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.”

Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing"

I first met the genius of Cormac McCarthy in the pages of The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer, 2005). The encounter was accidental. I’d bought the journal to read a travel piece by Tom Bissell called “A Polar Turn of Mind.” The issue also happened to contain an excerpt from a new novel by Cormac McCarthy. The excerpt was titled "Agua." I read the opening sentence – “Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars” – and I was hooked. I immediately read the whole piece straight through, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. It seemed to me it was like Hemingway evolved to another level. Not long after, in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005), I read James Wood’s "Red Planet," a review of McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Wood didn’t think much of the novel. He called it “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller.” Wood can be a severe critic, but in McCarthy’s case, he gentled his attack with very high praise for some of McCarthy’s other work. For example, he said that McCarthy “has written extraordinarily beautiful prose.” And he also said this, which touches directly on the reason I love McCarthy’s writing: “He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature.” I would go further and say that McCarthy is one of the world’s great nature poets.

This week, I finished reading McCarthy’s The Crossing, which is the second volume of his Border Trilogy. It is filled with descriptions of land, weather, and animals that are, in their exactness, vividness, and felt detail, simply amazing. Here is the night sky: “The earliest stars coined out of the dark coping to the south hanging in the dead wickerwood of the trees along the river.” Here are cattle: “The cows stood their distance and studied them back, a leggy and brocklefaced lot, part mexican, some longhorns, every color.” A horse walking in snow: “The snow in the pass was half way to the horse’s belly and the horse trod down the drifts in high elegance and swung its smoking muzzle over the white and crystal reefs and looked out down through the dark mountain woods or cocked its ears at the sudden flight of small winter birds before them.” The taste of river water: “He led the horse and wolf into the shallows and all three drank from the river and the water was cold and slatey to the taste.” On and on – I bet I could quote a hundred such passages from this great book, all beautifully precise, brilliantly inspired.

McCarthy is also a master at conveying swift, violent action. Here is a brief excerpt from one of the book’s most memorable scenes – the rescue of a wolf from a dog-fighting pit: “He rose and stepped to the iron stake piked in the ground and wrapped a turn of chain about his forearm and squatted and seized the chain at the ring and tried to rise with it. No one moved, no one spoke. He doubled his grip and tried again. The beaded sweat on his forehead shone in the light. He tried yet a third time but he could not pull the stake and he rose and turned back and took hold of the actual wolf by the collar and unsnapped the swivelhook and drew the bloody and slobbering head to his side and stood.” Note the frequent usage of “and” in the aforesaid quote – seven of them in the concluding sentence alone. In his review, Wood says, “His sentences are commaless convoys, articulated only by the Biblical ‘and’.” Wood calls it Biblical; he may be right – I wouldn’t know. I would call it Faulknerian. Consider this passage from Faulkner’s “Old Man”: “Wild and invisible, it tossed and heaved and beneath the boat, ridged with dirty phosphorescent foam and filled with a debris of destruction – objects nameless and enormous and invisible which struck and slashed at the skiff and whirled on.” “And” occurs nine times in that quote. Charles McGrath, in his wretched review of The Crossing, published in The New Yorker (June 27, 1994), says, “Cormac McCarthy may be the last of the great overwriters.” He says, “McCarthy never lets you forget that what you’re reading is writing.” Well, I strongly disagree. Like an over-zealous prosecutor, McGrath uses devious methods to indict McCarthy. For one thing, to provide grounds for the “overwriting” charge, he quotes from McCarthy’s early work. That’s like judging Faulkner solely on the basis of Pylon, and not on his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. For another, he quickly skates over the magnificent precision of McCarthy’s nature descriptions, preferring instead to dwell on what he calls McCarthy’s “orating and pumping up.” More than anything else, what really seems to bug McGrath about McCarthy is that “he’s uninterested in the kind of heightened clarity that amounts to invisibility in prose” – hence the “overwriting" charge.

My response to McGrath is that McCarthy specializes in narrating action. There is no better action writer than McCarthy. Hemingway seems almost quaint in comparison. The key to McCarthy’s action-writing mastery is his ability to link together successive steps or procedures in amazing fluid sequences that seem to unspool almost in real time. “And” is the linking word par excellence. No writer deploys it better than McCarthy. McGrath is stuck in the Elements of Style school of writing that requires economy and compression if “invisibility in prose” is to be achieved. To me this is an “old school” approach to writing. To be mimetic of the action it describes, writing must move; it must flow, and not lazily either, but with speed. This is what McCarthy’s action sequences do incomparably. I can think of no one writing today – fictionist or non-fictionist - who describes action as well as McCarthy does.

Piecemeal faults might be found with The Crossing. There’s a Felliniesque aspect to some of the scenes (e.g., those involving a traveling opera company and a group of gypsies). But McCarthy’s great gifts deserve great indulgence. It seems to me James Wood said it best when he observed that McCarthy shows a “willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearian liberality.” Narrow-minded McGrath, clutching his copy of The Elements of Style, would probably reply that Shakespeare was a great overwriter, too.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by Mark Ulriksen; it appears in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005) as an illustration for James Wood's "Red Planet."