Where the Bluebird Sings

… the admirable artist Flannery O’Connor said that she dealt in the grotesque because when speaking to the hard-of-hearing one must shout. That remark rather offends me as a reader. I don’t think I am hard-of-hearing; and anyway, with the truly deaf, shouting doesn’t help, it only confuses and annoys.

The above, and all of the chopped extracts that follow are from the book, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs  by Wallace Stegner. All are from the final chapter, The Law of Nature and the Dream of Man: Ruminations on the Art of Fiction. It’s about writing, but it also works for the making of photographs.

… So long as I am saying what doesn’t interest me, I may as well fill out the list. As I wouldn’t be tempted to exploit the battles or troubles of strangers for my own purposes, or play innovator for the sake of being in on the latest fad, so I have never been driven to thump what Mencken called the booboisie, or foam in rage at the middlebrows, or speak in thunder on the morning’s headlines. Not in fiction. Fiction is too important to be abused that way. In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner. They speak to the deaf, but it takes good ears to hear me, for I want to be part of the common sound, a not-too-dominating element of the ambient noise.

… These attitudes I have grown into slowly. I started, as I just said, with the revolutionary and iconoclastic attitudes of the twenties, the time when I was in college. I vorted with the Vorticists and imaged with the Imagists, and if I had been able to get to Paris I would probably have babbled with the Dadaists in the direction of total intellectual, artistic, and emotional disaffiliation. But there was one trouble. I had grown up migrant, without history, tradition, or extended family, in remote backwaters of the West. I never saw a water closet or a lawn until I was eleven years old; I never met a person with my surname, apart from my parents and brother, until I was past thirty; I never knew, and don’t know now, the first names of three of my grandparents. My family could tell me little, for neither had finished grade school, and their uprooting was the cause of mine.

… And so, though I was susceptible to the dialectic of those who declared their independence of custom and tradition and the dead hand of the past, I had no tradition to declare myself independent of, and had never felt the dead hand of the past in my life. If the truth were told, and it now is, I was always hungry to feel that hand on my head, to belong to some socially or intellectually or historically or literarily cohesive group, some tribe, some culture, some recognizable and persistent offshoot of Western civilization. If I revolted, and I had all the appropriate temptations, I had to revolt away from what I was, and that meant toward  something — tradition, cultural memory, shared experience, order.

… Back where we began. How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it’s autobiography. Sure, it’s fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it’s true.

-Julie

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