On Reading and Writing Fiction: Thoughts of an Inveterate Writer of Non-Fiction (Part 1)
Howard Gardner © 2024
Part 1: On Reading Fiction
General Introduction
As anyone who has glanced at my website knows, I’m a writer. And, indeed, I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. I write regularly—“Nulle dies sine linea,” as the Romans celebrated—or lamented; and I ‘ve written a great deal: over 30 books, over 1,000 articles, more blogs of about 1,000 words than I can (or care) to remember. It’s fair to say that I write reasonably well.
Full stop: Occasionally an event (or two) in one’s life causes one to think anew—and perhaps even in illuminating ways—about something that’s long been in the background.
Quite by accident I learned that two friends from long ago had become authors of fiction. I would not have predicted that outcome—and it gave me pause.
Friend 1: Mark Harris
As I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania in the 1950s, there was one older boy whom I especially admired—Mark Harris. I followed Mark’s footsteps in attending the local private secondary school, Wyoming Seminary. There, he preceded me as the editor of The Opinator—the weekly school news magazine; and he generously came to my aid when I had roommate problems. And Mark also preceded me in attending Harvard College, where he was two years ahead of me. We kept in loose touch thereafter. Mark started his career as a journalist and then became a major film documentarian—he has won three Oscars, including one for his essential film Into the Arms of Strangers—about the Kindertransport of the late 1930s.
Recently I was pleased, but also surprised, to learn that Mark had just published Misfits, a collection of 13 short stories.
Friend 2: Max Byrd
A year ahead of me at Harvard College, Max was also a friend and a role model. Indeed, when he sent me a powerful and persuasive message about which path I should proceed after graduating from college, I made a quick change of plans—one which in turn significantly affected both my personal and my professional lives. I did not keep in touch with Max, though I was aware that he had become a well-known novelist. Recently, thanks to a mutual friend (also from college times), I have corresponded with Max; learned that he had also been a professor of English. I’ve had the pleasure of reading two of his novels and some of his articles, and have learned that we share many concerns.
These discoveries have prompted me to ponder my relation to the world(s) of fiction: novels, short stories, plays.
Some guiding issues:
How, as an author of scholarly and popular writings in the social sciences, do I make sense of my own literary output?
What's been my relation to fiction, more generally? What do I like, what do I spurn?
How has that changed over time? Why?
Why have I chosen not to write fiction?
And what about other writers who work primarily in the social sciences—including my wife, Ellen Winner?
On Reading Fiction
For most of my life, I was a typical consumer of fiction. I read and enjoyed novels and stories that were well known or had recently received positive reviews; I watched a great many movies; and I particularly loved theater. Whenever I was in Manhattan, I made sure to see the latest Broadway and off-Broadway plays; and when I had the privilege of spending time in London, I would book tickets ahead of time for plays—sometimes attending a matinee and an evening performance on the same day. But only recently, when poring through my memorabilia (including scores of playbills accumulated over six decades!) did I glean insights into my own literary bent.
For a long time, Tom Stoppard has been my favorite contemporary playwright. I have written about this preference (see here and here); and I especially cherish my two brief in-person encounters with Stoppard. Of course, there are many reasons why I and countless others cherish Stoppard’s theatrical pieces (see Hermione Lee’s outstanding biography). He is clever, amusing, informed, sophisticated, etc. But it turns out that I especially value those Stoppard plays which feature history in the background—Travesties (Zurich in the period just before the Russian Revolution); The Coast of Utopia (Russian emigres in Western Europe during the middle of the 19th century); Arcadia (featuring Lady Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who anticipated the computer age by a full century); and most recently Leopoldstadt (a Jewish family residing in Vienna over the course of a tumultuous half century—and, pointedly, an engagement with Stoppard’s own past of which he had apparently, and perhaps willfully, been ignorant until midlife.) Perhaps their links to history revealed something about me as a reader and a member of the theatrical audience.
Switching authors: When I read a pair of novels by Max Byrd, I realized that I could enter into each of the worlds portrayed therein with some ease.
Case #1: Shooting the Sun features Lady Lovelace (yes, the same person featured in Arcadia) and Charles Babbage, as well as a travelling cohort which includes an unattractive Harvard professor of mathematics. In a pre-computer age, these personalities—armed with one of the first cameras—attempt to document a solar eclipse.
Case #2: Pont Neuf is a love story set against the background of the Battle of the Bulge (late 1944, early 1945 in Western Europe). In addition to an array of familiar characters from that era (novelist Ernest Hemingway, his estranged wife, Martha Gellhorn, General George Patton, among others) the novel features a romantic competition between two Harvard graduates, friends from very different social and economic backgrounds.
A Reaction to These Works by Old Friends
In the case of Mark Harris, I had seen and admired several of his documentaries. As with Max Byrd’s novels, these films dealt with historical (and contemporary) situations which would be reasonably familiar to contemporary viewers. But when I read Mark’s short stories, I was initially mystified. They portray segments of society with which I did not have personal knowledge (criminals, charlatans, youngsters with autism, sex workers)—they seem quite removed not only from my own personal experiences but also from the little that I knew about Mark’s post-college life as a documentary filmmaker, head of a family, and professor in Southern California. (The one exception: A story that features J. Robert Oppenheimer, long known to me and recently the subject of a much-acclaimed biopic.)
Only when I happened upon a podcast from earlier this year, was Mark’s own literary output demystified—at least to some extent, at least for me. Responding to the final question posed by the host, Mark reflected as follows: When in bed, before falling asleep, Mark often tries to imagine the lives of the individuals whom he has recently encountered—many of them quite unfortunate owing to biological, economic, sociological, psychological factors, or a combination thereof. These pre-sleep scenarios sometimes inspired a short story—a collection of these constitute Misfits.
I might speculate that historical events or personalities provided the “dry land” for Max Byrd’s writings, while individuals exhibiting unusual psychological and/or personal symptoms provided the “dry land” for Mark Harris’ literary output. In the case of his documentaries, I did not need such a link—because I already had some familiar with the historical, political, and social milieus that he was “documenting.”
Stepping Back (and Forward!)
As I have aged, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to approach any work unless I had or could readily acquire the necessary groundwork and background knowledge. In earlier decades, when I read novels or watched movies, I could readily follow the plot and keep track of the individuating characters. Nowadays, I value—and often need—scaffolding. The list of dramatic personae that used to be provided in the opening pages of 19th century novels would always be welcome! (Here’s to Wikipedia!)
But there are other kinds of scaffolding—and those include knowledge of history and of biography, and also of human psychology and sociology. That kind of background knowledge proves particularly valuable when one tries to make sense of a new work of fiction—play, movie, novel, short story. (Incidentally, this explains why I usually don’t like docudramas—if the drama toys with what I already know to be the historical or the biographical case, I become annoyed.)
Aside #1: After seeing Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, my friend Tom Carothers quipped: In the future, that’s how individuals will remember the president—and not through careful biographies of the sort written by Theodore Sorenson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, and more recently Frederik Logevall.
Aside #2: There can be other patches of dry land. Because I admire the Cambridge author Claire Messud and know her slightly, I try to read each of her novels. Albeit, with some hesitation, I embarked on her most recent lengthy novel, This Strange Eventful History. Since the novel deals in large measure with her own family, and their lives in the 20th century, I figured that I would be able to make my way through it with some appreciation—as well as some apprehension. And in that spirit, I proceeded. But only when I discovered (on page 80 of the Kindle version) that her family (the Messuds) intersected with my own extended family’s (the Lebachs’) history, was I hooked! And I sailed through the rest of the novel and discussed it with friends and family…and, via email, with the author.
Searching for “Dry Land”
If you have universal knowledge—or polychromatic imagination—you should be able to read, watch, and assess virtually any creation by any individual. And perhaps when one is young, as I once was, it’s easier to do. But if, like the rest of us, you lack universality—or have gradually lost it—it’s very important to find, locate, or create some kind of dry land on which to tread as one reads.
Personal Illustrations
Perhaps because I am not much of a physical scientist—and even less of an engineer—I have rarely enjoyed science fiction novels and films. But recently I read with a great deal of interest (and profit!) the Ray Bradbury classic of the 1950s, Fahrenheit 451. At the time of its writing, Fahrenheit 451 may have seemed like science fiction, with modest literary flair. But nowadays vigilantes (especially on the “right wing” of the political spectrum but also on the “left wing”), are moving toward the banning—if not the burning—of books. And so, a period piece that may have seemed fantastic when published has become a current event!
There’s another crucial aspect of literature that clearly merits mention: the love of words, images, figures of speech, literary structure. As a writer for almost eight decades, I cherish language, and I pay attention to it. But I am not obsessed by it. I want to be clear—and as a reader as well as an editor, wish others to be clear—but I tend to heed the content, rather than the manner in which it’s conveyed.
Literary flair can be found in all kinds of writers—but of course, it’s quintessential in poets, playwrights, indeed the gamut of authors who create worlds of fiction. Here, Max Byrd provides an important insight. In an essay that he kindly shared with me, Max goes through dozens—and presumably could have gone through hundreds—of figures of speech used by our greatest writers. These clearly have stuck with him! Here is one example he gives: “Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: ‘He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.’”
He also shares those figures of speech which do not work as well (at least for him!) and offers explanations as to why they fail. This meticulous attention to language, while clearly relevant for any author, particularly distinguishes our greatest novelists and poets—the ones that we continue to quote in English: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Toni Morrison.
Which brings back one of my most salient memories—one dating back to my student days. I had the privilege of auditing a course on the writing of poetry, given by Robert Lowell, certainly one of the distinguished American poets of the 20th century. What surprised—indeed, astonished—me: Looking over a student’s poem, Lowell would alight on a word (or phrase)—and then, seemingly without having to strain, relate how that word (or that phrase) had been used by many English poets, across many different contexts. His mind seemed like a cross between The Norton Anthology of Literature and Roget’s Thesaurus.
Wow—I’ve covered a huge amount of ground!
Closing Thoughts
Of course, as I enter deeper into my ninth decade, I still judge novels, short stories, poems, and plays primarily by their literary quality and interest—but the historical and/or biographical backdrop has become increasingly important. Keeping a myriad of names and following circuitous plots has become difficult for me—I am nostalgic for Russian lists or the appropriate volume of Masterplots or the relevant entry on Wikipedia.
If I can turn professorial: Liking to read and having an opportunity and impetus to write should be universal—and it’s lamentable that’s rarely been relatively common in the world, and even less so nowadays. We should help young minds explore the full range of written and performed works.
One may like words and enjoy writing but not hanker to create fiction—something that characterizes my own literary output. Why some are attracted to the writing of fiction is probably somewhat biographical—and in the case of Mark Harris, I’ve indicated one reason.
As for appreciation of fiction—whether in prose, poetry, or the visual media—there should not be any rigid barriers. But particularly as one gets older, it is helpful to have some kind of personal scaffolding. And in my case, having historical and/or biographical pegs on which to hang the fiction is helpful—so long as it is not seen as contradicting the records. This may explain why I’ve been attracted to the plays of Tom Stoppard; why I found it easy and rewarding to enter the worlds depicted by Max Byrd; and why Mark Harris’s reflections illuminated his own enigmatic short stories. But any other kind of scaffolding should suffice, and the skilled teacher, parent, or friend helps one to locate apt scaffolding—for reading and also for writing. In the accompanying essay, I reflect on why I—an almost compulsive writer—have never had a significant hanker to write fiction.
SELECTED REFERENCES
Byrd, M. (2020). Pont Neuf. Permuted Press.
Byrd, M. (2004). Shooting the sun. Bantam Books.
Harris, M. (2023). Misfits. Atmosphere Press.
Lee, H. (2022). Tom Stoppard: A life. Faber & Faber.
Messud, C. (2024). This strange eventful history: A novel. W. W. Norton and Company.
Wilson, E. (1945). Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? New Yorker, 20, 59-66.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For comments on earlier versions of this blog, I am very grateful to Mark Harris, Max Byrd, Ellen Winner, Shinri Furuzawa, and Annie Stachura.