Misanthrope's Corner -- July 28, 1997

F L O R E N C E

K I N G

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

TOWARD the end of his life when his health had begun to break down, my fellow misanthrope Evelyn Waugh wrote his friend, Nancy Mitford: ``I'm quite deaf now. Such a comfort.'' I wish I could say the same as we prepare for our national conversation on race, but unfortunately I have ears like a lynx.
I didn't always hate the sound of the human voice. As a college student in the Fifties I ran with arty bohemians, a dependably garrulous breed, staying up all night in shabby apartments amid Toulouse-Lautrec posters and orange-crate bookcases, drinking muscatel and talking intensely about ``life.''
By ``life'' we really meant our own lives, which is what made our marathon soul-searching so enjoyable. We were the last generation of wannabe intellectuals to celebrate selfishness. We thought Gauguin was right to abandon his wife and children and run away to Tahiti, we cheered Sherwood Anderson's walk down the railroad tracks into a new life, and we did not care how much adulterous havoc George Sand wreaked. Nothing mattered to us except cultivating the garden of our salad days; we would have sacrificed anybody for a chance to live in Europe ``for a year,'' justifying it with the self-evident principle that creative people must put themselves first.
Then came the Sixties. Suddenly, intellectuals were no longer selfish and soul-searching was no longer arty. As altruistic hippies and utopian radicals replaced bohemian blithe spirits, discourse among the avant garde degenerated into self-flagellating confessions, consciousness-raising, and wrangles about bus schedules for Freedom Rides and which Safeways to target for boycotts of lettuce and grapes.
When the black-turtleneck-sweater crowd donned tie-dyes and took up selfless martyrdom, I found myself cut off from the writer's natural milieu. I enjoyed blithe spirits and outrageous nonconformists, but now their opinions set my teeth on edge. I liked the freemasonry of artists with their easy assumptions of superiority, but now they all believed in equality. I wasn't cut out to be a hippie, but neither was I cut out to be a Republican committeewoman. Where could I turn for stimulating conversation?
I solved the problem by keeping a foot in both camps, becoming an anti-intellectual intellectual, a right-wing feminist, and an elitist conservative -- three guaranteed ways to end up with no one to talk to at all, which is probably why I did it.
Giving up talking is the smartest thing I ever did. Take, for example, the widespread assumption that writers need to talk often with all kinds of people to master the ``give and take'' of human exchange. I believed this myself for years, but now I know it's not true. Writing and talking don't mix, and in fact war against each other. Every fledgling writer soon learns that trying to reproduce ``the way people really talk'' results in unreadable dialogue. It also works the other way around, as the Rambling Wreck from Arkansas has demonstrated. Bill Clinton's 1969 letter thanking the ROTC colonel for saving him from the draft was full of repellent sentiments, but they were well-expressed. It was a good letter because it did not sound like the way people really talk. But now, after years of incessant talking, everything Clinton says sounds like bad writing.
``It's really about listening,'' said John Kasich of the proposed national conversation on race. Exactly. A writer who listens to America talking does so at his peril. The first principle of art is selectivity; ``Achilles' rage alone, when wrought with skill, abundantly does a whole Iliad fill,'' advised Boileau. American conversation being all about healing power, its first principle issues from therapists, facilitators, and every woman's best girlfriend: ``Start at the beginning and don't leave anything out.''
For all our eagerness to heal with words, the average American utterance can be jarring. This is probably caused by continuous exposure to bereaved families trying to cram into a sound bite their pleas for a) mercy, b) justice, or c) privacy.
``Remember always never to bring a tame in union with a savage thing,'' advised Horace. When a prisoner on Maryland's death row chose gas over lethal injection to force the authorities to witness painful capital punishment, Kathie O'Donnell of the Public Defender's Office explained, ``This is a brutal act, he doesn't want them to sort of redefine the act by making it seem like he's going to sleep.''
YOU don't say ``sort of'' when talking about savage things, but Americans always insert these stool softeners to avoid sounding too blunt and direct. Even some columnists are doing it now. I have seen the softening ``sort of'' in columns, along with ``Correct me if I'm wrong'' (Okay, you're wrong), and ``I hate to say it'' (Then don't).
``Neither a talker nor a listener be,'' advised King. My decision to go Trappist was reinforced last year when I got a message from Mary Matalin's show inviting me to ``talk about your review of Hillary Clinton's book.'' This should not have hit me as strongly as it did. I get enough requests for personal appearances to have kept my cool, but I reacted instead like the heroine of a gothic novel who has to get thrown down a well, locked in the attic, and smothered by a fallen canopy before she finally says ``Suddenly, I realized . . . ''
How can you talk about what you have already written? How can extemporaneous speech possibly improve and clarify something that took you three days of revising, polishing, and fine-tuning to get exactly right? Writing is the ultimate self-expression, but letting an idea stand in pristine -- i.e., written -- form offends an oral culture. Nothing is final until we render it fleeting; nothing makes sense until we confuse it; nothing is lively until we kill it.
Nonetheless, there's hope. Have you noticed how often the new buzzword, ``closure,'' has been cropping up lately? It may be a subconscious way of saying everybody shut up.