“But by then Harold was over his head in an ocean.”
Writing going poorly is, along with love going poorly and travel going poorly, among the enduring literary subjects. The Shining. The Anatomy Lesson. The Anthologist.
One reason for this is generic: struggle is interesting. We don’t want to hear about the glorious frolic in the waterfall; we want to hear about the resultant bacterial infection and midnight drive over an unpaved road to see the drunken village doctor.
The specific appeal of literary failure as a subject, though, is that (like the compulsive gambler’s empty wallet) it’s there when all is lost. When the writer can’t get anything else going — the space opera has imploded, the nautical adventure has capsized — this is the subject that remains. The story of writing going poorly is what’s printed on the bottom of the literary barrel.
Stories about writing going well, on the other hand, are virtually non-existent. When the writing’s going well, you don’t want to write about it — you want to keep writing about whatever it is you’re writing well about.
Which is one of many reasons I’m grateful for the existence of Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. It’s the best and truest account I know of what it feels like to be a writer on the (none too frequent) days when the work is a joy.
It is also, of course — when it isn’t inhabiting its secret identity as a book about writing — a singularly wonderful children’s book. It’s dreamy but coherent, eventful but compact. My daughter and I have been reading it with no diminishment in enjoyment for nearly four years now. Its sweetness feels as innate, and as non-cloying, as the sweetness of a peach.
Like Where the Wild Things Are (which is undeservedly much more culturally prominent — where are the Spike Jonze Harold adaptations? the Harold tattoos on sensitive twenty-somethings?), the book tells the story of a young boy’s imaginary nighttime walkabout. Harold sets out on a path of his and his crayon’s creation and ends up, simply by responding to his drawings ever-evolving demands, confronting a dragon, tumbling off a mountain, and riding in a hot air balloon. Throughout his adventures he wears an all-but-unvarying look of surprised delight (and a pair of zipper-less footie pajamas).
One of the few moments that challenge Harold’s equanimity involves the aforementioned dragon. He’s drawn a tree, filled it with delicious apples, and decided (since delicious apples need guarding) to draw a dragon at its base. But the dragon comes out scarier than he intended.
“It even frightened Harold. He backed away. His hand holding the purple crayon shook.”
And it’s this moment, when Harold’s crayon shakes, that solidifies the book as a masterpiece about the act of literary creation. Because the shaking crayon, held by his side as he backs away, ends up drawing a zigzag line. And that zigzag line happens to look an awful lot like water.
“Suddenly he realized what was happening. But by then Harold was over his head in an ocean.”
Harold doesn’t set out to draw an ocean. He realizes that he’s drawing an ocean.
That chapter you’ve been blundering around in for a month, having your hero muse about his dead sister — the sister isn’t dead! She’s just not talking to your hero! And your hero is writing letters to her! That’s what these pages have been groping toward!
Many a fiction writer has, in an interview, offered up a self-satisfied and vaguely mystical account of this moment in the creative process — The characters told me what they wanted. The ending was as much of a surprise to me as it was to the reader. But I’ve never seen it so elegantly, succinctly demonstrated as it is here by Harold and his sudden ocean.
Because Harold doesn’t merely realize that he’s drawing an ocean. He’s simultaneously submerged in that ocean — in fact the submersion ever-so-slightly precedes the realization (But by then…). Which means that he, or the part of him that creates (let’s call it Crayon), is playing a kind of game with the other part of him, the part that loves his parents and goes to daycare and has a favorite pair of pajamas (let’s call it Harold).
Crayon acts — it not only creates an ocean but shoves Harold into it — and Harold races to keep up, supplying ideas (a boat? can the boat have an anchor?) that Crayon giddily accepts and transforms, thus giving Harold something new to respond to. And so on and so on, round after round, until Harold and Crayon together glimpse the possibility of an ending in the distance (what if I got into bed and we actually drew up the covers?) and suddenly the problem isn’t summoning the discipline to write; the problem is remembering to eat.
Non-writers ask me, occasionally, if it’s lonely, writing all day, speaking to no one but the UPS guy. This question underestimates the depths of introversion it takes to choose writing as a career. But it also underestimates the true sustaining delight of the relationship that develops between typist and imagination, between Harold and Crayon.
Martin Amis has said that the distinguishing feature of a writer is that “he is most alive when alone.” On good days, anyway, a writer is certainly alive. But he isn’t alone
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Delicious writing, as usual.
I love these posts! Today's makes clear that it isn't about writing, but about reading. I may never learn to read as well as Ben Dolnick, but these letters are a major part of my strategy to keep the gap narrow. They at least allow me to vicariously enjoy reading through his eyes.