From WriterHouse: Balancing Lyricism and Efficiency

Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Equal Measure

By Jay Kauffmann of WriterHouse
QuailBellMagazine.com

I first met Leonard Michaels when I was an undergraduate at UC/Berkeley. He was hunched over his desk, surrounded by untamed heaps of papers and books, a pen hovering over a manuscript. The room felt airless and hot. Still new to California, I stood before the light pouring in through the windows with something like awe. He looked up, face partially obscured by his longish, black hair. “Mr. Michaels,” I said, “I would like to take your fiction writing class…” He sat up, spoke fast, in a scattershot manner…about the amount of work he still had to do, a meeting that afternoon, his damn classes, the screenplay he was supposed to write. Then he extended his hand and asked to see my work. I handed him a five-page short story I had been working and reworking for months in preparation for this moment. As he read the first paragraph, he crossed out words, circled others, furiously wrote in the margin. Then he handed it back to me. He told me to read Chekhov, Kafka, and Isaac Babel and try him again next semester. I walked out demoralized, staring at the first page of my story. “Use active verbs,” he had written, “watch adv.,” “syntax prob.,” “redundant adj.,” “abstract lang.,” “rhythm prob.” He had read only five sentences, but hardly a word was unmarked with blue ink.

Although I did end up getting into his writing class the next semester, I almost learned more from that first brief interaction with Leonard Michaels than I did from his class. The way he deconstructed that one paragraph opened my eyes to a new world. No one had ever looked at my writing so closely, with a jeweler’s eye, attentive to every minute decision, weighing the importance of every syllable. So this is how real writers view prose? I thought. In a way, Michaels set the bar for me.

Like many readers who are also aspiring writers, I was drawn in college to strong, beautiful prose, but without precisely knowing what constituted strong, beautiful prose. I only knew it when I saw it. Michaels showed me that, while you need to be conscious of meaning and clarity, you must also be aware of rhythm and sound. He illustrated the importance of bringing the poet’s ear to narrative writing. Michaels considered each sentence as if it were an isolated gem, cut to precise requirements: Does it make sense? Does it feed the drama? Does it have rhythmic integrity? If you hit it with a mallet, will it hold up or crumble?

In some ways, he adopted Hemingway’s notion of the “true sentence.”  But while Hemingway favored the journalist’s lean efficiency, Michaels sought more to strike a balance—melding the efficiency of Hemingway with the rich lyricism of, say, Fitzgerald.

Now, more than thirty years after that first meeting with Michaels, I still try to find this balance:Am I getting it down right? Am I shaping it into something beautiful—tonally, structurally? No guiding principle, in fact, has served me more as a writer. I would even go so far as to say that it is here, in this spectrum between beauty and function, that all serious writers labor. Go too far in one direction and you end up with a work that is lacking, uneven.

I remember, once, during one of his classes, Michaels raised his voice at a student. He was “offended,” as he put it, by the sheer awfulness of the boy’s sentence. The student, a red-haired kid from Missouri, stared down at the errant sentence as if it were a misbehaved child. Michaels complained about the structure, the rhythm, the word choice… He wanted the boy to repent before the gods of prose and rewrite it at once. “Get it down right,” he demanded, “and make it sing.”

***This piece first appeared on WriterHouse and was republished here with permission. ***

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