(From 'Thank You, Esther Forbes', The Braindead Megaphone, by George Saunders)
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Before Johnny Tremain, writers and writing gave me the creeps. In our English book, which had one of those 1970s titles that connoted nothing (Issues and Perspectives, maybe, or Amalgram 109), the sentences ("Larry, aged ten, a tow-headed heavyset boy with a happy smile for all, meandered down to the ballfield, hoping against hope he would at least be invited to join some good-spirited game instigated by the other lads of summer") repulsed me the way a certain kind of moccasin-style house slipper then in vogue among my father's friends repulsed me. I would never, I swore, wear slippers like that. Only old people who had given up on life could wear slippers like that. Likewise the sentences in Amalgram 109 or Polyglot Viewpoints seemed to have given up on life, or to never have taken life sufficiently personally. They weren't lies, exactly, but they weren't true either. They lacked will. They seemed committee-written, seemed to emanate from no-person, to argue against the intimate actual feeling of minute-to-minute life.
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Forbes suggested that the sentence was where the battle was fought. With enough attention, a sentence could peel away from its fellows and be, not only from you, but you. I later found the same quality in Hemingway, in Isaac Babel, Gertrude Stein, Henry Green: sentences that had been the subject of so much concentration, they had become things in the world instead of attempts to catalog it.
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A person can write: "There were, out in the bay, a number of rocks, islands of a sort, and upon these miniature islands, there resided a number of guls, which, as the sun began to rise, gradually came to life, ready to begin another day of searching for food."
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Or she can write: "On rocky islands gulls woke."
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The first sentence is perfectly correct. There is, strictly speaking, more information in it than in the second. But is the increased information justified by the greater number of words? The second sentence credits our intelligence. Where else would the islands be, but in a bay? The plural "islands" implies that there are "a number" of them. If the rocks are "islands of a sort", let's call them "islands". Gulls search for food every day, no need to point it out.
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The second sentence has been loved by its creator. She has given it her full attention. That missing comma? She meant it. There was, to Forbes, I expect, a world of difference between "On rocky islands, gulls woke," and "On rocky islands gulls woke."
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Standing around the school yard, I tried out sentences meant to describe, with Forbes-like precision, whatever I happened to be seeing. "Sister Lynette was eating lunch in the doorway while watching the third- and fourth-grade kids running around in the parking lot at recess and as she watched them, she thought of her home in Kansas." That wasn't very Forbes-ish. Sister Lynette wasn't actually standing in the doorway at all. She was ... she was "standing on the sidewalk that ran between the school building itself and the parking lot on which the children played." Or actually, she was "standing with one foot on that sidewalk and one foot in the parking lot." Do we need all that? Was her exact position worth the resulting sentence-bulk? Why did we care where she was standing anyway? Did it affect what came next? Also, she wasn't watching "the third- and fourth-grade kids." She was watching some of them. Actually, on closer inspection, she wasn't. She was looking across the street, at a run-down house. What did I mean by "run-down"? What were the specific characteristics of the house that might cause me to think of it as "run-down"?
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I remember those times with great affection: the bitter Chicago cold, the vast parking lot, the world, suddenly and for the first time, transformed into something describable, with me, the Potential Describer, at its center.
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The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.
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The difference between Esther Forbes and the authors of Polyglot 141 was that Forbes had fully invested herself in her sentences. She had made them her own, agreed to live or die by them, taken total responsibility for them. How had she done this? I didn't know. But I do now: she'd revised them. She had abided long enough with each of them to push past the normal into what we might call the excessive-meaningful: had held the prose up to sufficient scrutiny to turn it into something iconic, something that sounded like her and only like her.
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What happens when this attention is not paid?
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Well, Polyglot 141 happens.
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But worse things can happen than Polyglot 141.
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A petty bureaucrat writes to his superior: "The lighting must be better protected than now. Lights could be eliminated, since they apparently are never used. However, it has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them as soon as darkness sets in. This is because the load naturally rushes toward the light when darkness sets in, which makes closing the door difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. It would therefore be useful to light the lamp before and during the first moments of the operation." The bureaucrat was the ironically named "Mr Just," his organisation the SS, the year 1942.
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What Mr Just did not write -- what he would have written, had he been taking full responsibility for his own prose -- is: "To more easily kill the Jews, leave the lights on." But writing this would have forced him to admit what he was up to. To avoid writing this, what did he have to do? Disown his prose. Pretend his prose was not him. He may have written a more honest version, and tore it up. He may have intuitively, self-protectively, skipped directly to this dishonest, passive-voice version. Either way, he accepted an inauthentic relation to his own prose, and thereby doomed himself to hell.
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Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility ("On structures not unlike rock masses, it was observed that certain animals perhaps prone to flight slept somewhat less aggressively than previously"), or something more diabolical ("The germ-ridden avatars of evil perched on their filthy black rocks in the otherwise pure bay, daring the clear-souled inhabitants of the city to do what was so obviously necessary: kill them before they could infest the city's hopeful, innocent children"); the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most important of all, tells us what we really think. But this process takes time, and immersion in prior models of beautiful compression.
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Forbes was my first model of beautiful compression. She did for me what one writer can do for another: awoke a love for sentences. Behind her prose I sensed the loving hand of an involved human maker. Her thirst for direct, original language seemed like religion of sorts, a method of orientation, and a comfort, in all countries and weather, in happiness and sadness, in sickness and in health. Reading Johnny Tremain, I felt a premonition that immersion in language would enrich and bring purpose to my life, which has turned out to be true.
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So thank you, Esther Forbes. I never knew you, it turned out your Boston never existed, but that nonexistent town, and that boy made out of words, changed things for me forever.
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