While reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a salacious tale of life in the Paris gutter, it seemed to me that Miller was what I’d call a “writer” instead of an “author.”
Or maybe “scribbler” would be a better term, though Miller is an excellent one.
I propose that a scribbler is to an author as an improviser is to a composer. The scribbler writes fast—or seems to. The reader feels that sentences come straight from the writer’s mind, in the moment that they were conceived. The feeling arises that the book is a documented sequence of mental states, impressed fresh for others to read.
Other excellent scribblers include Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch; Junky), two other Americans who seem to have transmuted the yarn that is Twain’s Huckleberry Finn into personal expressions of spontaneous authenticity.
And yet, all of these scribblers show signs of craftsmanship, of revision—though not too much revision.
The edges of these texts are left blurred, like the blurred edges of a painting by Sargent.
Sargent sought a sprezzatura effect, like the carefully awry knot of a tie or a purposely misaligned belt buckle in the attire of a man who wants to pretend that the effect he produces has happened by accident.
*Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.