Many years ago I went to the Barbican Theatre in London to see Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon, a play about the space race seen from the perspective of two brothers who were struggling to cope with a domestic tragedy. In fact, I went to see it twice because I enjoyed it so much. The end of the play, in which a scene of weightlessness was created with mirrors to a soundtrack of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, was the most astounding theatrical scene I’d ever experienced.
But there’s another moment in the play that I want to mention here. One of the characters was sitting in a laundrette with a washing machine behind him. When the wash cycle came to an end, he opened the washing machine door and pulled all his clothes into the basket. However, as we all know, there’s always a sock which remains stubbornly in the machine, so he leant further and further in. Eventually, the sock proving recalcitrant, he climbed right in and the door closed behind him. It was a great comic moment, the actor’s head appearing forlornly in the round window as the audience laughed.
But then, gloriously, the washing machine took off, becoming a rocket - this was a play about the space race, after all - and suddenly, with the actor still looking out of his window, we were in another scene, another mood, altogether.
That transitional moment came to mind recently when I read John McPhee’s wonderful book, Silk Parachute. McPhee has written for The New Yorker for many decades - he’s now in his 90s and still writing - and his work is both beautifully written and beautifully crafted. In ‘Season on the Chalk’, for example, he writes about a journey from Ditchling Beacon to Épernay, except the journey itself is scarcely mentioned. Instead, McPhee moves us from place to place by means of visual association. Just as the washing machine’s window transforms into the rocket’s porthole, a vineyard in East Sussex becomes a vineyard in Champagne, the chalk bedrock which links the two places rising occasionally, but spectacularly, to the surface.
Or we could consider the end of ‘Silk Parachute’, the book’s title essay, which addresses McPhee’s relationship with his elderly mother. The most surprising aspect of this essay is the title itself, which only appears at the very end of the piece when a young McPhee persuades his mum to take him plane spotting, despite the sub-zero temperature. Afterwards, in the terminal building,
she bought me what appeared to be a black rubber ball but on closer inspection was a pair of hollow hemispheres hinged on one side and folded together. They contained a silk parachute. Opposite the hinge, each hemisphere had a small nib. A piece of string wrapped round and round the two nibs kept the ball closed. If you threw it high into the air, the string unwound and the parachute blossomed. If you sent it up with a tennis racquet, you could put it into the clouds. Not until the development of the multi-megabyte hard disk would the world ever know such a fabulous toy. Folded just so, the parachute never failed. Always, it floated back to you - silkily, beautifully - to start over and float back again. Even if you abused it, whacked it really hard - gracefully, lightly, it floated back to you.
It’s a stunningly beautiful ending. Nothing more needs to be said about the relationship between mother and son. We have left the laundrette and are on our way to the stars.
Part of my job as a teacher is to help students develop their writing style. Often, when they reach my class at the age of 11, their idea of structure is to chuck in the occasional “and” or '“but” whenever a sentence looks like it needs refreshment. So we start talking about grammar and then we home in on linking words until a distant growl interrupts our work. It’s one of my bugbears demanding entry to the room. This particular bugbear tends to get riled by the word “however” because most students have no idea how to use the word. “And” and “but” are on their way out, so “however” tends to sidle in and take their place. But that’s not good enough. (However, that’s not good enough?) Each word has its place. Sentences are not cardboard boxes jammed together to create a child’s den: they are structures which stand firm when basic laws of construction are obeyed. So we work on the correct use of “however” and slowly students learn how to create functional buildings. Buildings that work, but which - understandably at that age - often have the grace and beauty of a multi-storey car park.
In other words, we’re not done yet. Or we shouldn’t be. If architecture ended with multi-storey car parks, West Edmonton Mall, rather than Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiore, would be the go-to example for all budding art historians. No, if we want to learn to write well, we need to move on, ideally to the local laundrette because we know we can blast off from there.
So here’s a final transition to consider, this time from C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. In this passage Mark Studdock, who is being drawn into the orbit of the satanic N.I.C.E., dimly recalls a better way of living. He’s on his way to the village of Cure Hardy, which the N.I.C.E. wish to destroy, but as he arrives, he is struck by the beauty of the place:
Perhaps the winter morning sunlight affected him all the more because he had never been taught to regard it as specially beautiful and it therefore worked on his senses without interference. The earth and sky had the look of things recently washed. The brown fields looked as if they would be good to eat, and those in grass set off the curves of the little hills as close clipped hair sets off the body of a horse. The sky looked further away than usual, but also clearer, so that the long slender streaks of cloud (dark slate colour against the pale blue) had edges as clear as if they were cut out of cardboard. Every little copse was black and bristling as a hair brush, and when the car stopped in Cure Hardy itself the silence that followed the turning off of the engine was filled with the noise of rooks that seemed to be calling “Wake! Wake!”
“Bloody awful noise those birds make,” said Cosser.
The transition from Mark’s to Cosser’s reaction is what gives this passage its power. There is no need for further narrative comment and certainly no need for “Mark, however, …”.
There’s more to be said about transitions - of course there is - but I’d like to finish with another joy we discover when we start writing creatively: we can start sentences with “and” or “but” again. What fun! I love starting sentences with conjunctions, though I imagine some of you may now be shaking your heads in disbelief. So, I give you one final example: a passage from a book I can heartily recommend (and which is still available from Amazon and all good booksellers). It’s Dad from The Race speaking to his long-suffering daughter:
“And another thing,” he added, “if any of your teachers tell you you can’t start a sentence with ‘and’ just quote Jerusalem at them. One of the most famous poems in the English language and it starts with ‘and’. Completely dodgy theology, of course. He was a great poet, William Blake, but utterly barmy.”
And with that he was off, singing at the top of his voice until Mum threatened to send him to the shed if he didn’t stop straightaway.