Pen-Breakers

[elfs]

As readers, there are books we read, and books we choose never to read. Books we pick up, make our way a few pages in, and then put down never to be completed. Books that, as Dorothy Parker once said, are not to be put down lightly but hurled at the wall with great force.

For writers there are other categories of books, perhaps the most significant of which is the ones we go to when we wish to learn from the masters. We read Hemingway, or Dickens, or Chekhov, with the hope of understanding what it was about these books that made them so important, so magnificent.

All of those writers are dead, however. It is when we encounter such talent in a writer who is still alive, however, that these books become something else. Something alarming, or maddening, or depressing. Mark Helprin is one of those writers. I have only read two of his stories to date and not made my way far in either one of them: Winter's Tale, which is a massive trade paperback, and A Soldier of the Great War, which I have in an e-book format and is much easier to carry about. (I have no intention of putting either one down, but I don't carry the massive paperback with me on the bus.)

For me, Helprin is what writers call a pen-breaker: someone whose mastery of the language is so commanding it makes you want to break every pen you own and give up the art of writing forever: you'll just never be that good. Here's his description, the third paragraph of his novel A Soldier of the Great War, of an old man walking through the outskirts of Rome:

As he hurried along the Villa Borghese he felt his blood rushing and his eyes sharpening with sweat. In advance of his approach through long tunnels of dark greenery the birds caught fire in song but were perfectly quiet as he passed directly underneath, so that he propelled and drew their hypnotic chatter before and after him like an ocean wave pushing through an estuary. With his white hair and thick white mustache, Alessandro Giuliani might have seemed English were it not for his cream-colored suit of distinctly Roman cut and a thin bamboo cane entirely inappropriate for an Englishman. Still trotting, breathless, and tapping, he emerged from the Villa Borghese onto a long wide road that went up a hill and was flanked on either side by a row of tranquil buildings with tile roofs from which the light reflected as if it were a waterfall cascading onto broken rock.

Sigh. He has such an incredible force of simile, a power to choose exactly the right word and the right time. I have no idea where this story is going; I'm well into the book and so far it is a collection of beautiful moments as Alessandro ends up walking 70 kilometers from Rome to the town where his younger sister lives accompanied by a young, naive but enthusiastic man, and I can't help but be envious. A Winter's Tale opens with the introduction of a magical, mischievous horse who is walking towards Christmas 1899 New York, and the description of the crisp streets, the fresh snow, the guttered homeless and the starlit buildings just took my breath away and made me tear up with the sheer brilliance of it.

I will, probably, end up reading the Harry Potter series just as I finished the Kushiel series. I want to understand what sells. But when I want examples of the writing I admire, Mark Helprin joins a very small shelf. Someday, when I grow up, I hope to have a voice like that.

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