Compose and Decompose

Kinds of criticism, or, full steam ahead?

Bardelys rethought his playing of the Game of ‘What’s wrong with this opening?’

He did so because of a philosophy he had adopted as an experiment, ever since he had read what Lady Dunsany had written.

Lady Dunsany was the widow of the Irish poet and talesman Lord Dunsany. And she had written, after his death, that he had written all his tales, novels, and poetry with a quill pen, and never rewritten a word of it: all of it was first draft. He set down the first draft and (being a genius, you see) it was brilliant.

There was also Bardelys’ longstanding admiration for the pulp authors of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. They had pounded out their tales on unforgiving typewriters for a penny a word, or tuppence; top of the market slicks in the late 1940s paid no more than ten cents a word, as Bardelys recalled. Under the circumstances, these authors too set down their tales ‘good enough’ and mailed them off in the hope of getting a check in return.

There was a type of popular tale, told in pulps, in movies in their golden era, in radio plays, in television plays, in comics, that had a great appeal to Bardelys, for it was all the world had left of the great Romantic poetry that had taken Europe by storm with the ascendency of the bourgeoisie. Romance was middle-class, and Bardelys was nothing if not middle-class, and so he liked what the middle-class liked. (It went past that, of course, for the fanciful tales of the Hellenic world, and the ‘lying sagas’ of the late medieval Icelandic sagamen, were also Romance, and so was much of fable and folklore from Sindbad to Cinderella.)

What all those hackworks had in common was they were done for money, and consumed for entertainment, they were part of the ‘Little Tradition,’ and they were read, attended, listened to, watched, and thrown away by a public eager for next week’s delights. Under such circumstances, great things were made along with much junk, and they were fashioned with a good will, as well as could be done at the time and under the circumstances, and then let go.

Rewriting was unthinkable in these fields, unless a tale didn’t sell. In that case it was sent out to another publication, pitched to another studio or producer, recast in new dress, or junked. Rewriting was, in the broadest sense, done through next season’s tales. A standard sort of tale would be taken up and retold in new dress, most of all if it proved popular. No matter if it was another talesman’s tale or your own, when you were stuck for an idea, you’d grab the old chestnut, put some new twist on it, and type it up again.

But you wrote forward, and didn’t look back. There was no money in rewrites, unless, as Robert A. Heinlein noted, some editor with cash on hand was proposing the changes.

It was the poetical equivalent of daily journalism.

Style with both was of minor importance. Meat — and quickness — and ‘good enough’ — were all.

Bardelys had thought he would take up this attitude, so alien to him, as an experiment. He would dash out a tale, dress it up just so it was ‘good enough,’ and go on to the next one. From time to time he would stumble on a tale that rose above his usual dreck, and maybe even a pearl here or there; improvement he would make, not in rewriting one tale twenty times, but in the course of writing twenty tales one time each. The twentieth tale would be told better than the first, the fortieth better than the twentieth.

So you see, to Bardelys it was contrary to his experiment to look over those old openings and try to play and tease them apart.

This was more for criticism.

There were, Bardelys reckoned, two camps of criticism. One was constructive, and one was deconstructive. Call them composing and decomposing. There was nothing to call one ‘good’ and the other ‘bad.’ It lay more in their functions.

For example, a talesman looking over a tale he had not written, and seeing something he’d like to swipe: this was constructive, and composing. But if he only picked the tale apart to prove to himself that his stuff was better, that was deconstructive, and decomposing. It could still be valuable, as lessons in what he ought to avoid.

Again, a critic for the daily rags or blogs might read a tale, and tell others as potential fellows of the same audience, if the tale was strong or weak, whether it had moved him or not. This was constructive. Or a critic in academia might read a tale, and offer it up as an example of theory, and that would be deconstructive, in Bardelys’ view.

And so, with but two small steps, Bardelys abandoned what he had called only the day before the Great Game, and decided that for him, for now at any rate, there was only ‘Forward!’ — and no looking back.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, August 6, 2008)