Jerome Kagan and the Passion for Abstraction

Jerome Kagan (Photo by Rick Friedman)

I see in the Times that Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan died recently. In his Three Seductive Ideas (1998), Kagan analyzed human nature’s “passion for abstraction.” He said, “The human brain, like the brain of a rat, is biased initially to attend to generality rather than particularity.” 

If you believe, as I do, that specificity is the key to effective writing, you'll find that Kagan’s observation explains a lot. It explains why specificity doesn’t come naturally, why we have to school ourselves to use definite, specific, concrete language. William Strunk and E. B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style (1972), wrote,

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

This, to me, is writing's golden rule. It’s a difficult rule to apply because, as Kagan pointed out, it runs counter to our natural inclination to generalize. 

January 28, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Robert A. Caro’s superb “Turn Every Page,” in which he takes us behind his great biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson, parts of which have appeared in The New Yorker (see, for example, his riveting “The Transition,” April 2, 2012), and describes some of his research experiences. If that sounds dry, it isn’t. It’s one of the most absorbing pieces I’ve read in a long time. Caro offers research tips (“turn every page”; “the importance of sense of place”), and he illustrates them with fascinating stories:

I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “you were supposed to have checks by friday . . . hope they arrived in due form and on time.”

Even as a junior congressman, Johnson wielded power. That Western Union telegram led Caro to the source of it.

What I enjoyed most about Caro’s piece is the writing as pure writing. Caro is a master plain English stylist – vigorous, definite, specific, concrete, concise. Here, for example, is his description of his first sighting of the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up:

Looking back on my work on Johnson, I think I realized on my very first drive into the Hill Country—or should have realized—that I was entering a world I really didn’t understand and wasn’t prepared for. I still remember: you drove west from Austin, and about forty-one miles out you came to the top of a tall hill. As I came to the crest of that hill, suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and stand there looking down. Because what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness—a vast emptiness. I later found out that it’s a valley, the valley of the Pedernales River. It’s about seventy-five miles long and fifteen miles across.

When I stood there looking down on it that first time, for a few minutes I didn’t see a single sign of human life in that immense space. Then something happened—a cloud moved from in front of the sun perhaps, and suddenly in the middle of this emptiness the sun was glinting off a little huddle of houses. That was Johnson City. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up in that town, three hundred and twenty-three people lived there; when I arrived, there were only a few hundred more. As I stood on that hill, I realized that I was looking at something, was about to drive down into something, unlike anything I had ever seen before, in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation.

No big fancy words – just plain language. And yet they evoke a vivid picture. E. B. White, in his (and William Strunk’s) The Elements of Style (1972), says, “The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.” Robert A. Caro’s writing exemplifies this approach perfectly. 

November 19, 2012 Issue

These days it seems that Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s great baseball writer, spends as much time thinking about double burial plots as he does contemplating double plays. This may strike some people as morbid, but not me. I enjoy nosing around old cemeteries. I enjoy reading about them, too. Angell’s “Here Below” (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006) is a wonderful cemetery piece, ranking with Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956; Up in the Old Hotel, 1992) and John Updike’s superb “Cemeteries” (Picked-Up Pieces, 1976). “Here Below” describes visits that Angell and his wife, Carol, made to Palisades Cemetery, Stockbridge cemetery, and (most memorably) Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery, where a number of his family, including his mother (Katherine S. White) and step-father (E. B. White), are buried. I like Angell’s descriptions of grave markers (e.g., “An other eloquent marker nearby was a tall and faded pinkish-brown slab – perhaps it’s brownstone – with a scalloped top and the pleasing old willow-tree-and-stone-urn drawing barely visible here, that you find in this part of the country”). Interestingly, “Here Below” contains one of the longest sentences I’ve ever seen in The New Yorker, an amazing construction that innocuously begins, “Mother smiles and sighs and picks at her roast potato,” and then takes off, running sixty-eight lines, ending with a question mark.

Angell’s “Over the Wall,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, is a touching sequel to “Here Below.” In this new piece, Angell again visits Brooklin Cemetery. This time he describes two additional grave markers – his wife’s, who died early last April – and his own (“it only lacks the final numbers”). And he mentions another grave, as well, “that of my daughter Callie, who died two years ago.” Angell doesn’t linger over his wife’s grave. He says, “My visits to Carol didn’t last long. I’d perk up the flowers in the vase we had there, and pick deadheads off a pot of yellow daisies; if there had been rain overnight, I’d pick up any pieces of the sea glass that had fallen and replace them on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone.” That “on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone” is inspired. In the oldest part of the cemetery, Angell sees headstones “worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility.” This echoes one of “Here Below”’s best lines: “Carol found one of the markers we were looking for: a silvery granite oblong, with the letters fading into invisibility.” Fading into invisibility – time’s inevitable effect. Angell’s two marvelous cemetery pieces make the vanishing process almost palpable. 

Interesting Emendations: Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table"

Here are two variations of the same passage. One is from Michael Ondaatje’s short story “The Cat’s Table,” which appeared in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. The other is from his novel of the same name. Just from looking at their composition, can you tell which one is the New Yorker version?

Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

Out on the street, you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a narrow, vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

The two passages differ in three ways: (1) one has a comma after “street,” the other one doesn’t; (2) in one, the scissors are described as “vicious”; in the other, they are described as “narrow, vicious”; (3) one says “the possibility of any further hair”; the other simply says “the possibility of hair.”

Of the three differences, the most telling, in terms of identifying the New Yorker version, is the deletion of the extraneous “any further” in the second passage. The New Yorker consistently follows the principles set out in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, chief amongst which is “Omit needless words.” The second passage is from The New Yorker.

Here from the same sources are two more extracts for comparison:

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, the throat-catching smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut, and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

Note the elimination of the parenthesis in the second passage, and the insertion of “throat-catching” immediately before “smell.” The second version strikes me as more concise and, as Strunk & White would say, definite. It’s my favorite passage in the short story. I was surprised to see it altered in the novel.

The Cat’s Table contains many such differences. In almost every instance, I prefer the New Yorker version. I wonder why Ondaatje didn’t use the New Yorker edits in his novel.

Credit: The above portrait of Michael Ondaatje is by Patrick Long; it appears in The New Yorker, June 4, 2007, as an illustration for Louis Menand’s “The Aesthete.”

The Year In Reading: Philip Connors' "Fire Season"

One of the best books of 2011 is Philip Connors’ Fire Season. The New Yorker calls it "a compelling study of isolation, wildness, and 'a vocation in its twilight'" ("Briefly Noted," May 9, 2011). That’s an excellent description of it. But the magazine’s anonymous reviewer also says that Connors' "prose style can be portentous" and that his "personality veers from smug to misanthropic." Reading Fire Season, I didn’t detect any of those alleged attributes. Granted, there are passages in which Connors bluntly expresses aversion to what he calls “nonlookout work” and to “any task involving contact with the public in an official government capacity.” He’s quite open about his wish to be “left utterly and blissfully alone.” But he’s equally honest about the fact that his aloneness lasts only ten days at a time. After each ten-day stint on the mountain, he takes a four-day break during which he returns to Silver City. Even when he’s up on the mountain carrying out his duties as a fire lookout (or, as he calls himself, “a professional watcher of mountains”), he has occasional contact with the outside world, either by radio or in person (e.g., when hikers unexpectedly appear, or when government colleagues trek or fly in to see him). In those outside contacts, Connors doesn't come across as cold or aloof; on the contrary, he seems affable and easy to get along with. One time his wife visits with him for three days. Connors calls that time "three days of delicious domesticity." That doesn't sound like misanthropism to me. Yes, Connors has an attraction to solitude. But that doesn’t make him a misanthrope anymore than Thoreau’s solo existence at Walden made him a misanthrope. In fact, as Robert Sullivan points out in The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), Thoreau “kept a chair by his door to encourage visitors, and took it away only when he was writing.” Note that exception – “only when he was writing.” The need for solitude and the urge to write are closely knit. Connors uses some of his time at the lookout to think and write. At one point, when he’s up in the tower, he says, “In all my seasons I’ve never seen the view so clear, so I open my notebook and begin to name and count the visible mountain ranges….” Then, in one of Fire Season’s most beautiful passages, he proceeds to recreate the list:

… the Wahoos, the Details, the Cuchillos, the San Mateos, the Magdalenas, the Fra Cristobal Range, the Oscuras, the Caballos, the San Andres Mountains, the Sacramentos, the Organs, the Franklins, the Doña Anas and the Rough and Ready Hills, the Sierra de las Uvas, the Good Sight Mountains, the Cookes Range, the Floridas and the Tres Hermanas, the Cedars, the Big and Little Hatchets, the Animas Mountains, the Pyramids, the Peloncillos and Chiricahaus, and Big Burros, the Pinaleños, the Silver City Range, the Pinos Altos Range, the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons – more than thirty in all and me in the middle of them, goggle-eyed and rapturous, alone in my aerie in the vastness.

Alone in my aerie in the vastness – aloneness is the key; if Connors hadn’t been alone at that particular “goggle-eyed and rapturous” moment, he likely wouldn’t have been moved to get out his notebook and compile his wonderful mountain list. As a consequence, we might not have the pleasure of reading it now. Connors’ self-confessed “attraction to solitude” isn’t a function of misanthropy; it flows from his being a writer. The book we hold in our hands today, Fire Season, is the result of the solitude that Connors sought and found on the Black Range. You’d think The New Yorker, the most literary of all magazines, would appreciate that. E. B. White would certainly have appreciated it. He wouldn’t allege misanthropy against a writer seeking solitude.

As for the criticism that Connors is “smug,” I find no basis for it, unless it’s in his “reference to his “peonage in newspapers,” and assertions that he doesn’t have the requisite temperament for what he calls “the hamster wheel of the eight-hour day.” I don’t find these passages smug; I find them bracing. They contain a Thoreauvian friction, a resistance to the culture at large, that I really admire.

This brings me to the most irritating aspect of the New Yorker review – the description of Connors’ prose style as “portentous.” Of the many adjectives I can think of to apply to Connors’ writing (e.g., clear, vivid, precise, detailed, honest, lyrical), “portentous” is most certainly not among them. Fire Season struck me as a remarkable piece of writing, remarkable for its clarity and concreteness, and for the present-tense immediacy of many of its descriptions. Here is birdsong (“Through the open tower windows I hear the call of the hermit thrush, one of the most gorgeous sounds in all of nature, a mellifluous warble beginning on a long clear note”), clouds (“Lenticular clouds dot the highest peaks, their elliptical shapes and striated edges bringing news of howling winds a few thousand feet above me”), air (“Come morning the air will smell sweetly of burning grass and pine duff, and my tower will cast its silhouette against a hazy salmon sunrise”), smoke (“All past folly recedes, at least momentarily, beneath the roiling smokes of June”), more smoke (“The mountains to my north are mantled in a haze of drift smoke stretching sixty miles”), trees (“On the north slope red-bark ponderosa far older than the Vitorio war throw their shaggy shadows on the needle-cast floor”), mountain peaks (“Off in the other direction, the shadow of my peak stretches in the shape of an arrowhead forty miles across the desert, the tip of it touching the Rio Grande just before sunset”), a snake (“Bit by bit the snake – a Western wandering garter – walks its jaws up the length of the salamander’s body, preparing to swallow it whole”), lightning striking his cabin (“For several minutes there’s a weird smell in the air, like an over-heated radiator, and my heart jiggles in my chest like a fox in a burlap bag”) – on and on, a multiplicity of acutely seen details that bring the page alive. At one point in Fire Season, Connors says, “I produce nothing but words.” Yes, that may be so. But what words! Fire Season is a wonderful book. I enjoyed it immensely.