Winter’s Tales, by Isak Dinesen

Does Isak Dinesen narrate well? Of course she does; she is one of the greatest storytellers ever. For instance, her novel, Out of Africa, begins, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” The first sentence tells the entire story: of owing and working a farm, of beautiful and dangerous Africa, and of the significant things that happen to her during the telling of this story. Hence the “I” in the first sentence; the narrator of the novel is ultimately the one changed in the course of the story.

In one sentence, she incorporates all the components of successful narrative described by Richard Cohen in Writer’s Mind © 1995. She does as well with her stories in Winter’s Tales. She demonstrates most strongly the characteristics of narrative Cohen describes in two of these tales: “The Sorrow-Acre” and “The Pearls.”

The Sorrow-Acre

In “The Sorrow-Acre,” Dinesen presents an idealistic young man returning to his boyhood home and witnessing the death of a peasant woman working on his uncle’s farm. I definitely cared about the young man because he is a likable character, youthful, idealistic, and is faced with an enormous moral dilemma: whether to stay and be complicit in the woman’s death or to leave for places unknown, abandoning his family and happy memories of his youth.

The youthful idealism is shocked out of him as he chooses to stay and witness the circumstances of the woman’s death. Dinesen makes these circumstances seem very real and necessary. The moral dilemma is gut wrenching--our gut tells us one thing, but the uncle’s moral logic makes sense. In the end, the reader looses some of his or her idealism too, witnessing the inevitable death of the woman and the natural reactions of people to the circumstances surrounding her death. This story is a profound and inevitable morality tale that resonates with the reader.

The Pearls

In “The Pearls,” the protagonist is a young woman, newly married. She is frustrated by her husband whom she feels is too carefree in and unworried by the world. She spends her honeymoon trying to induce fear into him, but doesn’t suceed. He gives her a strand of pearls during their honeymoon. The pearls have sentimental value for him and the number of the pearls is significant to the memories of his grandparents. She snags the pearls and they break apart. She counts them out one by one for a local tradesman who repairs them and, when she gets them back, she refuses to open the package and count them again; she doesn’t want to give her husband the satisfaction of knowing she checked (though she is sure they are lighter than they were before).

On returning home from their honeymoon, she counts the pearls and discovered there is one more than before. She writes to the tradesman who describes how he added a pearl to her necklace that he had accidentally left out of a necklace he repaired the previous year. The young woman is at a loss to know how to survive in this world filled with people who “neither care not fear” about such things as the loss and ‘theft’ of a pearl. In the end, she seems to ‘lighten up’ and give in to the ways of her husband’s world.

This story is an excellent example the narrative process Cohen describes. It definitely climaxed in a surprise with the additional pearl, valued at more than all the rest of the pearls in the necklace. I felt changed along with the young woman as I read the story and experienced with her an awareness of seeing the world from her husband’s win some/lose some perspective.

Cohen describes the narrative process very effectively and this work by Dinesen contains strong examples of telling stories where a sequence of events happen to a character we care about, what happens is significant to that character, events unfold naturally and seem real and appropriate for the circumstances, and, somehow, the reader is changed.

Chapter 2 - What is a Story?

Richard Cohen, author of Writer's Mind © 1995, defines a story as containing five elements:

1. We care about the character.
   
2. Something happens to him or her.
   
3. The thing that happens is significant; it makes a different in the character’s life.
   
4. The thing that happens is not a single event but a sequence.
   
5. The sequence is narrated; it is recreated by a writer.

He states that a story helps us see life’s meaning and form and that the narrative is the machine that manufactures meaning and form. The narrative components also have to fit together; the events that occur, the decisions the writer makes, have to appear natural and real to the reader. Also, a good story should have elements of surprise. There should be something in the story that changes the reader.

While reading the selection of books for this chapter, I’ll focus on how well each contains the five components of a story, what kinds of decisions the writers make throughout and whether they appear natural and real, and whether the stories contain elements of surprise--do they change me somehow?

The bookshelf for this chapter is:

• Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen
  
• Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
  
• Woman Who Talked to Herself by A. L. Barker
  
• Metamorphosis by Ovid (translated by Rolfe Humphries, 1955)
  
• Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso (translated by Tim Parks, 1993)
  
• Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino (translated by George Martin, 1980)
  
• Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, translated by Edward William Lane

Self-Consciousness, by John Updike

Updike takes the reader on a march through the past he considered worthy of his biography: growing up in Shillington, psoriasis, stuttering, the Vietnam War, his family tree, and religion. Throughout, he gives examples from his fiction writing that was based on real events mentioned in the biographical text. The fictional account always seems to follow very closely the biographical version of the events and the fictional version doesn’t appear to offer additional details that give greater depth of meaning to the events. Updike seems to think that whatever happens in the real world is ‘deep’ enough.

He does share some interesting observations on writing; which should be expected from a writer as prolific as he is. He compares his writing with his skin disease, psoriasis:

What was my creativity, my relentless need to produce, but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing overproduction? Was not my thick literary skin, which shrugged off rejection slips and patronizing reviews by the sheaf, a superior version of my poor vulnerable own, and my shamelessness on the page a distraction from my real shame? (75)

He compares his writing style to that of Proust, “styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap themselves around the things…” (103) Updike does seems to approach his subjects in a broad, expansive way that could be described as an embrace. He never appears to tie down anything he writes about, but lets it remain free to affect the reader as it will.

He shares about difficulties entering into the writing profession: “The great temple of fiction has no well-marked front portal; most devotees arrive through a side door, and not dressed for worship.” (108)

Finally, he writes very interestingly about his past selves (much as Joan Didion wrote about keeping on touch with one’s former selves so that they don’t come back knocking on the mind’s door at three in the morning):

That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world-it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold… (226)

Updike mentions that critics of his writing said that he had a lot to write about, but very little to say. With that admission, it makes it hard to evaluate Updike’s work here. However, it’s not always clear that growing up in Shillington, having psoriasis, enduring stuttering, his hawkish position on the Vietnam War, his family tree, and generalities on religion constitute an apt biography of Updike. He seemed very lonely, almost in a child’s way, throughout his life. Apparently this loneliness, and his unrelenting self-consciousness, makes him the writer he is.

Moments of Being, by Virginia Woolf

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Woolf separates her “moments of being” from the “cotton wool of daily life.” As a child, these moments of acute awareness caused her pain and despair. Later, when she learned to provide explanations for the newfound awareness that came out of these moments of acute awareness, they became less painful and she began to see her “shock receiving capacity” as part of what made her a writer:

…as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the [realization of the moment of being]. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are not always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. (72)

She finds it particularly exciting to set down in writing an explanation for the ‘shock.’ This makes it whole and removes its power to cause harm,

I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me... (72)

In fact, creating a coherent whole gives her great pleasure:

…it gives me … great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. (72)

Clearly, Woolf is heavily invested personally and emotionally in what she writes. Not only does she feel rapture, for her writing is a palliative. She mentions how writing To the Lighthouse helped her deal with unresolved feelings she had concerning her parents, particularly concerning her mother, but also to some extent her father, though she hoped to exorcise more of her feelings for him through writing the essays in Moments of Being.

She also addresses the nature of writing biographies, perhaps because much of this work consists of descriptions of people living or dead who inhabited her past. She writes that the written word can never do a person justice:

Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you can love. (36)

Regarding the difficulty of revisiting the past in one’s mind, she describes the state of life that is most conducive for her to remember the past:

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. (98)

Finally, she sees the greatest works of art within all people: Shakespeare is in everything; Beethoven is in all people. She writes,

But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. (72)

The Prelude, by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem about his development as a poet, written in over 7,700 lines of blank verse, covers a disparate range of topics: rural customs in England, childhood, revolution in France, the nature of man, and becoming a poet. Beautifully written, it is lyrical and sensitive, as one would expect romantic poetry to be.

I read a parallel text version containing both the 1805 and 1850 versions of the poem, switching back and forth between them as I read. It is hard to describe things as clearly and imaginatively as Wordsworth does; so, I thought I would let him speak for himself with minimal intervention from me. I’ve grouped the quotations into the following subjects:

• Development of a Poet
  
• Being a Writer
  
• Sources of Inspiration
  
• Freedom and Solitude
  
• Caught Pondering
  
• Mankind
  
• An Amazing Capture
  

Development of a Poet

Wordsworth first describes the creative muse as a breeze, one that grows into a tempest “vexing its own creation.” When the muse arrives, it brings with it the assurance of work, if not “progress in an honourable field:”

A corresponding mild creative breeze,
A vital breeze which traveled gently on
O’er things which it had made, and is become
A tempest, a redundant energy
Vexing its own creation. ‘Tis a power
That does not come unrecognized, a storm
Which, breaking up a long-continued frost,
Brings with it vernal promises, the hope
Of active days, of dignity and thought,
Of progress in an honourable field,
Pure passions, virtue, knowledge, and delight,
The holy life of music and of verse. (1, 43-54 1805)

Here he describes how he changed as a writer and struggled with uncertainty with his writing and the results of “forced labour.” It doesn’t appear he always followed Annie Dillard’s and Rollo May’s advice to wait until the muse comes to you:

     my nature’s outward coat
Changed also slowly and insensibly,
To the deep quiet and majestic thoughts
Of loneliness succeeded empty noise
And superficial pastimes; now and then
Forced labour, and more frequently forced hopes;
And, worse than all, a treasonable growth
Of indecisive judgements, that impaired
And shook the mind’s simplicity. (3, 208-216 1805)

He finally resigned himself to being just a poet with the belief that there would be an audience for the self he pours forth:

A Poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth;
And, lastly, as hereafter will be shown,
If willing audience fail not, Nature's self,
By all varieties of human love
Assisted… (11, 347-351 1850)

He considers himself chosen for this profession and makes it his goal to understand “all passions and all moods” which exist and to incorporate those moods into his experience:

     I was a chosen son.
For hither I had come with holy powers
And faculties, whether to work or feel;
To apprehend all passions and all moods
Which time and place and season do impress
Upon the visible universe, and work
Like changes there by force of my own mind.
I was a Freeman; in the purest sense
Was free, and to majestic ends was strong.
I do not speak of learning, moral truth,
Or understanding; ‘twas enough for me
To know that I was otherwise endowed. (3, 82-93 1805)

Here he describes how, when poetic writings poured out of him, to his surprised, they conformed themselves to the “rules of art” that he had studied. He goes on to show how he applied this poetic skill to everything, “nothing was safe:”

But when that first poetic faculty
Of plain Imagination and severe,
No longer a mute influence of the soul,
Ventured, at some rash Muse's earnest call,
To try her strength among harmonious words;
And to book-notions and the rules of art
Did knowingly conform itself; there came
Among the simple shapes of human life
A wilfulness of fancy and conceit;
And Nature and her objects beautified
These fictions, as in some sort, in their turn,
They burnished her. From touch of this new power
Nothing was safe: the elder-tree that grew
Beside the well-known charnel-house had then
A dismal look: the yew-tree had its ghost,
That took his station there for ornament:
The dignities of plain occurrence then
Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point
Where no sufficient pleasure could be found. (8, 365-383, 1850)

He even describes, somewhat shockingly, how he could turn a window’s mourning into a poetic conceit:

Then, if a widow, staggering with the blow
Of her distress, was known to have turned her steps
To the cold grave in which her husband slept,
One night, or haply more than one, through pain
Or half-insensate impotence of mind,
The fact was caught at greedily, and there
She must be visitant the whole year through,
Wetting the turf with never-ending tears. (8, 365-391 1850)

But as he points out, a writer must learn to endure “the shock of various tempers” and to develop two natures, “one that feels, the other that observes:”

In hardy independence, to stand up
Amid conflicting interests, and the shock
Of various tempers; to endure and note
What was not understood, though known to be;
Among the mysteries of love and hate,
Honour and shame, looking to right and left,
Unchecked by innocence too delicate,
And moral notions too intolerant,
Sympathies too contracted. Hence, when called
To take a station among men, the step
Was easier, the transition more secure,
More profitable also; for, the mind
Learns from such timely exercise to keep
In wholesome separation the two natures,
The one that feels, the other that observes. (14, 333-347 1850)

Later, when he returns to poetry after wandering through England and France (including the French Revolution), he discovers he is no longer intimidated by the great poets:

The Poet's soul was with me at that time;
Sweet meditations, the still overflow
Of present happiness, while future years
Lacked not anticipations, tender dreams,
No few of which have since been realised;
And some remain, hopes for my future life.
Four years and thirty, told this very week,
Have I been now a sojourner on earth,
By sorrow not unsmitten; yet for me
Life's morning radiance hath not left the hills,
Her dew is on the flowers. Those were the days
Which also first emboldened me to trust
With firmness, hitherto but lightly touched
By such a daring thought, that I might leave
Some monument behind me which pure hearts
Should reverence. The instinctive humbleness,
Maintained even by the very name and thought
Of printed books and authorship, began
To melt away; and further, the dread awe
Of mighty names was softened down and seemed
Approachable, admitting fellowship
Of modest sympathy…. (6, 42-63 1805)

He ends with the conviction that poets will connect with readers through their writings and that man will one day supersede nature as an object of beauty and adulation:

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine. (14, 444-454 1850)

Being a Writer

He describes what it feels like to be a writer:

The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of many,
But with high objects, with enduring things--
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. (1, 434-4411805)

And not to leave the story of that time
Imperfect, with these habits must be joined,
Moods melancholy, fits of spleen, that loved
A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds,
The twilight more than dawn, autumn than spring;
A treasured and luxurious gloom of choice
And inclination mainly, and the mere
Redundancy of youth's contentedness. (6, 171-177 1805)

There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,
No languor, no dejection, no dismay,
No absence scarcely can there be, for those
Who love as we do.… (6, 244-247 1805)

The following passage ends with a description of “points…where we all stand single,” sounding like something Virginia Woolf might write:

     Not of outward things
Done visible for other minds, words, signs,
Symbols or actions, but of my own heart
Have I been speaking, and my youthful mind.
O Heavens! how awful is the might of souls,
And what they do within themselves which yet
The yoke of earth is new to them, the world
Nothing but a wild field where they are sown.
This is, in truth, heroic argument,
And genuine prowess, which I wished to touch
With hands however weak, but in the main
It lies far hidden from the reach of words.
Points have we all of us within our souls
Where all stand single … (3, 174-187 1805)

Here he describes not death and dissolution, but the workings of a poet’s mind:

That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude
Or black desertion. No familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through my mind
By day, and were the trouble of my dreams. (1, 418-427 1805)

Sources of Inspiration

Where does he find his sources of inspiration? From events in childhood (“spots of time”):

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master--outward sense
The obedient servant of her will. Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood. (12, 208-225 1850)

From the Great City, a source for material that he could always pull from:

     And less
Than other intellects had mine been used
To lean upon extrinsic circumstance
Of record or tradition; but a sense
Of what in the Great City had been done
And suffered, and was doing, suffering, still,
Weighed with me, could support the test of thought;
And, in despite of all that had gone by,
Or was departing never to return,
There I conversed with majesty and power
Like independent natures. (8, 623-632 1850)

And from nature:

Yes, I remember when the changeful earth,
And twice five [summers] on my mind had stamped
The faces of the moving year, even then,
A child, I held unconscious intercourse
With the eternal beauty, drinking in
A pure organic pleasure from the lines
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters coloured by the steady clouds. (1, 586-593 1805)

Especially from nature:

In progress through this verse, my mind hath looked
Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven
As her prime teacher, intercourse with man
Established by the sovereign Intellect,
Who through that bodily image hath diffused
A soul divine which we participate,
A deathless spirit. (5, 11-17 1805)

Freedom and Solitude

He speaks often of the freedom to choose what to do, what to read and write about, and the solitude that goes along with that freedom:

Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect … (1, 26-27 1805)

Enough that I am free; for months to come
May dedicate myself to chosen tasks … (1, 33-34 1805)

And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of Solitude. (2, 77-78 1805)

Later in the work, he seems to question whether the amount of freedom he exercised in selecting his own interests was too great and caused his potency as a writer to suffer:

Yet independent study seemed a course
Of hardy disobedience toward friends
And kindred, proud rebellion and unkind.
This spurious virtue, rather let it bear
A name it now deserves, this cowardice,
Gave treacherous sanction to that over-love
Of freedom which encouraged me to turn
From regulations even of my own
As from restraints and bonds. Yet who can tell--
Who knows what thus may have been gained, both then
And at a later season, or preserved;
What love of nature, what original strength
Of contemplation, what intuitive truths,
The deepest and the best, what keen research,
Unbiassed, unbewildered, and unawed? (6, 27-41 1805)

He asks whether a life of freedom can lead to “perpetual progress”?

Oh! who is he that hath his whole life long
Preserved, enlarged, this freedom in himself?
For this alone is genuine liberty:
Where is the favoured being who hath held
That course unchecked, unerring, and untired,
In one perpetual progress smooth and bright? (14, 130-135 1850)

Caught Pondering

He seemed sensitive that he was different from other people and that he might appear peculiar. At times, when walking about, lost in a reverie of poetical thoughts and talking to himself, he enlists his dog to warn him of someone’s approach:

I sauntered, like a river murmuring
And talked to itself, at such a season
It was his custom to jog on before;
But, duly, whensoever he had met
A passenger approaching, which he turn
To give me timely notice, and straightway,
Punctual to such admonishment, I hushed
My voice, composed my gait, and shaped myself
To give and take a greeting that might save
My name from piteous rumours, such as wait
On men suspected to be crazed in brain. (4, 110-120 1805)

Apparently, he has good reason to be wary. He writes about “country people” praying for his constant questioning of everything and their concerns about the knowledge he was gaining:

     he sifts, he weights;
Takes nothing upon trust: his teachers stare;
The country people pray for God’s good grace,
And tremble at his deep experiments.
All things are put to question; he must live
Knowing that he grows wiser every day
Or else not live at all, and seeing too
Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart … (5, 337-345 1805)

Mankind

He beautifully describes the mind of man as the “breath and harmony of music” and describes with seeming awe how disparate parts of someone, such as early miseries, are part of that same person when he or she grows older:

The mind of man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society. Ah me! that all
The terrors, all the early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all
The thoughts and feelings which have been infused
Into my mind, should ever have made up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! (1, 351-361 1805)

Here he describes man as simultaneously exalted and lowly, full of meaningful contradiction:

     In the midst stood Man,
Outwardly, inwardly contemplated,
As, of all visible natures, crown, though born
Of dust, and kindred to the worm; a Being,
Both in perception and discernment, first
In every capability of rapture,
Through the divine effect of power and love;
As, more than anything we know, instinct
With godhead, and, by reason and by will,
Acknowledging dependency sublime. (8, 385-494 1850)

Here how man’s immortal soul gives one strength:

How life pervades the undecaying mind;
How the immortal soul with God-like power
Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep
That time can lay upon her; how on earth,
man, if he do but live within the light
Of high endeavours, daily spreads abroad
His being with a strength that cannot fail. (4, 154-161 1805)

An Amazing Capture

Amazing, he is able to capture a non-corporal experience he describes as a “weight of ages” passing across his soul, affecting him forever, but possessing him for just a moment:

A weight of ages did at once descend
Upon my heart; no thought embodied, no
Distinct remembrances, but weight and power,
Power growing under weight: alas! I feel
That I am trifling: 'twas a moment's pause,
All that took place within me came and went
As in a moment; yet with Time it dwells,
And grateful memory, as a thing divine. (8, 552-559 1850)