LE MOT JUSTICE

by James Lincoln Warren

There is nothing more flattering to a writer than to be quoted, there being nothing that sates the voracity of vanity more than having one’s pearls before swine, inter alia, held up for admiration by the non-swinish. Deep in the breast of every one of us hack scribblers beats the heart of an aspiring aphorist, I’m convinced. More the province of poets and essayists than short story writers, I suspect, but the economy necessary in writing short fiction makes finding le mot juste more of concern to us than them blathering novelists.

The great danger in attempting to spin a phrase worthy of quotation, of course, is that one’s beloved gem of expressive genius may stick out like a frilly drag queen at an outlaw biker rally, and distract the reader from the story–not unlike my recent diatribe against using arcane words where others would easily suffice (The Scribbler, June 8). Boswell quotes Johnson on the matter: “I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: ‘Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'” (Johnson, of course, is the most quotable of sources in English after the KJV Bible, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope.)

My ruminations on good writing are far more frequently quoted than my actual creative writing. (My advice to writers has been quoted, uh, three times. I don’t think anybody has ever quoted a line from one of my stories.) One would prefer, Gentle Reader, to be held up as a writer worthy of emulation rather than as a literary agony aunt.

But one tries. Sometimes, one fails spectacularly.

I fell madly in love with a trope of my own invention in the original version of “Mother Brimstone” (AHMM, Jan/Feb 2007). Mrs. Stavacre, my heroine, has a short temper that is getting shorter as she deals with the foolish prattling of her daughter Nancy. Finally, Nan oversteps her mother’s patience. I originally wrote something along the lines of “Mrs. Stavacre’s temper revealed itself to her daughter as Jupiter unto Semele.”

The reference is to the myth describing the birth of Bacchus–Semele was his mortal mother and Jupiter his immortal father. When Jupiter’s jealous divine wife, Juno, discovered that Semele was bearing her husband’s child, she tricked Semele into getting Jupiter to appear before her as the god of lightning, a sight no mortal can endure, during which interval Semele was blasted to ashes.

I thought it was as flawless and beautiful an image as had ever been devised. Until, that is, my wife read it and said, “Who the [expletive deleted] is Semele? Stop showing off. The reader won’t understand what the [expletive deleted] you’re talking about.”

Which demonstrates exactly why, Gentle Reader, one requires an editor.

She was perfectly correct, of course. The final version was, ” . . . the sputtering slow-match of Mrs. Stavacre’s temper at last breached its keg, with dazzling results.” Not as colorful or as clever, but definitely with the greater virtue of being comprehensible.

And one still tries. My two current favorites are from two unpublished stories, the first of which, “Cold Reason”, will appear in some future issue of AHMM. As most of you are probably aware, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was a chess enthusiast. My Italian-American former NYPD detective, Carmine Ferrari, ain’t. So in discussing chess, Carmine observes, “To me, a Sicilian defense is the Fifth Amendment.” (That line took three days to get right.)

The second is from a story called “Shanghaied”, which is a retelling of the first section of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, set in 1866 San Francisco vice 1752 Scotland. The House of Shaws, Davie Balfour’s ancestral home in Stevenson, in my version becomes Hop Shaw’s Jade Joy House, a Chinatown brothel lorded over by the evil Uncle Ebenezer. When Davie arrives to demand his inheritance, he internally remarks that “If there’s any lonelier place than a deserted church, it’s a crowded whorehouse.”

I know. Preening is so unattractive in a pasty fat gray-haired guy like me. Sorry. But the real beauty of these remarks is that they fit in context and are rare examples of literary fair-haired bairns that I did not actually have to eviscerate, while at the same time, they stand up pretty well on their own.

I would love to hear quotations from you, Gentle Reader: either phrases that you are proud of having coined, or passages that you find worth repeating from what you have read.