Subtracting ... judgement

But how to keep the sand in the oyster?

Two words floated into my mind the other day: no judgement.

As I start a new novel, I often find myself nudging toward an internal manifesto, a kind of statement of intent for the book to come. Perhaps it’s a way of closing off options, calming the anxiety arising from the problem of too many possibilities. I also like to have a somewhat ‘technical’ puzzle – once it was how to write a book set in one day; another time, how to manage a loosely shifting point of view. These little jobs – aspects of craft or style that are not new, but new to me – are somehow a comfort, maybe a distraction from the alarming blankness of all that is yet unwritten.

So here I am at the start of a new book, and my tiny new manifesto appears to be this: subtract judgement.

By ‘judgement’ here I mean what some might call ‘judgmentalism’, rather than constructive discernment. I mean the casting of the critical, fault-seeking eye over my characters, perhaps especially the minor ones. I’m talking about the novelist’s impulse to seek out and hold up for inspection something foolish, unpleasant, deluded or cruel in a character’s behaviour. I mean the mocking, sneering impulse, those acerbic observations that can be very pleasurable to get down on the page. Writers are often praised for this by reviewers and readers – who doesn’t love a bit of ‘skewering’, some ‘merciless satire’? Who can resist the delicious spotlighting of the vanities and stupidities that abound in contemporary life?

I’ve always enjoyed splashing a little vinegar around in my fiction, though I’ve never felt I could pull it off as skilfully as others I’ve admired. Shirley Hazzard springs immediately to mind, with the Transit of Venus’s vile Dora, Tertia Thrice and other villains; or more recently, Gwendoline Riley’s ruthless portraits of bullying fathers and doormat mothers.

Why is it so enjoyable, to read and to write? If it’s done well, there might be the illumination of some trait or behaviour we have observed, but not been able to put into words before. It’s the pleasure of recognition. Many books ago I wrote a minor character who often prefaced her earnest declarations by saying, ‘As a mother...’, placing the flat of her hand against her chest. I enjoyed that particular bit of noticing I’d done in the world – the way some women think motherhood bestows them with special moral insight – and loved taking it into my book. It also provided a useful bonding moment for two other characters, who amused themselves by privately ridiculing the woman.  I still like that particular bit of skewering – but the rest of that character, I think now, is too shallow. I could have done more with her, but I didn’t. She’s by no means the only secondary character I’ve written who has remained an outline, not a person.

Another pleasure in judging people on the page is the simple joy of rudeness, I think. There’s a cathartic release in giving expression to our lower selves. Sometimes, it’s just fun to be mean.

Then there’s something more interesting, to do with energy in the creative act. An acutely spiteful observation in a piece of fiction, it seems to me, has always been a reliable way of enlivening it. It animates the thing, as Bonnie Friedman writes in her essay ‘Your Mother’ Passions, Your Sister’s Woes: Writing About The Living’¹:

My friend Regi set to writing essays. ‘Have you noticed,’ she inquired, ‘how if you let yourself write only nice things about people it ends up sounding like the kind of speech people give at a graveside? A eulogy, I mean? And how your writing springs to life when you write something that, if they read it, they would just die?’

The writing springs to life – this has been my finding too. Writing with a bit of acid gave the work an insurgent, sparkling energy I not only loved, but needed, because the pursuit of energy on the page remains the only sure way I know to proceed.

In non-fiction, particularly in the case of persuasive writing, I think a sense of judgement might be not only pleasurable but imperative, and not just for this spiky energy. If you have a case to prosecute you need a clear standpoint, a place from which to analyse and critique. Shifting ground, the place where I think fiction comes alive, will only undermine your case.

But I’m writing fiction, and something’s changed for me, or in me. No matter how much I still enjoy it, can even thrill at it in other people’s work, I no longer find the same glee in applying the acid myself. I’ve just - lost heart for it. What caused this loss I can’t say, other than perhaps the Great Chastening that came with the pandemic, with the turns of life, or simply from growing older. Perhaps it’s because I never did it well enough anyway.

Whatever; the appeal of seeking out and holding up some fictional hypocrisy or vanity, ostensibly for ‘scrutiny’ - but actually for my own pleasure - is fading. It feels fake and preachy and simplistic and immature. Pointing at something isn’t the same as understanding it or even protesting against it. I’m interested now in trying for something deeper, more sincere and more complex. And yes, more compassionate. People who know me well will be wryly raising an eyebrow here: my own judgemental streak is deep and wide and has caused me and others pain more times than I care to consider. But it’s always been clear to me that my better self is at work in my fiction, not my life. Also: see hypocrisy, below.

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What’s underneath?

What is it that lies beneath our urge to judge others, beyond the usual human desire to belong to a tribe (for surely, pointing out who doesn’t belong is a good way to shore up the chances that you do)?

I wonder if this impulse is partly rooted in an unacknowledged anger of some kind, that trait so deplored by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own². Woolf claimed that detectable anger in art (particularly in a woman’s writing) was a corroding force that obscured the work at hand, revealing only the fragility of the person making it. She used Charlotte Bronte as her main example, claiming that Bronte had more genius than Austen, but Bronte’s ‘rage’ at the world destroyed her, and her work. It meant, claimed Woolf, that Bronte could

… never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?

Bronte’s work, she continued, shows

an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.

I don’t agree with Woolf that openly expressed anger in art necessarily deforms it, if that is what she’s saying, but I like the provocation she has offered me. I realise that her point about the obscuring power of anger, that it reveals the writer rather than the work, is what has always bothered me about trying to write Politics into my fiction: I can’t do it without judgement’s smarmy sister, sanctimony, taking over.

I’m sad about this, because I do believe it’s the job of fiction to comment on political atrocities, events, motivations, systems, and the job of the novelist to examine and respond to them. I am completely persuaded, for example, by Tim Winton’s recent call for fiction writers to go into battle for the planet. As he says,

I don’t think it’s folly to hope the combined labours of writers and activists can contribute to saving the biosphere. The three best ways to ensure the failure of such a project is to declare that words are powerless, the world is dead already, and that nature was something that never existed in the first place.

My problem is not that I disagree with any of this – it’s that my prose won’t obey my personal moral and ethical impulses. George Saunders famously said ‘You can choose what to write, but you can’t choose what to make live.’  And that’s my trouble. Whenever I have tried to ‘address’ (critique, illuminate, aka pass judgement on) the things that should and do consume us – climate change, Indigenous dispossession, bigotry and prejudice in all its many isms, rampant exploitation, all the rest – my writing shrivels on the page.

I found a warning note to myself in a recent notebook entry: ‘Activism kills good writing and is a form of lying about the self.’ I think I meant that the effortful denunciation of these crimes in fiction so often has the side effect of looking like an attempt to absolve the author from any responsibility for them. If I point vigorously enough at the clearly identified racist, the rapist, the nature killer, the sexist, the ableist, the homo/trans/xenophobe, I turn the lens away from myself. Happily, the guilty party is always someone else.

But it’s never true, is it? We’re all guilty of all these sins to some degree, in some form, at some time or other (okay, I’ve never raped anyone. But have I tried to push someone into doing something they didn’t want to, for my benefit not theirs? Almost certainly.) At this point I’m reminded of a Jonathan Haidt declaration³ I came across many years ago, one I try (and mostly fail) to keep in mind, for writing and life:

Stop smirking. One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras is that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own.

The judgement of others not only compounds my own hypocrisy, it seems, but potentially ruins my writing.

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But now what?

So, okay. Subtract judgement. But how? And now what? Must I lose all critical observation of the world? When I read recently that the late Joan Acocella, critic and ‘enemy of pretension’, described her own style by saying, ‘I like a little sand in my oyster’, I cheered. Me too, Joan! So, how to keep this activating grit in the oyster? Is it possible to maintain the unflinching eye, the unsentimental apprehension of the world and its vapidities, without judgement? If I lose the animating spite, even anger, where will the work find its energy?

I don’t know, but I’m punting on discovering a different wellspring for that breath of life in the prose, and hoping the search itself provides the energising risk.

The Friedman quote at the start of this piece was missing something in its simple dichotomy: say something mean (and true) and the writing lives, or say something nice (and false) and the writing dies. But dichotomies do not interesting fiction make. It’s on the shifting, uncertain ground between polarities that the good stuff lies.

As always, others have been solving the problem long before me.

James Wood, in his essay on the late Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower, praised both her ‘bracingly satirical’ eye and her psychological subtlety:

Harrower is a vivid portraitist of anger (usually male), of the ways in which entitlement and resentment feed off each other. Like Dostoyevsky, she sees that pride is really humility, because both are born of uncertain reckoning; measurement always cuts in both directions at once, higher and lower.

Another Australian novelist I love, Joan London, is the kind of writer who cuts in both directions at once. She once told me⁴ of her love of Chekhov, and Vasily Grossman.

I had a real Chekhov thing for years. There’s no ego in his stories. He’s complete observer, in control, but at the service of the unexpected, of his art. He is very tough, unsentimental. And his canvas is so broad that everyone has their story … and in the twentieth century there is Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the great Soviet novel, set during the Second World War. It has the same piercing psychology, insight and honesty, yet huge humane canvas …

What London speaks of here is what I want – this piercing insight, unsentimentality married to humanity.

One way of getting it might be to simply delay one’s verdict. Notice the vanity, the lie, the hypocrisy, sure – but don’t close the door on its practitioner just yet. I recently admired Angela O’Keefe’s novel The Sitter, in which the ghost-like presence of Cezanne’s wife Hortense watches the fictional author trying to write her story. I was particularly struck by these lines⁵:

I did not look happy in the photo, I am the first to admit that, yet there was a spark in my eyes, and I began to speak to her about this spark, about the strange vitality that I came to experience at the end of my life. But she talked over me, saying that I’d aged badly and looked broken. She’d made up her mind – a fatal flaw in a writer, I thought, but what did I know?

Another hint on how one might come at subtracting judgement in fiction comes from Vivian Gornick in life. In her memoir The Odd Woman and the City⁶ she frequently refers to the struggle for two people ‘to become real to each other’.

Zadie Smith echoed this line of thinking in a much quoted 2019 interview:

I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better, or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are and have all the same expectations and demands. And it’s so difficult that basically the only person that ever did it was Christ. The rest of us are very, very far behind.

The difficulty of this acceptance! The difficulty of allowing even a minor fictional character their full humanity; of declining to make up one’s mind about their faults, of leaving the door on this open. The tremendous challenge of letting go the great egoistic drive to point and sneer, and separate the righteous self from guilty others. The hard task of more patient, deeper, quieter - more humane - observation.

I want that rigour now. I want to forgo the cheap shot. I want to look for beauty and mercy in places where I used to think it couldn’t be found because I went too quickly and wanted too much to be admired for the quick, parrying jab.

A year before she died, the great Janet Malcolm wrote this - related, I think - about patience, and observation.

There is a box in my apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” This is an understatement. Most of the photos are two-and-a-half-inch squares, showing little blurred black-and-white images, taken from too far away of people whose features you can barely make out, standing or sitting alone or in groups, against backgrounds of gray uninterestingness. They are like the barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken, rather than the self-important ones that follow us into the day and seem to be crying out for interpretation. However, as psychoanalysis has taught us, it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.

There’s one common feature shared by these teachers I quote above: a strong, pure, calm voice, devoid of anxiety or performance. The older I get as a writer, the more I think voice does all the work. It shows you the falseness, the nerviness, the desperation in yourself (to belong, to be right, to not miss out) as you work. When the voice is sure, the ego quietens, the writing is true. And one can slow down to observe, to listen, to understand which deeper parts of the work will ‘begin to speak to us’.

This month I’ve been …

Reading

• Madame Bovary, Flaubert

• ‘I got a scheme’ - Roth on Bellow

• Hannah Gold on Mary Gaitskill

Watching

• Bronwyn Oliver - The Shadows Within

• I, Tonya

• Cooked, Michael Pollan

• Petit Maman

Seeing

• Frank Auerbach, The Charcoal Heads, Courtauld Gallery London

• Nachtland directed by Patrick Marber, Young Vic, London

• Hills of California, written by Jez Butterworth, Harold Pinter Theatre London

Listening to

• Zadie Smith, City Arts & Lectures 2019

• Mariachi El Bronx

• Lioness, Emily Perkins (audio book read by Kerry Fox)

• Celine Sciamma’s BAFTA Screenwriters’ Lecture

Eating & cooking

• Puntarelle alla Romana, Toklas London (so good)

• Chicken Marbella, Ottolenghi

• Mussels & tomato, bbq focaccia, marjoram & fennel at Baba’s Place, Marrickville

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1. Writing Past Dark – Envy, Fear, Distraction and other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, Bonnie Friedman, 1994 HarperPerennial. HarperCollins Publishers New York.

2. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, first published 1928; 2004 Penguin Books London.

3. The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science, Jonathan Haidt, 2021 Random House UK.

4. Joan London, in The Writer’s Room, Charlotte Wood, 2016 Allen & Unwin Australia.

5. The Sitter, Angela O’Keeffe, 2023 University of Queensland Press Australia.

6. The Odd Woman and The City - A Memoir, Vivian Gornick, 2016 Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York.