V: Parsing the Good from the Not So

F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “the separator.” Ernest Hemingway, characteristically, called it “the bullshit detector.”

What they spoke of was an internal mechanism a writer has, the ability to distinguish that which is good, where his story is working, from the false starts.

The very concept of fiction itself is amazing: intricate, involved patterns of lies sustained for pages and pages, requiring hours to read (and many more to pose) which, when the lies are really working well, not only entertain but can instruct on some deeper truths about people and about what was called, at least back in the upbeat days of my college education, “the human condition.”

For they are lies — and yet.

In calling it “the bullshit detector” Hemingway may be closer to describing its purpose, yet it’s tough not to think Hem delighted in the crudity. As he got older he had an apparent need to prove he was the ballsiest guy in the room. (A writer can’t function without some sensitivity to both her or himself and what goes on around him or her, yet Hemingway seemed bent on showing that any such sensitivity didn’t diminish his masculine invulnerability. In this, he has alway seemed for me one of the most insecure of our writers. Wonderful at what he did. I like his writing, especially its deceptive apparent simplicity. But I’ve occasionally wished I could go back in time and say: Ernie, put the bullets or the bottle down. There’s a lot more to masculinity.)

At any rate, I like the concept because it’s not only about separating elements, it’s also an effort to distinguish what is good from what is bad, and it has a graphic edge to it that, frankly, sometimes is important for writers who are prone to feeling that all of their words are a delightful gift.

Fitzgerald described his separator as essential to good writing. It is the internal critic that, when it functions best, does not cripple creativity but informs it. By assiduously and systematically stripping that which does not serve the plot’s higher purpose from the writing that does, the separator makes the entire story better.

In another context, the actor Jack Lemmon once described how this works in movies. In Italy to film Save the Tiger, Lemmon said that he performed in a love scene that was among the best work of his career. (Jack Lemmon, eternal nebbish, in a highly charged erotic scene is unique enough in itself.)

Yet the filmmakers struggled with the movie, and the director Billy Wilder happened to be in Italy, so they screened what they had for him. That love scene, he said, take it out.

Lemmon tells how he blanched at the notion, some of his best work cut out and discarded! And yet he defended the decision. The scene did not serve to advance the plot, and Lemmon says the film was better for its omission.

So the separator works not only to distinguish the good from the bad, but even the good that works for the plot from the good that does not.

I mention all this discerning equipment because it seems a part of us, our very selves, rooted even in our animal beings, not just the desire to distinguish what is true from the false but what rings true and what rings false — the separator or bullshit detector stems from something deeper in us.

Tying it in to fiction brings me back to Chandler. There is a chapter of Raymond Chandler Speaking (yes, I’m still reading it, slowly, even going back and forth, re-reading bits–I’m savoring this one) titled “Chandler on Famous Crimes.” In one letter he writes the following to a mystery novel critic on what crimes, especially murders, are worth examining and writing about.

“The kind of case you want is one which is a genuine mystery, that is to say one which could not now be solved but on which enough data exist to make a strong logical argument either way; or else one which really was solved but only by a peculiar and interesting chain of circumstances. The case should not be sordid or repulsive. It should not be too remote in time. … It should be a case in which the accused, whether found innocent or guilty, had a good run for his money and was not simply railroaded. And it should preferably be a case in which a slight shifting of emphasis might have made the trial go the other way. Or else, as I said before, the chain of clues itself should be fascinating. That’s another way of saying that it should have been a case which would have been worth writing as fiction.”

So I’ll end with a note from the noir side of things, the criminal element, where rationalizations rule and deception is common currency. I do believe deception is inherent to nature and ubiquitous to people, so deep they often don’t notice it in themselves. But I also do so like our abilities to ferret out the truth, and how we love and even savor that process, enough that we tell stories.