For Ethan Canin, the author of
A Doubter’s Almanac, Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish” is a masterwork. The protagonist is a businessman named Woody Selbst who’s unsure of how to mourn his con artist father. Pop didn’t just abandon the family when Woody was a teenager. He tricked his son into becoming an accomplice in his escape—a cruel ruse that permanently thwarted Woody’s ambitions in the process.
In our conversation for this series, Canin explained that his favorite part comes at the very end. As Pop pulls off one last con on his deathbed, Woody’s coming-to-terms is expressed in a simple final sentence: “That was how he was.” We discussed how Bellow infuses five ordinary words with such uncanny power; why endings should make us feel, not think; and what “A Silver Dish” teaches about dialogue, plot, and character.
A Doubter’s Almanac is a family saga about the destructive power of genius, and like “A Silver Dish” it concerns a complex father/son legacy. It’s the story of a groundbreaking mathematician from northern Michigan, whose brilliance is only equaled by his capacity for betrayal and violence. A cast of long-suffering characters support the celebrated work, including the son who fears he’s inherited his father’s gifts and penchant for self-destruction.
In 1998, Ethan Canin left medicine to teach fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he was my professor). The best-selling author of the story collections
Emperor of the Air and
The Palace Thief, and novels including
America America and
For Kings and Planets, his fiction has been published in
The New Yorker,
The Atlantic, and
The Best American Short Stories. We spoke at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan.
Ethan Canin: When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of
Henderson the Rain King in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had, a pair of cords and a sport coat—but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits. As they stood there talking about whether they preferred intravenous versus oral chemotherapy, I thought, “Oh my god, I’m about to get myself into the wrong line of work.” But when I went in for the interview, the guy noticed I had a book in my jacket pocket. He asked what I was reading, and when I took it out, he said, “Oh, that’s my favorite book.” All we did was talk about
Henderson the Rain King. I think that’s how I got into medical school.
I think Bellow’s the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I’m in awe.
One of my favorite works is the great short story “A Silver Dish,” a story not too many people seem to know. It ends with, for me, one of the most memorable lines in fiction:
That was how he was.
There are five words in that sentence, each one essentially meaningless: That was how he was. Two of them are the same word: “was” and “was.” Hardly any sounds even, in those words, there’s no tilt, no break, no angle to the rhythm—just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Of all those words, only “he” and perhaps “was” have any sort of meaning. “How” is technically an adverb the way it’s used here but feels more nounish to me, in the sense that I get a little visual spark when I read it, entirely from what has come before in the story. The whole sentence uses only seven distinct letters, and contains only 15 letters total: three a’s, three h’s, three w’s, two s’s, two t’s, an o, and an e.
It’s an amazingly restrained line from Bellow, who was a poet of the first order. I think he was intentionally restricting his palette. Compare it to some of his other great sentences, like the famous first line of
The Adventures of Augie March:
I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
You can open that book up to page 400 and find the best sentence you’ve ever seen. It’s an astonishing, volcanic eruption of ideas and language. (...)
But the last line of “A Silver Dish,”
is nothing like that. I can’t tell you what any single one of those words means. Imagine you’re a lexicographer and you have to define the word that, or how. And on top of this, there’s none of Bellow’s typical play with rhythm and language—it’s almost a non-sentence. And yet, when I get to it in the story, I weep. I’ve read the story three times in the past few weeks, and each time I arrived at that sentence, tears came to my eyes.
How does Bellow pack so much emotion into those five ordinary words?
I think it’s their very blankness that allows them to channel so much emotion. Because they don’t bring anything specific to mind, they allow us to feel without thinking. At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy. It’s the writer’s job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel. You’ll often see this in the final moments of a film: The camera tilts up, and the movie ends with a non-distinct image of the sky, or the sea, or the coast. Something the eye can’t quite focus on, which allows you to focus on everything that’s come before. That’s how “that was how he was” works, too. It brings nothing else to mind. This sentence would be a non-sentence if it began the story—but, placed at the end, it’s packed with the charge of everything that precedes it. Each of those non-words is nitroglycerin, and the story that precedes it is the fuse.
To me, this line also shows that content trumps style. I have a theory about writing, which is that you cannot simultaneously write something true about character and, at the same time, write something linguistically beautiful. There are too few words to express both truth and beauty, so most empathetic—or another way to say this might be
character-driven writers—tend to naturally reserve their beautiful constructions for when the content is less urgent. You’ll see Bellow get poetic when he’s writing about the scenery, like when Woody and his dad take that streetcar ride. But when he’s trying to write something that really gets to the narrator’s deep emotional experience, the prose is mostly very simple: That was how he was. Five plain words. At the crux of the story it pays to write what’s true, rather than try to write what’s true and then dilute that by making the prose beautiful. It’s a continuum, of course, but I don’t think you can be at both ends of the continuum.
For me, I should also say, this story answers almost every question a young writer could have about fiction writing. (...)
When “A Silver Dish” begins, it’s remarkably static: Woody, pierced by the sound of church bells all over Chicago, is mourning his father, a lifetime of old memories and impressions washing over him. But the story snaps into sudden focus when he recalls one of his father’s transgressions, a betrayal that’s haunted the younger man all his life. It’s that individual transgression—that memorable instance of bad behavior—that gets the story rolling.
I think of that moment as the story standing up. The moment when the black lines on the page suddenly become a story.
I’ve heard [the
Deadwood creator] David Milch say (though I might be butchering it slightly) that it’s easier to plot your way into an idea than it is to idea your way into a plot. And I think a lot of writers start out making the mistake of trying to write a novel about something. Novels are discussed as though they are intentionally about something, but they’re not. They’re stories. We’re taught to think about them that way by literary critics, or by English teachers, who are, in their defense, generally trying to teach you to write a paragraph rather than a novel. But to be a writer, I think, you have to abandon the idea that fiction is “about” something. This concept is bad enough in your reading life. But it’s fatal in your writing life.
I’ve seen plenty of students come in and say, I want to write a novel about
blah blah blah. But you just can’t do it. You can only write a novel about a character who does something wrong, and see what happens from there. Novels are compendiums of bad behavior, and literature is the gossip about it.
In other words, if you’re writing a piece of fiction, I’d urge you not to try to show anything—instead, try to discover something. There’s no way to write anything powerful unless your unconscious takes charge.
by Joe Fassler and Ethan Canin, The Atlantic |
Read more:
Actually, entertaining isn’t the right word. It’s been insane, but the kind of insane that’s unreasonably fun to watch from a safe remove. Like watching a man stop traffic to cross against a green light by shouting, “I’ll bite your car!” As long as it isn’t your car he’s threatening, it’s sort of funny.
