In last issue’s column I talked about the catchphrase “Show, Don’t Tell,” so familiar to anyone who has ever attended a class in writing or a writers’ workshop. I spoke of how beginning writers are warned against stopping a story’s action to insert a slug of narrative explanation of the sort that writing teachers label “expository lumps” or “infodumps.” I quoted an example of lump-free fiction by Ernest Hemingway, the most outspoken early advocate of a method of storytelling that depended on a minimum of auctorial exposition to convey the meaning of a story, and I devoted quite a bit of space to the work of Robert A. Heinlein, who, more than anyone else in our field, made use of Hemingway’s narrative innovations in order to bring the unfamiliar future to life without the aid of expository lumps or, worse, stodgy masses of footnotes. Hemingway believed that the way to tell a story was to show people doing things, not to have the author interpret their deeds for us in little asides. Hemingway wrote about what we like to think of as the real world; but Heinlein brilliantly demonstrated how one could even drop one’s readers down in the bewilderingly unfamiliar future without explaining anything to them, letting them find their own way around in the strange environment into which they had been thrust.

What, then, are we to make of a passage like this one? It is the opening paragraph, no less, of a very well-known novel.
“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice guy, he never fought anybody except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. . . .”

The passage continues in this vein—an expository lump if ever there was one—for three pages. We hear about Robert Cohn’s family, his marital difficulties, his financial problems, his literary ambitions, and his departure for Paris, where, finally, on the third page of the book, we see him in a café with a couple of American friends, and one of them—the narrator of the book, as it happens—says, “I know a girl in Strasbourg who can show us the town.” It is the first bit of dialog in the book and it does, after a fashion, foreshadow the theme of the book, which deals with the adventures and disillusionments of a group of young American expatriates in France just after World War I. And eventually the focus of the book shifts from Robert Cohn to the real protagonist, who is the narrator, one Jake Barnes.

You may, very probably, have guessed from these hints that the novel is The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, his second and perhaps greatest book. But how can we account for the gigantic infodump—concerning a secondary character, even—that begins the story, and the delay with which the author introduces the webwork of conflicts that constitute the plot of the novel? Can this really be by Hemingway, the advocate of minimal editorializing and swift narrative movement? Yes, it can, apparently.

And I’ve been reading the collected short stories of John Cheever lately. He’s generally considered one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century, an opinion with which I concur. This is the opening of “Just Tell Me Who It Was”:
“Will Pym was a self-made man; that is, he had started his adult life without a nickel or a connection, other than the general friendliness of man to man, and had risen to a vice-presidency in a rayon-blanket firm. He made a large annual contribution to the Baltimore settlement house that had set his feet upon the right path, and he had a few anecdotes to tell about . . .”

Expository! Expository!
“Mr. Hatherly had many old-fashioned tastes. He wore high yellow boots, dined at Luchow’s in order to hear the music, and slept in a woolen nightshirt. His urge to establish in business a patriarchal liaison with some young man who would serve as his descendant, in the fullest sense of the word, was another of these old-fashioned tastes. Mr. Hatherly picked for his heir . . .”

Another expository opening; Cheever again, “The Children.”
Well, you say, Cheever and Hemingway are writing character-driven stories, in which it is, perhaps, legitimate to do a quick passage of expository biography by way of providing a fix on a character, whereas science fiction is generally plot-driven and technology-driven, and it is clumsy writing to move a science fiction plot along through chunks of exposition and to depict a novel technological gimmick with a flatfooted infodump. Maybe so. But Cheever wrote at least one story that could be called science fiction, “The Enormous Radio,” and it, too, opens in expository fashion. (“Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins.”) Despite its clever SF gimmick, though (a new radio that somehow picks up private conversations from all over a Manhattan apartment house), it, too, turns out to be character-driven in the end; so perhaps it is permissible, in a character-driven story, to be expository. Perhaps. (To see how a theme much like that of “The Enormous Radio” can be handled in the pure SF mode, minus expository baggage, check out Henry Kuttner’s classic story “The Twonky,” where all the emphasis is on plot, not character.)

But sometimes even Heinlein, our own apostle of non-expository writing, found it necessary to slow things down and deliver a history lecture. He always gets the story started quickly, of course. But we see in his much-anthologized “The Roads Must Roll” that after five pages of effective scenes in the action mode he suddenly halted the pace and wrote this:

“The Age of Power blends into the Age of Transportation almost imperceptibly, but two events stand out as landmarks in the change: the achievement of cheap sun power and the installation of the first mechanized road. The power resources of oil and coal of the United States had—save for a few sporadic outbreaks of common sense—been shamefully wasted in their development all through the first half of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, the automobile . . .”

And so on for two pages before he gets back to Heinleinesque storytelling. We find the same thing in his well-known novella “Waldo,” where, when an explanation is needed early on, Heinlein takes a deep breath and says, “It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture—its mores, evaluations, family organization. eating habits, living habits, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth—arise from the economic necessities of its technology.” Again, the passage continues for two more pages. It’s Heinlein in his most professorial mode, offered without apology. If we look carefully at almost any Heinlein tale, in fact, we will find him slipping in little background lectures whenever he needs one—not as blatantly as in “Waldo,” but they are there, despite his often-stated insistence that the best way to write science fiction was simply to show the future as a going concern, without stopping to explain anything.

Heinlein provides his own justification for that in his famed 1947 essay, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” where he says, “Don’t write to me to point out how I have violated my own rules in this story or that. I’ve violated all of them and I would much rather try a new story than defend an old one.” (He also notes the distinction between plot-driven and character-driven stories, but he thinks, as I do, that science fiction can accommodate both types: “There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction—write about people, or write about gadgets.” And then he observes that Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men achieves greatness in science fiction without paying much attention either to characters or gadgets. As Kipling says—also quoted by Heinlein—”There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!”

Where are we, then?
If expository lumps are such evil things, as the teachers of fiction-writing keep telling us, why do we find Hemingway and Cheever and even Heinlein indulging in them?

The answer, I think, is that sometimes, especially in a story that depends heavily on the depiction of character, or in one that is set against a truly unfamiliar background, the expository lump becomes a necessity rather than a vice. It’s a good idea, especially in a genre like science fiction whose readers tend to get impatient whenever a story starts to slow, not to indulge in such things too extensively. But if a writer is good enough—if he has that inner force, that verbal charisma, that all the top professional writers have and the hopeless amateurs lack—he can get away with anything. A great writer like Jack Vance can pepper his books with dry footnotes that would not have been out of place in one of Hugo Gernsback’s magazines of 1928, and no one will mind. Hemingway or Cheever can start a story with a mini-biography of a character, and it will be reprinted a thousand times. Robert A. Heinlein, when he wants to tell you how his rolling roads came into being, will just stop and tell you, and nobody minds.

So the rebuttal to writing-school dogmas is that the way to stop thinking about whether expository lumps are good writing or bad writing is to be as good a writer as Hemingway, Cheever, Heinlein, or Vance, and then you can do whatever you want. Unfortunately, that’s something that the writing schools don’t seem to be able to teach.