Fruitful Soil
Our local library regularly changes the pictures hanging in a back hallway stretching from the tiny café to the restrooms. This month, instead of some local artist’s work, they have photographs of great writers, including a few, like Abraham Lincoln and Bertrand Russell, who did not earn their reputation primarily for writing. The display worked in my case; I decided to check out a few books by great essayists, reminded of the value of learning from the masters.
Not long ago, I wrote about needing novelty in my literary diet, after a long stretch of almost nothing but folk tales, mythology, and modern fantasy. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole story, as I realized last night after reading some of those essays. Free of the need for research in a specific topic, I binged on literary junk food, science fiction and recreational math and, yes, comic books. (These genres do include some excellent works, but I didn’t pick those titles.) Moving abruptly from fun writing to great writing wasn’t just a reminder that our English teachers have been correct all along—this stuff is worth your time—it was a humbling experience.
I refer specifically to “The Dream,” Winston Churchill’s transcript of an imaginary conversation with his dead father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, letting the old boy know how England and the world had been getting on since his death. It was precisely the kind of conversation I fantasized in my own April 30 entry, but was vastly, embarrassingly, more interesting.
This was not because Winston Churchill himself is far more interesting than I; in “The Dream,” Churchill plays coy with his father about his own achievements, admitting only to writing books and articles for the press, and to being a major in the Yeomanry. Churchill’s fantasy of discussing current events with the dead is vastly more interesting because he actually writes the conversation, rather than describing to the reader what such a conversation might be like. How many times have we seen the basic literary rule “show, don’t tell”? How many times? Well, it works. And I feel like an ass.
Great writers find their own voice, but they still learn their tricks from good writers. If these essays are really going to be worth your time, and not just text potato chips, I need to improve my own diet, first.