely breathe beneath the sheen. Porter perfected her stories until you begin to feel like a clumsy intruder for even reading them. Rarely do you get beneath the decorous surface and feel a character’s lifeblood. And it is this artificiality that kept Porter on the wrong side of the line that separates a minor writer from a great one. Ultimately, she controlled too much: she relied on tricks of style, on a language that was too cultivated for the rough potential of stories like “He” and “Noon Wine” to develop. Too often one senses Porter repressing the trashy twang of her childhood in favor of something more, as Capote put it, “enameled.”

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