Tag: writing

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Spoiler Alerts: Don’t read further if you plan to read The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree.

My book club was reading a book called The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree by India Hayford. Hayford is a good writer and it was an engaging enough story but John Calvin, the villain, irritated me. He might as well been twirling his mustache every time he appears in the book just so you remembered he was the bad guy. He was just evil. Bad to the bone, a bully that nobody likes but everyone kowtows too. It also makes the more dubious actions of the heroes a lot easier to stomach. You can do anything to stop evil after all, right?

That is precisely the problem though. It drains the story of any moral ambiguity. Should she or shouldn’t she isn’t the question.We are rooting for Genevieve, the heroine, to do whatever she has to do to stop the dastardly John Calvin. The reader gives her the license to kill because they hate her nemesis. But shouldn’t murder give one pause. Is this the only way the villain can be stopped?

I think in this case, maybe another method could have worked. When your whole family hates you and you are raping your own daughters, I would think revealing the monster might have worked just as well. But no, John Calvin is too evil. He deserves death. Oddly enough, Hayford pulls her punch at the end because Genevieve isn’t the one to exact revenge on John Calvin, it is another character which may give the book a bit more mystery but, again, it is distracting. The book’s lead character is Genevieve. Her trials and tribulations are the main focus. The reader knows the most about her life and her motivations — yet she turns over the satisfaction of killing John Calvin to someone else.

So, even though John Calvin is evil and deserves to die, Genevieve is too good to kill him. So all of Genevieve’s rather sparse moral dilemma about killing John Calvin is for naught as she ultimately doesn’t have to pull the trigger or, in this case, release the snakes. It is strangely unsatisfying and disappointing ending for a readable and page turning book.

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My book club read Ernest Hemingways’ The Sun Also Rises this month. It was a book I loved when I was 20. The vivid descriptions of Paris and Spain, everyone drinking way too much and never seeming to work, it all seemed wonderful. It’s funny how 40 years later I see something that I missed on my first reading.

There is still much to like but I was only a few pages in when Hemingway’s casual bigotry began to grate on me. He uses the N word to describe a drummer in a jazz band. And not in using the N word was important for understanding the character way, but in trying to let you know that the drummer was black way.

Robert Cohn is a Jewish character. Hemingway uses a lot of Jewish stereotypes to convey his personality. Jake Barnes, the hero of his story, complains about the number of words he uses in a telegram in order to save money. Or how Cohn has this superior Jewish attitude. None of the other characters seem to like him. There are various reasons other than being Jewish that create this animus toward Cohn but an important and frequently mentioned problem for his friends was that Cohn was simply being Jewish.

Oh, you have to forgive Hemingway. He was just a man of his time. That is the way everyone talked back then. It doesn’t make him a bad person. No, it doesn’t but it certainly make him a racist. So then, it becomes an important factor in discussing his writing.

This is a big problem I have when examining history and literature before the Civil Rights Era. Modern readers are supposed to forgive racism as unimportant because everyone back then was racist. It is meaningless to the story. This is very much the attitude people take when an old person slips into making racist’s statements. They are old. They grew up before they knew it was wrong.

But, saying the N Word, has always been wrong. If Hemingway had used colored or Negro, I could forgive him because they were acceptable terms to describe Black people in the 1920’s. But the N word wasn’t supposed to be used in polite company even in the 1920’s. That Hemingway used it matters greatly.

He knew he could get away with it. His mostly White readers wouldn’t blink an eye when they saw it and, more importantly, they would form an opinion about that character based on the use of the racial slur. It also gave readers a look into Jake’s friend – Lady Brett who was friendly with the drummer. What kind of self-respecting White woman knows a Black Jazz drummer? It helps Hemingway’s characterization of Lady Brett as a promiscuous woman. Racial slurs, then, are not neutral even in the 1920’s.

Furthermore, it isn’t harmless because everyone is doing it. If everyone is doing it then it calls into question the entire White population who either use the word or dismiss it as inconsequential. Why is everybody using it? So, if you are talking about The Sun Also Rises, it is a relevant point of discussion.

This also points to a bigger problem with how we address racism when discussing our past. A lot of people want to say racism is irrelevant to present day America because nobody would do this today. I would argue differently but let’s give them this point.

We aren’t talking about 2025. We are talking about a book written a hundred years ago when a man like Hemingway could safely use racial slurs and still be considered one of the great American writers of the 20th century. Why is that and what does this say about America during this time?

You can’t explain what was going on back then by ignoring racism. The past was far from perfect. Not everything can be tied in to nice little bow. One of those lessons might be that racism was pervasive in 1920’s America and how did this racism affect literature written during this time. But it isn’t meaningless.

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Since I have started writing on a daily basis, I have discovered that sometimes I have trouble coming up with the right word or phrase to actually explain what I am thinking. It happens frequently. I stop writing then and try to think of the right word.

I used to wait and come back to the piece and hope that it came to me. Sometimes it did but sometimes it didn’t. When I struggled, I started to use the best word or phrase I can come up to explain what I mean even though it wasn’t really the word I wanted. This allowed me to complete my blog but it bothered me when I did that because it isn’t exactly what I wanted to say and my meaning is a bit off. It is close but not quite right.

I tried the thesaurus thinking that since I am close, the thesaurus will list the correct word. This usually worked but sometimes, remarkably, the word I am looking for wasn’t there. Then I think that the word I was looking for hasn’t been invented yet which I find unbelievable. I am fairly certain that I am not the first person in 6,000 years or so of history to want this word. So where did it go and why can’t I find it?

It also dawned on me that this is the problem with all human communication. No one can quite say what they really want to say because they are missing the right words to say it. In order to communicate, people have to use whatever words come to them in order to move the conversation along. The problem is when the conversation continues with these not quite right words, are we really understanding each other?

So even when we speak the same language and are understanding the words we say, the person we are talking with may not understand us for lack of the right word It is really quite amazing that we get along as well as we do.