Straining credulity, the solitary creative genius, and daffodil cake
With Arvind Ethan David and Joseph Williams
I’m not often one to opt for books that make me weep (frankly, there’s enough in the world to cry about) but a few years ago I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in one sitting, and had a headache by the end. I don’t know if it was the poor lighting emitted by my energy-saving bulb or the tears I had shed that caused it; likely a combination of the two. I thought about The Road for a long time.
I didn’t really interrogate why I felt so strongly about it at the time (I had university essays to write and a dissertation to procrastinate), but reading Arvind Ethan David’s piece in today’s issue of Boundless resurfaced those feelings and gave me some clarity on what it might have been. A landscape bereft of potential — and crucially of the infrastructure of petrol and oil, which Stephanie LeMenager wrote has become ‘embodied memory’ for the modern civilian and thus unthinkable to be without — felt like a world away, but there was something uncomfortably real about the Man and the Boy.
‘Today,’ Arvind writes, ‘The Road reads like a bleakly factual account of what life has been like for so many in Syria, Libya, Gaza, Ukraine and the Sahel. The millions displaced from normal lives and condemned to wander the wilderness, forever in search of hope that is never found.’
He wrote these words before the events of this week, when the ceasefire was broken and airstrikes rained down on Gaza once again. More parents and children will be wandering their rubbled home this week and the idea of searching for hope in the face of such loss can feel futile, even from thousands of miles away. And yet, we have to continue to carry the fire for those who can’t escape these flames; as Arvind concludes, ‘what choice do we have?’
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
You can’t make this shit up
Arvind Ethan David asks: with the world in paroxysms of excessive implausibility, how’s fiction meant to keep up?
Working as a writer in Hollywood is to spend your life getting feedback – ‘notes’ – from Studio Executives and Producers. Sometimes these can be helpful. Often, they are not.
Of all the notes, one of the most frequent and most annoying is:
‘But that just wouldn’t happen in real life.’
Or there is it's more sophisticated sounding, but equally unhelpful, equivalent: ‘That strains credulity.’
The reason we hate this note is that fiction, by definition, is an account of things that didn’t happen and an invention of the incredible. As a writer of fiction, receiving this note feels rather like being criticised for doing your job.
A full 200 years ago, Coleridge — that most perceptive of critics — in an essay about Shakespeare, pointed out that ‘suspension of disbelief’ is the deal that storytellers have always made with our audience. Just agree to set all that reality malarky aside, we humbly request, and we’ll show you the truth.
Often, the real ‘note behind the note’ – the useful, intuitive concern behind the constructed thought – is that the story-beat under scrutiny has failed to construct a sufficiently robust framework on which the reader or audience can hang their disbelief.
The real issue, in other words, is not that the tale itself is fantastical (it’s supposed to be), but that its fantasy is poorly designed, lacking internal logic and therefore unconvincing. As Douglas Adams once put it: ‘Without logic, there is no surprise, and no joy.’
The job of a creator of fictions, therefore, is to construct an unreality carefully supported by rigorous structure and logic such that the audience is happy to hang their collective disbelief at the door and open themselves to wonder and revelation.
It’s a weird job, but it’s an honourable one.
Or at least, it used to be. That was always the deal, the accepted division between those of us who trade in fiction and those who work in fact. In recent years, that compact has started to break down, and for a totally unexpected reason: reality isn’t playing ball anymore.
Over the last decade, reality has become problematically implausible. In many areas of existence, things are happening IRL that would usually be challenged as unrealistic in fiction — and as a result, certain genres of fiction are struggling to find new footing.
Arvind Ethan David is a writer and producer. His graphic novelisation of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble is my Business is available for pre-order as is Douglas Adams: Explaining the World, his audiobook about the legacy of his one time mentor. He has also adapted Lenny Henry's The Boy With Wings into a play, showing at Wimbledon's Polka Theatre later this year.
Arvind joined Erica Wagner on this week’s episode of the Boundless podcast — have a listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
When McEwan met Bradbury
Joseph Williams on the birth of the creative writing course
When, in October 1970, Ian McEwan entered the Maids Head hotel — a sprawling, 13th century palimpsest which stands opposite the grounds of Norwich Cathedral — he had no idea what would come next.
He knew, as he squeezed between tables with a creased typescript of his first short story folded under one arm, that he was there to meet the comic novelist Malcolm Bradbury. He was less sure what Bradbury might make of the story: a deranged dramatic monologue titled ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’. But neither of them could have known, as they sat in a brown room, with brown pints, and Bradbury’s a brown pipe filled with dusty tobacco, just how far this endeavour would go, how important Creative Writing courses would become.
In the five decades since that first supervision, Creative Writing in the UK has expanded rapidly from two men sat in a hotel bar in Norwich, to a subject offered at more than a hundred and twenty universities. What began as a one-year postgraduate degree has become an undergraduate course in its own right: in 27 universities students can now take a BA in Creative Writing as opposed to ‘straight English’. At more than 50 you can do a PhD in it.
The rise of Creative Writing has profoundly shaped British literary culture (even those writers who have not taken the subject will make a point of telling you that) and yet this rise was never easy. As Bradbury quipped in a valedictory piece for the Times Literary Supplement (‘The bridgeable gap’, January 17 1992), the MA course he and Angus Wilson had established at UEA ‘was regarded as a suspect American import, like the hamburger — a vulgar hybrid which, as everyone once knew, no sensible person would ever eat.’
Part of the suspicion towards Creative Writing, both then as now, was the question of whether or not you could teach somebody to write. The major literary figures of the past — Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Proust — had done well enough without an MA, and Hemingway had once claimed, somewhat bizarrely, that ‘writing cannot be taught, but it can be learned’. To say as much is to re-hash the Romantic idea of the solitary creative genius, an idea that would have appealed to Hemingway’s own brand of macho stoicism (even if he’d received his own fair share of advice from Gertrude Stein in the salon at 27 rue de Fleurus).
Joseph Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly. He is currently reading Colin Barrett’s compulsively brilliant second collection of stories, Homesickness (2022), and Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun (1964)
Mary’s daffodil cake
Erica Wagner digs into her mother’s old recipe books
Somehow we’ve all found ourselves in thrall to Big Cake. Tough day at work? Have a piece of cake. World burning up? Cake. Democracy’s collapse? CAKE. The Great British Bake-Off (primly retitled The Great British Baking Show for our American friends) surely sealed the deal, with its promise of sweet treats and the possibility of stardom.
I confess I’ve never been wholly convinced, but maybe that’s just my own insecurity talking. Certainly as soon as early humans figured out what was really going on inside a beehive, sugar’s been a panacea for our ills and a balm to our souls. But I find baking pretty nerve-wracking. I love to cook because you can see, smell, taste what’s going on as you go. Sauce a little on the acidic side? A tiny pinch of baking soda does the trick. Soup a tiny bit dull? Splash in some fish sauce and Bob’s your proverbial.
But baking! Leavening agents — yeast, baking powder — have an air of precision yet are also mysterious. Set your oven to a certain temperature… But what really is the temperature of your oven? Will someone stamp on the floor and collapse your meringues? It’s all a bit much for me.
If you — secretly or otherwise — share my feelings, then welcome to the bliss that is Mary Bayes Ryan’s Daffodil Cake. Mary was my late mother’s best friend; they met in 1944 at Anita Zahn’s Summer School for the Arts in East Hampton, Long Island — in those days the Hamptons were not the hysterically moneyed resort they are now, but a fairly remote artists’ colony a very long drive from New York City. Mary was a talented painter who as a young woman was briefly engaged to J. D. Salinger; occasionally she’d drop references to ‘Jerry’ into conversation when speaking of her past. I am an only child and her two sons, one a year younger than I am and one a year older, were like my brothers growing up — and still are.
Mary had a real flair for taking simple — and yes, packaged and processed ingredients — and turning them into something truly special. Wispride processed cheese spread — yuk? No, think again. Toast an English muffin, thickly spread your spread, and grace with stacks of warm, hot-off-the-vine East Hampton tomatoes, and you have a sandwich that cannot be beat.
And then there was Mary’s Daffodil cake. The recipe here was typed out on my mom’s IBM Selectric from Mary’s instruction; it was a tangy staple of our times together. My mother was even more nervous about baking than I am: but this cake is foolproof and fabulous. This is the cake that convinces me, bliss whether you scarf up a slice with Gardiner’s Bay twinkling in the Long Island sunshine, or with an English rain lashing down outside.
You can get Duncan Hines cake mix from American food stores; trust me, you won’t be sorry. Go with the apricot nectar; fresh orange juice is really good too. Pricking the holes in the cake and drizzling in the glaze is deeply soothing; the glaze pools satisfyingly onto the plate and your cake begins to glisten. If you want, you can tell your treasured guests that the cake is completely homemade… but why not spill the beans and share the joy?
Erica Wagner is Editor-at-Large at Boundless