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On Pure Storytelling

—for Vonda N. McIntyre

[Talk delivered at the 1970 Nebula Awards Banquet in Berkeley]

I think the trouble with writers writing about writing (or speaking about it) is the trouble anyone has discussing his or her own profession.

I first came across this idea in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927): you’ll do better writing about something you’ve only done a little of, because you still preserve those first impressions that make it vivid, even to someone who has been doing it for years. If you write about something you have been doing day in and day out, though you would recognize those impressions if someone else were to recall them to you, you yourself tend to pass over them as commonplaces.

Therefore, contemplating what I was going to say this evening, I tried to go back and capture some of my initial impressions about the whole experience of writing stories, or even my first encounters with the whole idea of stories and storytelling.

The catalyst for my ideas this evening was a book I passed recently on the shelves of the Tro Harper bookstore. It was a large-sized, quality paperback, with a red cover, published by Dell: The Careless Atom by Sheldon Novick.

Sheldon Novick …

The last time I heard Sheldon Novick’s name was fourteen years ago. He was several years ahead of me at the Bronx High School of Science. There was a strange half dozen years when the Bronx High School of Science held a whole gaggle of fascinating people at once, including, among others, Stokeley Carmichael, Bobby Darin, Todd Gitlin, Peter Beagle, Norman Spinrad, someone else who is currently writing the motorcycle column for The Good Times under the nom de plume of The Black Shadow, and Marilyn Hacker.

As I said, that was the last I’d heard of Shelley, till two weeks ago.

The first I’d heard of him was several years before that. We were at summer camp. Some dozen of us had taken an evening hike from a place named, for unknown reasons, Brooklyn College, to another known as The Ledge.

There was a campfire.

Several marshmallows had, by now, fallen into it. We were a quarter of the way up the back of a forested hill, pretentiously called Mount Wittenburg. And it was dark and chilly. You know the situation: smoke in the eyes, your left cheek buttered with heat, your right shoulder shivering.

Somebody said, “Shelley, tell us a story.”

“What do you want to hear a story for?” Shelley said with disdain, and licked marshmallow from his fingers.

“Tell us a story, tell us a story!” There wasn’t any stopping us. “Tell us a story. Tell us the one about—”

“Oh, I told you that one last week.”

“Tell it again! Tell it again!”

And I, who had never heard Shelley tell anything at all, but was thoroughly caught up by the enthusiasm, cried: “Well, then, tell us a new one!”

Smiling a little in the direction of the rubber on his left sneaker toe, Shelley rose to take a seat on a fallen log. He put his hands on his knees, leaned forward and said, “All right.” He looked up at us. “Tonight I shall tell you the story of …”

The story that he told was called Who Goes There? He told it for an hour and a half that night, stopping in the middle. We gathered outside Brooklyn College the next night and sat on the flagstones while he told us another hour’s worth. And two nights later we gathered in one of the tents while he gave us the concluding half hour under the kerosene lantern hanging from the center pole.

“Did you make that up?” somebody asked him, when he was finished.

“Oh, no. It’s by somebody called John W. Campbell,” he explained to us. “It’s a book. I read it a couple of weeks ago.”

At which point our counselor told him, really, it was well past lights out and he simply had to go.

Our counselor blew out the light, and I lay in my cot bed thinking about storytelling. Shelley was perhaps thirteen, back then. I was nine or ten, but even then it seemed perfectly marvelous that somebody could keep so many people enthralled for four hours over three nights.

Shelley was the first of those wonderful creatures, “a Storyteller,” whom I had ever encountered.

A summer camp is a very small place. Shelley’s reputation spread. Some weeks later, he was asked to tell his story again to a much larger group—bunk five, bunk six, and bunk seven all collected in the amphitheater behind the long, creosoted kitchen house. On a bench this time, once more Shelley told the story Who Goes There? This time it took only a single hour sitting.

We who’d heard it before, of course, had the expected connoisseur reaction: Oh, it was much better in the longer version. The intimacy of firelight and roasted marshmallows vastly improved the initial sequence. And lanterns were essential for the conclusion to have its full effect. But the forty-odd people who, that evening, heard it for the first time were just as enthralled as we had been. More important, I got a chance to look at how Shelley’s tale was put together.

The first thing I noticed the second time through was that the names of all the characters were different from the first time. And when I got a chance to look at the novel myself a year or so later, I realized with amusement that the names in neither of Shelley’s versions corresponded with those of Campbell’s.

The second thing I noticed was that a good deal of the story was chanted—indeed, in the most exciting passages very little was actually happening; and you had sections like:

They walked across the ice, they slogged across the ice, there was ice below them and ice all around them …

Or, when the monster was beginning to revive, I recall:

The fingers rose, the hand rose, the arm rose slowly, a little at a time, rose like a great green plant …

Needless to say, you will find none of these lines in the book.

What Shelley was giving us was a very theatrical, impromptu, and essentially poetic impression of his memory of the tale.

When I did encounter Shelley again in Bronx Science, I had just joined the staff of the school literary magazine, Dynamo. I was delighted to discover him. That was one of the first times I made the discovery that three years difference in age is a lot more at nine or ten than it is at fourteen or fifteen.

At any rate, I bumped into Shelley—literally—behind the projection booth in the auditorium balcony. We recovered, recognized each other, enthused for a while, and I asked him if he would be doing any fiction or poetry for Dynamo. He looked quite surprised. No, he hadn’t thought about it. Actually his interests were in theater.

I was quite surprised. But creative writing, he explained, had never particularly attracted him.

Later, Shelley turned in quite a credible performance as Jonathan in the senior play, Arsenic and Old Lace. And a few weeks ago, after having not seen him since, I learned, via the blurb on the back of The Careless Atom, that “Sheldon Novick is Program Administrator of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also Associate Editor of the journal Scientist and Citizen and is a frequent contributor of articles dealing with atomic energy.” I can recommend the book to anyone interested in the recent developments of the practical side of reactors and reactor plants. (Even more recently, Novick is the author of a fascinating and controversial biography, Henry James: The Young Master [Random House: New York, 1997], as well as a life of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He is also editor of Holmes’s collected works. –SRD, 2005)

But let’s get back to “storytelling.”

The second “storyteller” I encountered was Seamus McManus. He was the grandfather of one of my elementary school classmates. Mr. McManus had been born in Ireland. His father had been a professional storyteller who went from cottage to cottage and, for lodging and meals and a bit of kind, kept the family entertained in the evenings with what were called “faerie stories,” in which an endless number of heroes named Jack, always the youngest of three brothers, set out to seek their fortune and, after encountering multiple old women, magicians, giants and elves, magic mills, and enchanted apples, married the beautiful princess and lived happily ever after.

Mr. McManus had made the reconstruction of these classic Irish folk tales his hobby. He told them at children’s parties—indeed, it was at his grandson’s, Fitzhugh Mullan’s, birthday party that I first heard him. Sunlight streamed through white organdy curtains while the gray-haired gentleman sat forward in the armchair, and the rest of us, sitting on the rug and hugging our knees, were bound in the music of his brogue. Over the next few years, I heard him several times more, once at a children’s library, and once in a program in the school’s auditorium. And, after the initial magic, again I got a chance to look at what was going on.

The action in these stories—and you always left a McManus storytelling under the impression that you had just been through the tremendous and hair-raising adventures—the action, when you looked at it up close, was usually dismissed in a sentence or two: the typical battle between Jack and one of his numerous adversaries was usually handled something like this:

“You want to fight?” said Jack. “Well I’m a poor sort of fighter but I’ll do my best, and the best can do no more.” So they fought, and they fought, and they fought, and they fought, and—(here Mr. McManus would snap his fingers)—Jack slew him with a blow.

There was your action.

On the other hand, the things that stuck, the things that remained, indeed the things that took up most of the time, were the ritual descriptions and incantatory paragraphs, the endless journeys that all went from tale to tale, from story to story:

So they lifted up their bundles, and set out in high spirits. And they traveled twice as far as I could tell you, and three times farther than you could tell me, and seven times farther than anyone could tell the two of us.

And when, in a year or so, I first read the Iliad, I think this contributed much to my understanding of those ritual descriptions that are repeated word for word throughout the poem—like the sacrifices that come with exactly the same words nearly a dozen times, at each point the Achaeans are called on to perform one:

When they had made their petitions and scattered the grain, they first drew the heads of the animals back; they cut open their throats; they flayed them. Then from the thighs they cut slices and wrapped them in fat folds with raw meat above them. These the old priest burnt on the wood, and he sprinkled wine on the fire, and the young men gathered around him, five-pronged forks in their hands. When the thighs were burnt up, and they had all tasted the organs, they carved the remains into small pieces and pierced them with boughs and they roasted them well, then pulled them out of the flame. Work done, the meal ready, they fell to eating hungrily, all with an equal share. And, when their thirst and their hunger were satisfied …

When their thirst and their hunger were satisfied, the Trojan War got under way again.

Mr. McManus published several books of his stories. The one I recall most readily was Bold Heroes of Hungry Hill. If you read them, I suspect you will find them a little flat—though they are word for word as Mr. McManus told them.

While I considered the flatness, I was taken back to Mr. McManus at FitzHugh’s party. Afterward, we’d asked him questions about himself, about the stories, about Ireland. “After all,” I remember him saying, “the tales are hundreds of years old, passed on by word of mouth. We had some good storytellers, and some not so good. But the thing to remember—” and he sat back in his armchair again—“the tale is in the telling.”

The third storyteller I remember from that terribly odd, angular, and hyperlogical time called childhood was my geography teacher, John Seeger. He was the older brother of the folk singer Pete Seeger. They have practically identical speaking voices. Any one of you who caught Pete Seeger on the Johnny Cash show a few weeks back will have some idea of the terribly arresting quality of that voice. John—my elementary school was one of those fifties strangenesses where children called the teachers by their first names—John taught a good deal of his geography through storytelling.

They all followed the same form. Two children, a boy and a girl, variously named Pat and Pam, or Bill and Barbara, or John and Judy, along with their crotchety governess—the only one of her many names I remember was Miss Powderpuff—would get separated from their parents in a foreign country, and John would regale us with the economics, the geography, the landscape, the morals and mores of the country in a fusillade of fascinating anecdotes.

John’s stories were incredibly popular with the students. Twice a week, the geography room would stay open after school, and forty or fifty of us would squeeze into the circle while John, mimicking first this character, then another, with much slapping of the knees and clever gesticulations, would take his alliterative hero and heroine through Athens, Beirut, Calcutta, Damascus, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, and Geneva. I think John’s stories were the most enjoyable of the three. Besides being educational, they involved a great deal of audience participation. Whenever a new character entered, John would first describe him—a Greek musician, a French banker, a Turkish ambassador’s son—then he would turn to us and say, “And what should we call him?”

We would cry out names, and whichever one seemed most appropriate would stick with the character through the story.

During this time, I was indulging in my own first experiments with writing. I had even gone so far as to put down a hundred-odd pages of a novel, in cramped scrawling pencil, about an elderly gentleman of fifteen who spent a lot of time looking at the sea and taking long walks alone in the city. Sometime or other during its composition, it occurred to me that, besides spelling and grammar, something else was missing from the sorrows of my youngest of Werthers (it was called Lost Stars). But what …?

Once, after one of his more fascinating storytelling sessions, I went up to John and asked him if he had ever written any of his stories down.

All the other students had gone, and tall, gangling John and I walked down the hall toward the elevator. John looked surprisingly pensive. “I’ve tried,” he explained. “But somehow, I just can’t tell stories to a typewriter. And there isn’t the interplay back and forth between me and you kids.”

I was precocious. “Have you ever tried to record them?” I suggested. “Then you could transcribe—” (I had just learned the word two weeks ago and was using it now at every opportunity—) “you could transcribe them, and then they’d be just like you told them.”

“It’s funny you should suggest that,” John said. “Last year, I tried that. And once I forgot about the microphone, the telling went pretty well. Then I got my wife to type it out. And you know what?”

“What?” I asked.

“They were perfectly dreadful!” Then the elevator came.

I believe that was my first practical lesson in fiction writing. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that everything I know consciously about writing—and I’m painfully aware how little that actually is—has to do with the difference between written and spoken language.

I feel that I was lucky to have been exposed to so much purely verbal storytelling as a child, because it pointed out some essential differences between sitting, with a bunch of people, at the feet of a marvelous and magical raconteur, and sitting in one’s room, by oneself, with a book.

The aural art of storytelling, like theater, is essentially communal. People come together to hear stories. And the storyteller has the whole theatrical battery, including elements of dance and song, to compel his listeners’ attention.

Reading is very much a do-it-yourself entertainment. It’s private. There is no way for an author to compel the reader to do anything. Any call to the phone, or even a passing thought, can interrupt. On the other hand, the reader can determine his or her own pace at reading, can go back and reread; indeed, as a rule, the reader is far more conscious of details than the hearer.

In speech, incantation, invocation, and repetition are practically a must. But what the ear finds supremely enthralling the eye finds dull.

On the other hand, such a tiny part of the visual capacity of the eye and brain is used in scanning black print on white paper that practically the whole pictorial imagination is left free—so that in written texts, evocation becomes almost the entire process, the conjuring up of pictures, tones of voice, resonances, implications, and reminiscences.

Reading, as opposed to listening, requires a far higher level of attention, and the McLuhan formula, “Low resolution equals high involvement,” governs the whole play. Traditional phrases that weigh heavily on the ear, to the eye are mere clichés. The reader wants the information once and at the highest intensity, rather than beat into the tympanum with chanted repetition.