Three True Things

Having been tagged for this meme by Smithology (and being, besides, someone who talks about books at the drop of a hat, even to complete strangers in shops—though the tragedy is that my weakness for books has not corrected my weakness for cliches such as “drop of a hat”), I don’t see how I can pass this up.

I’d not come across the meme before, but apparently it requires me to post three true things that I’ve read recently that come from fiction.

So let’s start with a man who is, to my mind, one of the greatest novelists in English not just of the twentieth century, but of my reading experience:

May I say, too, that much of what I put in this book was inspired by the grotesque prices paid for works of art during the past century. Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions to endow certain sorts of human playfulness with inappropriate and hence distressing seriousness. I think not only of the mudpies of art, but of children’s games as well—running, jumping, catching, throwing.

Or dancing.

Or singing songs.

(Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard. 1987.)

Vonnegut is an easy enough choice, but my next choice requires me to roughly sketch in some background. Bear in mind: what follows is the melancholy tale of an unanticipated moment of overwhelming pretentiousness.

Two nights ago, Nick and I were watching an episode from season three of Northern Exposure: an episode in which Chris in the Morning is offered the chance to buy into Holling’s bar and goes slightly mad with bar-tending power.

At one point, he offers cheap beer to anyone who can recite the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

And I said to Nick, “I used to be able to recite those!”

T. S. Eliot was one of the poets I studied for my H. S. C. back in the mid-1990s, and because the exams were not open book, much of my final year of high school was devoted to memorising Eliot, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and various broadly applicable quotations from Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Arthur Miller.

Not the most effective way to learn to love literature.

So two nights ago, the juxtaposition of this mind-numbingly dull learning experience and a Northern Exposure episode led to Nick and I sitting on the back verandah in the dark and the cold, with me clutching a glass of wine and reading T. S. Eliot out loud.

We’d made it through “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” before I came to my senses and said to Nick, “You know, this is the most pretentious thing I have ever done—and it developed so organically!”

That doesn’t change my response to this passage:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

(T. S. Eliot. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.)

If the meme demands true statements from books I’ve read recently, the next quotation should be from something with a vampire in it, since that has made up the majority of my reading material for the past month. Much as I enjoyed them, though, I can’t think of a statement that struck me as essentially true.

(Though it is true that I came to an important realisation while reading—and thoroughly enjoying—Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments trilogy. It may not have been the intended moral of the story, but what I took from it was this: No matter how doughty a demon killer your brother is, snogging him still shows a paucity of imagination.)

So, instead, I’m going to fall back on a quotation from one of my all-time favourites, which I first read in 1993 and only recently read through and adored once again.

It is, fittingly, a quotation about truth in fiction:

What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? Haroun couldn’t get the terrible question out of his head. However, there were people who thought Rashid’s stories were useful. In those days it was almost election time, and the Grand Panjandrums of various political parties all came to Rashid, smiling their fat-cat smiles, to beg him to tell his stories at their rallies and nobody else’s. It was well known that if you could get Rashid’s magic tongue on your side then your troubles were over. Nobody ever believed anything a politico said, even though they pretended as hard as they could that they were telling the truth. (In fact, this was how everyone knew they were lying.) But everyone had complete faith in Rashid, because he always admitted that everything he told them was completely untrue and made up out of his own head.

(Salman Rushdie. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. 1991.)

There’s more truth in fiction than can possible be covered here. So, since one good tagging deserves another, I’ll see what truth Wondering Willow and A Billion Suns find on their bookshelves.