Back in the late-1990's, through the end of 2004, I subscribed to The New York Review Of Books. I loved it, and I miss it. I dropped my subscription because our move to Poplar Grove put us in an area where the cost of living was substantially higher than any previous place we had lived; even having two incomes (for a time, though, I was a stay-at-home Dad, so we had only one) meant dropping all sorts of luxuries. So, I stopped getting The Nation, The New Yorker (which published a whole series of short stories by Stephen King, Feodor), and NYRB. I miss The New Yorker and NYRB for different reasons, but the latter because it served as a catalog of books I just had to have (which is why my wife encouraged me to drop it, I think).
During the course of my subscription-time, there was a series of review essays on books on the American West by author and critic Larry McMurtry. In those essays, collected in a slim volume, Sacagawea's Nickname, I discovered something I had only dimly glimpsed in all my previous reading. Reading McMurtry was a joy because it was obvious that he loves words; more than ideas, more than their collection in sentences and paragraphs and multiple volumes, McMurtry had the unique (to my experience) virtue of loving words. He loves them so much that his review essays are among the most pleasurable, joy-filled reading experiences of my life. They were object-lessons in that classic understanding of beauty as something that is more than the sum of its parts.
I picked up that volume this morning to read myself to sleep after work, and found myself, once again, happily ensconced in some of the most masterful prose I have ever encountered. In an introduction he wrote to the volume, he recalls his failure to be what all Texas-ranch-children wanted to be, a cowboy, and his sad realization that his life would be spent among words. Yet, he then points out that being such is a bit like herding cattle. His deep love for words makes his writing something sublime because, loving them, he takes care to arrange them as sentences, paragraphs, and essays as carefully as possible. Yet, doing so with a seeming ease that belies what must be an agonizing process of writing, rewriting, editing, then rewriting again. Loving words, compared to loving the English sentence, which was the preference of another great prose stylist, Winston Churhcill, makes of the larger building blocks of writing something magical.
I offer this little report on my reading as a way, in part, of talking about how I am continuing to learn about the art and craft of writing. Even as I spend a good chunk of my waking hours (when not at the work that pays the bills) trying to figure out how to put stuff down in writing, I am also always wanting to learn how to do that better. There might be something discouraging about reading someone as wonderful at the task as McMurtry, but I am actually encouraged by reading him. Because I read McMurtry as sharing my own sense that it is at the level of words - not sentences, not paragraphs - that begins the task or building something that is a pleasure to read, I am now quite happily reading, and learning again, how that might be possible.
Word-herding is as apt, and workable, a description of writing as I can imagine. Not ideas, certainly. Just words. Getting them to go where we want them in such a way that it seems to be their own plan. How wonderful.
