Not Looking at Pictures

More E.M. Forster and an anniversary!

Today is my one-year anniversary on Substack! I began last year with these First Thoughts. Thank you all for joining me on this journey. I am not sure where I’m going next, but I’m glad to have your company. There is a low-key announcement at the end of this post, so read on. In honor of this title and theme, it will be a post without pictures—

When I taught Writing the Essay to art students¹, I often ramped the course up gently with a first assignment to read E.M. Forster’s “Not Looking at Pictures,” a modest essay where the novelist acknowledges how hard it is to view art.² At a museum, he wrote, his eye and mind did battle, and his mind would win. His arty friends (like Roger Fry) would laugh as he invented dialogue to make the paintings speak to him. The dragon in one medieval painting grumbles about being stuck with a spear. Forster was turning the static image into a scene, with character, action, and dialogue.

In contrast to the usual writing advice to “show, don’t tell,” in most writing both showing and telling are important—and the trick is in the balance. The Forster essay demonstrates how to move from description (showing) to interpretation (or telling), a key skill for students to learn for any field they study.³ Forster vividly traces a diagonal line in the composition of Titian’s Entombment and interprets it succinctly: “Stone shuts in flesh; the whole painting is a tomb.” He examines Velazquez’s Las Meninas for circles and arcs to show that “here again, as in the case of the Entombment, the composition and the action reinforced one another.”

For Forster, looking at form (the lines and angles and shapes in the painting) illuminates meaning (it draws his eye to the important parts), but also supports his emotional response to the work. If Titian’s formal tomb inspires “pathos,” Velazquez’s casual scene at the Spanish court fills him with “joy.” Forster uses his skills as a novelist—character, dialogue, scene-setting—to show how writing, thinking, and seeing can work together, even though he is “bad at looking at pictures.”

In my post on a portrait of my grandmother you can see me struggling to make a scene from my family archive and create a character out of Elsie. It doesn’t quite work and I’m not sure why. I may be rushing it. One learns one’s own writing habits over time, and I know I rush. When I revise it is always to add, not delete. Even now, I don’t want to linger long enough to explain what I mean by this, to give another example. I want to move on, quickly, to the next point. I think this stems from a discomfort with the spotlight. Whenever it’s turned on me I squirm. But I want it too or I wouldn’t be here, in the first person.

This ambivalence seems central to memoirists in particular: the desire to tell one’s story versus the reluctance to be on stage. Writing often seems to me an ideal way to navigate that dilemma: to be seen and not seen at the same time. The memoir is one way to experiment with that formal challenge, and practice different ways to balance the two desires.

Forster concludes his essay with “after all these years, I am learning to get myself out of the way a little.” He is not talking about making art in that sentence, but about looking at art. Nonetheless, it is a good reminder for any writer. In the essay he models both how to use the “I” in an essay and how to get the I “out of the way”— with vulnerability and humility. He turns himself into a self-effacing character. Sometimes vulnerability and humility can feel like performances, but Forster pulls this off, I think. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t sure how to handle this anniversary post, so I’m doing a bit of hiding behind him. That is, I’m trying to get myself out of the way too.

Thank you, all, again, for a rewarding year. I deeply appreciate your presence and the corner of community we’ve built here. I’ll offer my announcement with the least fanfare possible: I am turning on paid subscriptions today but they are entirely optional. You can read these posts or reach out to me by email or direct message or in Comments, whether you pay for this newsletter or not. This is not an opinion on anyone else’s Substack business model but what works for me now. I appreciate support in all the forms that can take, online and off.

Writing exercise: I haven’t included an exercise for awhile so here you go: where do you find yourself getting in your own way in your writing? Be specific about when and where that happens. How can you get out of your own way, while preserving your own voice and point of view? Feel free to share suggestions or examples in the Comments. I’ll respond!

1. Unfortunately, for several years our required reading assignments came from one textbook for the whole incoming freshman class. That means that when I search for Forster’s essay online the first few hits are for uploaded student papers, including some from my university in 2017 when I taught there, so students could simply buy their “reading” of the essay without reading it. It seems impossible to get away with that; teachers can tell when a student’s written voice doesn’t match the person in class— and we had ways of checking progress (a “progression” of assignments) along the way to a deadline. But still. It’s dispiriting.

2. I seem to write about Forster a lot. Here is another piece on his definition of plot and story.

3. This move is comparable to the shift from the Methods and Results sections to the Discussion in a scientific paper. The first two describe what happened in the experiment and the last section interprets or analyzes what happened.