Don Delillo doesn't smile for photos

“It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called ‘the click of a well-made box.’ Something like that. The word I always think of it as is ‘click.’…In Don DeLillo’s stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It’s maybe the only way to describe writers I love. I hear the click in most Nabokov. In Donne, Hopkins, Larkin. In Puig and Cortázar. Puig clicks like a fucking Geiger counter. And none of these people write prose as pretty as Updike, and yet I don’t hear the click in Updike.”
-David Foster Wallace in an interview by Larry McCaffery (Dalkey Archive Press)

I posted this quote for several reasons. I wanted to simultaneously shout out David Foster Wallace and bash John Updike. I wanted to type the words “fucking Geiger counter.” I wanted to praise Dalkey Archive Press–follow the link, look at their catalog, and you will definitely find some literature of interest. I also wanted to correct David Foster Wallace a little bit. W.B. Yeats actually wrote (in a September 1936 letter to Dorothy Wellesley) that “a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”

But I hear the click in Delillo too, which is why I thoroughly enjoyed this Vernacular post a couple months back on writers’ habits, including Don D’s. Here is a quote of his (from the web link) on sentence construction, or how he achieves “the click.”

“There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There’s always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence–these are sensuous pleasures. I might want very and only in the same sentence, spaced in a particular way, exactly so far apart. I might want rapture matched with danger–I like to match word endings. I type rather than write longhand because I like the way words and letters look when they come off the hammers onto the page–finished, printed, beautifully formed.”

Finally, here are some quotes from Delillo’s 1988 novel Libra that basically ache to be read aloud:

“From his window one night he watched two boys put the grocery store cat in a burlap sack and swing the sack against a lamppost.”

“He tried to time his movements against the rhythm of the street. Stay off the street from noon to one, three to five. Learn the alleys, use the dark. He rode the subways. He spent serious time at the zoo.”

“His mother was short and slender, going gray now just a little.”
(I’d like to note that there are 8 syllables on each side of the comma. The phrases “short and slender” and “just a little” also correspond syllabically.)

“The smell hit him full-on, a warmth and a force, the great carnivore reek of raw beef and animal fur and smoky piss.”

“Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need.”

“ornate cages of the birds of prey”

Tags:   Brooks · David Foster Wallace · Don Delillo · John Updike · writers' habits · writing processNo Comments