In A World Falling Apart

I need to stop reading news in the morning: it kills the rest of my day.

Yet as a Canadian, as one of the luckier human beings on this planet, I feel the need to understand the current mess (in part because my country is involved in messing things up). I have never learned how to do this without anger, shame, and despair. Not even the decades I spent working with social and political activist groups could ease that feeling in my gut.

Perhaps, for those of us not being bombed or droned or starved or occupied to death, one of the challenges of the century will be to survive on the inside: to live in a world that is falling apart, without falling apart ourselves... because if we fall apart, then how can we help other people?

But again, I have never learned how to do this.

No Room for Sleights of Hand

Willa Cather -- June 14, 1902.

For the first time, I've read one of her stories: a novella, "My Mortal Enemy," that offered some of the best prose I've read this year. It would seem almost too natural and effortless to be called a style, were it not for the implied control that keeps it clean, clear, concise, vivid, and lively.

Whether such control came easily to her, or whether she worked for it, I've no idea. But I do know that styles like this can be hard to find, and I'm thrilled to find hers.

Something else I know: writing of such clarity and simplicity would expose any false intentions or fakery to instant recognition; it leaves no room for sleights of hand or for Barnum and Bailey showmanship. It is what it is, it does what it does, openly... and beautifully.


(Photograph courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.)

All Roads Lead To Winter

M. R. Cosby is an Australian writer, whose recent collection of strange stories, Dying Embers, has been receiving strong reviews.

He has just written a strong review himself, of my novella, All Roads Lead to Winter.


"It's not often that I finish reading a book and say to myself, 'Wow! That was quite something,' but I did with this one....

"Go and download a copy now; Mark Fuller Dillon is a rare talent who deserves to be much more widely read."

The Novel Démeublé

"The boat was pulling out, and I was straining my eyes to catch, through the fine, reluctant snow, my first glimpse of the city we were approaching. We passed the Wilhelm der Grosse coming up the river under tug, her sides covered with ice after a stormy crossing, a flock of seagulls in her wake. The snow blurred everything a little, and the buildings on the Battery all ran together -- looked like an enormous fortress with a thousand windows. From the mass, the dull gold dome of the World building emerged like a ruddy autumn moon at twilight."

Later:

"The Henshawes’ apartment was the second floor of an old brownstone house on the north side of the Square. I loved it from the moment I entered it; such solidly built, high-ceiled rooms, with snug fire-places and wide doors and deep windows. The long, heavy velvet curtains and the velvet chairs were a wonderful plum-colour, like ripe purple fruit. The curtains were lined with that rich cream-colour that lies under the blue skin of ripe figs."

Later still:

"The snow fell lightly all the afternoon, and friendly old men with brooms kept sweeping the paths -- very ready to talk to a girl from the country, and to brush off a bench so that she could sit down. The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and sociable, like pleasant people. The snow lay in clinging folds on the bushes, and outlined every twig of every tree -- a line of white upon a line of black. Madison Square Garden, new and spacious then, looked to me so light and fanciful, and Saint Gaudens’ Diana, of which Mrs. Henshawe had told me, stepped out freely and fearlessly into the grey air. I lingered long by the intermittent fountain. Its rhythmical splash was like the voice of the place. It rose and fell like something taking deep, happy breaths; and the sound was musical, seemed to come from the throat of spring. Not far away, on the corner, was an old man selling English violets, each bunch wrapped in oiled paper to protect them from the snow. Here, I felt, winter brought no desolation; it was tamed, like a polar bear led on a leash by a beautiful lady.

"About the Square the pale blue shadows grew denser and drew closer. The street lamps flashed out all along the Avenue, and soft lights began to twinkle in the tall buildings while it was yet day -- violet buildings, just a little denser in substance and colour than the violet sky."

-- Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy. 1926.

"How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and four walls." 

-- "The Novel Démeublé."

Silvere felt himself swooning. "Ah, my God!"

"The next day Silvere waited at the street corner. A vendor was selling chestnuts. Two gamins were fighting in an alley. A woman was scrubbing some steps. This great Paris throbbed with life.

"Heloise came. She did not perceive Silvere. She passed with a happy smile on her face. She looked fresh, fair, innocent. Silvere felt himself swooning. 'Ah, my God!'

"She crossed the street. The young man received a shock that sent the warm blood to his brain. It had been raining. There was mud. With one slender hand Heloise lifted her skirts. Silvere leaning forward, saw her--"

A young man in a wet mackintosh came into the little gent's furnishing store.

"Ah, beg pardon," said he to the clerk, "but do you have an agency for a steam laundry here? I have been patronising a Chinaman down th' avenue for some time, but he-- what? No? You have none here? Well, why don't you start one, anyhow? It'd be a good thing in this neighbourhood. I live just round the corner, and it'd be a great thing for me. I know lots of people who would-- what? Oh, you don't? Oh!"

As the young man in the wet mackintosh retreated, the clerk with a blonde moustache made a hungry grab at the novel. He continued to read: "Handkerchief fall in a puddle. Silvere sprang forward. He picked up the handkerchief. Their eyes met. As he returned the handkerchief, their hands touched. The young girl smiled. Silvere was in ecstacies. 'Ah, my God!'

"A baker opposite was quarrelling over two sous with an old woman.

"A grey-haired veteran with a medal upon his breast and a butcher's boy were watching a dogfight. The smell of dead animals came from adjacent slaughter-houses. The letters on the sign over the tinsmith's shop on the corner shone redly like great clots of blood. It was hell on roller skates."

Here the clerk skipped some seventeen chapters descriptive of a number of intricate money transactions, the moles on the neck of a Parisian dressmaker, the process of making brandy, the milk-leg of Silvere's aunt, life in the coal-pits, and scenes in the Chamber of Deputies. In these chapters the reputation of the architect of Charlemagne's palace was vindicated, and it was explained why Heloise's grandmother didn't keep her stockings pulled up.

-- From
"Why Did The Young Clerk Swear? Or, The Unsatisfactory French."

Last Words, by Stephen Crane.
Digby, Long & Co, London. 1902.

Photo: Kean Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.