A.S. Byatt’s Plums | Talking Writing

December 5, 2011

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Theme Essay by Elizabeth Langosy

Precision or Immediacy? How Writers Describe the "Real" World

Alexander Wedderburn is “so much in the habit of rendering things into language," writes A.S. Byatt in her 1985 novel Still Life, that he can’t see or touch anything without trying to put it into words.

Alexander, a recurring character in a quartet of richly textured novels by Byatt, is working in Still Life on a play about Gauguin and Van Gogh. He's so obsessed with describing the colors painted by these artists that even the plums served with his breakfast become a language puzzle:

Do we have enough words, synonyms, near synonyms for purple? What is the grayish, or maybe white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine? How do you describe the dark cleft from stalk pit to oval end, its inky shadow?

This excerpt falls at the midpoint of a brilliant passage in which Alexander contemplates not only the precise way to describe plums but the difficulty of ensuring that readers will see them as he does:

A writer aiming for unadorned immediacy might say a plum, a pear, an apple, and by naming these things evoke in every reader’s mind a different plum, a dull tomato-and-green specked Victoria, a yellow-buff globular plum, a tight, black-purple damson. If he wishes to share a vision of a specific plum he must exclude and evoke: a matte, oval, purple-black plum, with a pronounced clef.

The first time I read this internal monologue about plums, I recognized myself. Like Alexander, I move through life constantly trying to translate what I see and touch into words. Sometimes this feels like a fun exercise. But often I want to tell my brain, Shut up already! I'm just out for a walk! Who cares about the exact color of those twigs?

The answer, of course, is that I care. As does Alexander Wedderburn and, I strongly suspect, A.S. Byatt.

How do writers portray sensory experiences like eating delicious food or viewing exquisite still lifes? For me, Byatt's plums instantly leap to mind. But I also have a fondness for the "unadorned immediacy" of the plums in Ernest Hemingway's 1964 memoir A Moveable Feast. Here’s how he describes Gertrude Stein's studio/gallery:

It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.

A Moveable Feast was published three years after Hemingway’s death, yet this book—the last he worked on—contains his famous advice on how to begin a story: “All you have to do is write one true sentence.”

“Writing one true sentence” is very different from “rendering things into language,” which implies a complex assessment of the options. Yet, the idea of beginning from a point of known reality—whether of place, feeling, or character—makes enormous sense to me. I love the simplicity of the opening lines of A Moveable Feast:

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.

All this makes me wonder about my own approach to description, raising some complicated questions. Is Hemingway’s immediacy (for, yes, we can feel the warmth of that fireplace and imagine the soft chairs and the side table holding the bottles of liqueur) compatible with Byatt’s precise descriptive language? Is it possible to have both immediacy and specificity? Does the specificity slow things down?

And, if they’re not able to coexist, is immediacy or specificity more important to me?

There are no easy answers to such literary questions, but even a precise detailer like A.S. Byatt knows when to balance highly intellectualized descriptions with lively dialog between oddly engaging characters. And Byatt would be the first to acknowledge the near impossibility of reining in the active minds of readers—and writers.

In Still Life, Alexander ultimately realizes the color he's settled on for the plums is “the dark center of some new and vigorously burgeoning human bruise,” although in fact the fruit is neither bruised nor human. With that, the quest for precision fails.

He yearns to devote his life to the search for unambiguous language, but—like most creative writers—he must take other jobs to earn a living. In the first novel of the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Alexander is a magnetic young teacher of English at a school for boys in northern England. By Still Life, he’s moved to London to work as a production assistant for BBC radio. In Babel Tower, he’s a self-absorbed producer for BBC television, where he remains at the close of the final book, A Whistling Woman. Throughout, he ponders, writes, and stages wordy plays with varying degrees of success.

Byatt’s “rendering” of this fictional writer and the overwriting that sometimes holds him back is certainly ironic, but passages like the one about the plums are also transcendent. Even writers like Alexander who become bogged down by life or narrowly absorbed in their ambitions can exhibit moments of genius.

Most writers shift back and forth between descriptive immediacy and precision. We want to write clearly and cleanly, yet with enough detail to set the story apart from any other. Hemingway’s simple, languid sentences build on each other to form powerful works. A.S. Byatt’s complex tales combine history, culture, and science with vivid storytelling.

I get caught up in each of their works, but Byatt’s are the books that cause me to miss my bus stop because I’m so absorbed in the delicious intricacies of her language. She’s one of my favorite writers, and I sense a kindred spirit—somebody who whittles away at her prose until she gets it right.

In February 2003, when Byatt was on tour to promote A Whistling Woman, my daughter and I heard her read at a theater in the Boston area. Although we were part of a huge crush of fans piling into the theater, we managed to find seats in the center of the second row. Eight years out, I can no longer remember exactly what she read or looked like, but I do remember my awe at being so close to her.

I also remember the tall man who slid in beside me in the darkened theater. He had the tweedy aura of an academic or a country squire, and he chuckled at Byatt's personal commentary, murmuring with a British accent, "Why, isn't that just like Annie!" I wondered if he was a friend or relative of Byatt, perhaps even her husband. But when I turned to him at the end of the reading, I found he'd slipped away as mysteriously as he'd appeared.

At the subsequent book signing, I waited in a long, serpentine line, cradling my copies of Possession (a beat-up paperback) and A Whistling Woman (a shiny new hardcover). I watched Byatt pleasantly greet each attendee. In my head, I tried to perfect the few words I’d have time to say. When I finally reached her, I handed her my books to sign.

“I really love your work,” I blurted, just like everyone else.

She smiled, still looking down as she signed her name.

Then I managed to get it out. “I’m a writer, too, and I'm very inspired by the passage on plums in Still Life.”

A.S. Byatt looked up.

“I’ve read it over and over,” I said, “and I’m amazed each time at what you accomplished.”

She met my eyes and held them for a moment, then gave a slight nod.

“I believe I spent more time on that passage than on anything else I’ve ever written,” she said. “You’re the first person to mention it to me. I’m so glad you like it.”

The Frederica Quartet by A.S. Byatt:

The Virgin in the Garden, originally published by Chatto and Windus, London, 1978 (first U.S. publication by Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
Still Life, originally published by Chatto and Windus, London, 1985 (first U.S. publication by Scribner, 1985).
Babel Tower, originally published by Chatto and Windus, London, 1996 (first U.S. publication by Random House, 1996).
A Whistling Woman, originally published by Chatto and Windus, London, 2002 (first U.S. publication by Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

Publishing Information:

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, Scribner, 1964.
Possession by A.S. Byatt, originally published by Chatto and Windus, London, 1990 (first U.S. publication by Random House, 1990).

Art Information

Elizabeth Langosy is the executive editor of Talking Writing.

“I hear a raucous voice and my husband’s chuckle, and I know he’s watching reruns of The Golden Girls, Seinfeld, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or the music swells—it’s a French or British film, the teary part, when the lover leaves for good (French, to cohabit with the former beloved’s sister; British, to war).” —NICS: Bring it On!