The Importance of Class

What no one has explained well is why we find mystery, music, beauty, maybe what Lorca would call writing that exhibits an author’s Duende in one story or poem, but not in another. And, that’s true even if the writers both are writing with clarity, good craft skills, and use similar vehicles for content. We may never know where that shadowy source, often labeled inspiration generically, comes from. We are only aware of its existence.

In an effort to understand, possibly cultivate that quality, in some of my own writing, I needed an analogy beyond the quotidian. I worked on thoroughbred racetracks across the country between 1974-1984 and learned something that has always made good writing as opposed to good craft usage easier for me to understand, not where it came from necessarily but what it is—a paradox, an intangible quality that can be seen, felt, tasted, touched, and heard, observed by both the conscious and subconscious mind. This is the existence of Class in race horses, and I have observed many examples of class personally.

On a given day at a fast track, a horse without much class can run six furlongs in one minute and ten seconds in a race with other horses of approximately equal worth. On the same day and on the same track but in a different race, another horse may win its race of six furlongs in one minute and twelve seconds. In race terminology that’s a substantial difference of ten horse lengths. Yet, on any other day under any conditions put these same two horses head-to-head in a race and the slower horse may outrun the other to the finish line most of the time if it has more class, even if the race is run in one minute and fourteen seconds. For many decades, expert horsemen have called this phenomenon simply heart or class.  One horse has more of it that another and sometimes regardless of breeding or bloodlines. No one knows why because this fact remains true even if the horse with more class is sore or dealing with a chronic ailment and the other horse is sound. It is more than breeding, more than conformation or training, and it goes beyond external factors. It’s a mystery that continues to confound horse trainers. But it exists in perpetuity.

It helps me when writing to think of what I’m writing in those terms. Most people who’ve had the educational and experience background I have can write well. But a writer who writes well may never write anything that rises to the level of what, for want of a better term and possibly an elitist one, gets labeled high or literary art. In horse terms think of Secretariat, Ruffian, Phar Lap, American Pharaoh, Affirmed, Seattle Slew, and a few others as stories or poems. There is a mystery attached to each of these horses as to what exactly makes them greater than the sum of their parts, a magic that even magicians cannot conjure whenever it suits them. Greatness, like lightening, just happens, and no one can catch it in a bottle consistently, if at all.

With writing, all the jargon and circular reasoning is what critics rely on in attempts to make their own analysis the most important aspect of us reading a text. All the pseudo-philosophy and psychology applied to a text isn’t what makes that text worth reading or change what draws us to it and then holds our interest. I’ve taught enough university English majors to know that’s not the case.

One of the brilliant writers of American short stories, Flannery O’Connor, one told a group of hopeful writers during her lecture on the craft involved, “I always thought story telling was the most natural of human endeavors, that anyone could do it. Then, I read your manuscripts.” Without a doubt this audience was full of people who could write well. What their writing did not contain was magic.

Of course, everything I’ve said here is subjective. Like my father used to tell me, “Opinions are the same as assholes. Everybody’s got one and they’re all different.” Each of us will judge what we prefer in reading a text and it will often be something different than the next person who prefers a different story or poem. But throughout the recorded history of human beings, enough individual opinions in enough different eras have been written down to speculate with accuracy that a particular piece of literature seems to do something to readers that other writing doesn’t, and although we keep trying to decipher what and why that is—and I don’t believe that is a bad thing—a concrete answer continues to escape us. For me, as both writer and reader, I am comfortable just saying that Absalom, Absalom or For Whom the Bell Tolls or Fern Hill or Wild Geese or Diving Into the Wreck or A Good Man is Hard to Find or The Plague of Doves or The Poisonwood Bible or To the Lighthouse, or The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, among many others I won’t bore you with listing, have a lot of class. They end up being greater than the sum of their parts. I can call them literary art with full confidence that the story or poem defines the label. I’m sure you have a list of magical writing as well, and it’s probably completely different than mine. The idea is to keep reading and find more and keep writing with hope the magic finds you.

Here are a few of many poems that feel magical to me for different reasons:

Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas – 1914-1953

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Wild Geese

By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg

by Richard Hugo

You might come here Sunday on a whim.   

Say your life broke down. The last good kiss   

you had was years ago. You walk these streets   

laid out by the insane, past hotels   

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try   

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.   

Only churches are kept up. The jail   

turned 70 this year. The only prisoner   

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now   

is rage. Hatred of the various grays   

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,   

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls   

who leave each year for Butte. One good   

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.   

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,   

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat   

or two stacks high above the town,   

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse   

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?   

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium   

and scorn sufficient to support a town,   

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze   

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty   

when the jail was built, still laughs   

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,   

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.   

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.   

The car that brought you here still runs.   

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver   

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Perhaps the World Ends Here

By Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.