Plain language in the service of feeling is congenial to my ear. When I was learning to write, William Maxwell used to tell me, “Use a word from plain speech.” Sometimes he would ask me to explain something I had written, and he would write my explanation in the margin, and it surprised me that something I had said could be writing. When people say something apt, I often have a difficult time getting the sound of it out of my ear—it seems to have an extra legitimacy because it happened—and sometimes it comes out on the page, seeming true and clear to me, because I heard it. Such a remark can take its place for me in a paragraph like a board nailed to a stud.
The entry below wasn’t written as it appears. It’s a listing from eBay which my wife sent me. (She wants a pickup truck.) She thought it read as a poem, and I arranged it in stanzas and fixed a couple of typos and added a comma. It doesn’t ask much of the imagination to picture a man in Alabama writing it. The truck is parked in his yard. It is the evening, after work, and he has the door closed against interruptions.
Photograph by Raymond Depardon/Magnum.
