HAPPY AS THE GRASS



Pursuing the matter, at least as far as the garden goes, I’ve noted with greater attention how writers go about describing nature. Many seem to hold the same view as Anton Chekhov that descriptions of nature should be brief and to the point.

It was easy for him to say, W. Somerset Maugham remarks in Points of View (1958), with his ability in a word or two to give the reader a vivid impression of a summer night when the nightingales were singing their heads off or the cold brilliance of the boundless steppes under the snow of winter. It was a priceless gift. Maughham’s mentioning of Chekhov’s condemnation of anthropomorphisms hit me, of course, like a hammer in a blancmange.

“The sea laughs,” he wrote in a letter, “you are of course in raptures over it. But it’s crude and cheap. […] The sea doesn’t laugh or cry, it roars, flashes, glistens. Just look how Tolstoy does it: ‘The sun rises and sets, the birds sing.’ No one laughs or sobs. And that’s the chief thing—simplicity.”

I was glad to learn, though, that Chekhov did not always adhere to the rule. In his story The Duel, he tells us that “a star peeped out and timidly blinked its one eye.” Like Maugham, I’m happy with that. Happy as the grass, I'd even say, where a child runs barefoot for the first time. I once saw a small boy’s drawing of it. His feet were the biggest things in the drawing with each toe strutting in delight, and the sun was laughing just as the sea would do at the sight of such happy feet.