The influence of Henry Adams on The Armies of the Night is peculiar. I had never read much Adams. In my Freshman year at Harvard, we were assigned one long chapter of The Education of Henry Adams, and I remember thinking at the time what an odd thing to write about yourself in the third person. Who is this fellow, Henry Adams, talking about himself as Henry Adams? I remember being annoyed in that mildly irritable way Freshmen have of passing over extraordinary works of literature. To my conscious recollection, I hardly ever thought about him again. Yet, start reading The Armies of the Night, and immediately you say—even I said—“My God, this is pure Henry Adams.” It’s as if I were the great-grandson. Contemplate, therefore, how peculiar is influence: Adams must have remained in my mind as a possibility, the way a painter might look at a particular Picasso or Cézanne and say to himself, “That’s the way to do it.” Yet the influence might not pop forth for twenty or thirty years. When it does, the painter could say, “Oh yes, that was a Picasso I saw at MoMA twenty-five years ago, and I’ve always wanted to try such a palette, and now I have.” In effect, that’s what happened with Henry Adams.
Literary influence remains endlessly curious. I happened to pick up Moby-Dick. I hadn’t thought about Melville ten times in the last thirty years, but as soon as I read the first page, I realized my later style was formed by Melville, shaped by his love of long, rolling sentences full of inversions and reverses and paradoxes and ironies and exclamation points and dashes. Of course, to be as good as Melville—that’s another matter.
It’s disturbing to read a novelist with a good style when you’re in the middle of putting your work together. It’s much like taking your car apart and having all the pieces on the floor just as somebody rides by in a Ferrari. Now, you may hear a note in the Ferrari that isn’t good and say, “His motor needs a little tuning.” But nonetheless the car and its roar are still there in your ear while your parts remain on the floor. So while I’m working on a book I rarely read more than The New York Times—which could have the long-term effect of flattening my style. I’d rather blame the Times than old age.
STAMINA
I’m now eighty, but some people still regard me as a wild man. Even at my peak, that was only five to ten percent of my nature. The rest was work. I like work. I remember Elia Kazan saying one day at Actors Studio, “Here, we’re always talking about the work. We talk about it piously. We say the work. The work. Well, we do work here, and get it straight: Work is a blessing.” He said this, glaring at every one of us. And I thought, He’s right. That’s what it is. A blessing.
Of course, if you ask what work is dependent upon, the key word, an unhappy one, is stamina. It’s as difficult to become a professional writer as a professional athlete. It often depends on the ability to keep faith in yourself. One must be willing to take risks and try again. And it does need an enormous amount of ongoing working practice to be good at it. Since you are affected by what you read as a child and adolescent, it also takes a while to unlearn all sorts of reading reflexes that have led you into bad prose.
I remember in the summer before my Junior year, working on my very first novel, No Percentage (which will remain forever unpublished), I ran into a phrase by Henry James. He spoke of “the keeping up.” That can be the first horror to face when you’re young. Your novel tends to change all too quickly. It may even be the cardinal reason why people in college tend to stay away from longer fiction. Young short-story writers, no matter how good, often blow up when they attempt a longer work. They’ll have a good beginning, but the second chapter goes off and they never get it back. The sad truth is that a would-be novelist possibly has to start a few books that do give out, or even crash, before a sense of the difficulties is acquired. If the same likelihood of early failure applied to young race-car drivers, there would not be speedways.
A large part of writing a novel is to keep your tone. I love starting a book; I usually like finishing one. It’s the long middle stretches that call on your character—all that in-between!—those months or years when you have to report to work almost every day. You don’t write novels by putting in two brilliant hours a week. You don’t write novels if you lose too many mornings and afternoons to a hangover.
Sometimes, when you’re in a bad period, you must in effect contract yourself for weeks running. “I’m going in to write tomorrow,” you have to declare, and, indeed, show up at your desk, even though there’s nothing in you, and sit there for hours, whatever number of hours you told yourself you were going to put in. Then, if nothing happens, you still show up the next day and the next and the next, until that recalcitrant presence, the unconscious, comes to decide you can finally be trusted. Such acceptance is crucial. The unconscious expects that what it has prepared for you in your sleep should be expressed, ideally, the next day. We live, you see, in an arm’s-length relationship to our unconscious. It has to be convinced over and over again to believe in you. Sometimes when you’re writing a novel, you have to live as responsibly as a good monk. That does get easier as you grow older.
Writing is wonderful when you talk about it. It’s fun to contemplate. But writing as a daily physical activity is not agreeable. You put on weight, you strain your gut, you get gout and chilblains. You’re alone, and every day you have to face a blank piece of paper.
There’s nothing glorious about being a professional. You become more dogged. You probably relinquish the upper reaches of the mind in order to be able to do your stint of work each day: That means you are ready to endure a certain amount of drudgery. But your mind is, obviously, not enthralled by such dull conditions. Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
I used to have a little studio in Brooklyn, a couple of blocks from my house—no telephone, not much else. The only thing I ever did there was work. It was perfect. I was like a draft horse with a conditioned reflex. I came in ready to sit at my desk. No television, no way to call out. Didn’t want to be tempted. There’s an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that’s not good enough, you build a fence around the fence. So, no amenities. (But for a refrigerator!) I wrote longhand with a pencil and I gave it to my assistant, Judith McNally. She would type it for me and next day I would go over it. Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I would hardly remember what I had written the day before. It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it. The critic in me was delighted. I could now proceed to fix the prose. The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.
When I read something good, I want to do a critical piece. I want to expand on where I think the author is terrific and where he or she is lacking—especially if reviewers are blowing it up too high. I may feel, It’s good but not that good—let’s get into it. So it can be immensely distracting. Your mind settles on the work you are reading rather than the one you’re supposed to be laboring on. A tendency grows to protect yourself by not reading anything that’s too good. Stendhal, for instance, used to peruse the Code Napoléon every day in the loo before he’d start to write.
Now, I didn’t always follow that rule. When I was doing The Naked and the Dead, I used to pick up Thomas Wolfe and Tolstoy. I didn’t read them every day, but they were on my writing desk and they were perfect for what I needed, Tolstoy particularly. The tone of Anna Karenina was wonderful for The Naked and the Dead. And then there was Thomas Wolfe to steam up the descriptions. If I needed a tropical sunset or the smell of the jungle, I had Wolfe. For the characters, Tolstoy.
I never know what the style of a book will be until I get into it. Sometimes you aim high and don’t get it—you have to settle for a more functional tone. After all, style is very much like the pace a serious jogger sets for himself. You have to be able to maintain it. In that sense, style is an offshoot of character. With all else, character is the wise or foolish estimate of your resources.
I think it’s important for a writer to keep in shape. But it’s hard to talk about. H
arry Greb, for example, was a fighter who used to keep in shape. He was completely a fighter, the way one might wish to be completely a writer. He always did the things that were necessary to him as a fighter. Now, some of these things were extremely irrational from a prize-fight manager’s point of view. That is, before he had a fight he would go to a brothel and he would have two prostitutes, not one, taking the two of them into the same bed. And this apparently left him feeling like a wild animal. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps he picked the two meanest whores in the joint and so absorbed into his system all the small, nasty, concentrated evils that had accumulated from carloads of men. Greb was known as the dirtiest fighter of his time. He didn’t have much of a punch, but he could spoil other fighters and punish them; he knew more dirty tricks than anyone around, and the two whores were an essential part of his training methods. He did it over and over again until he died at a relatively early age of a heart attack on an operating table. I think he died before he was thirty-eight. They operated on him, and bang, he went.
The point I want to make is that he stayed in training by the way he lived his life. The paramount element was to keep in shape. If he was drinking, you see, the point was to keep in shape while drinking. I’m being a touch imprecise.… Put it this way: He would not drink just to release his tension. Rather, what went on was that there was tension in him which was insupportable, so he had to booze. But reasoning as a professional, he felt that if he was going to drink, he might as well use that too. In the sense that the actor uses everything which happens to him, so Greb as a fighter used everything. As he drank, he would notice the way his body moved. One of the best reasons one drinks is to become aware of the way your mind and body move. Now, let me try to apply this.
Craft is a grab bag of procedures, tricks, lore, formal gymnastics, symbolic superstructures—methodology, in short. It’s the compendium of what you’ve acquired from others. And since great writers communicate a vision of experience, one can’t usually borrow their methods. Their method is married to the vision. Therefore, one acquires craft more from good writers and mediocre writers with a flair. Craft, after all, is what you can take out whole from their work. But keeping in shape is something else. For example, you can do journalism and it can be terrible for your style. Or it can temper your style. In other words, you can become a better writer by doing a lot of different kinds of writing. Or you can deteriorate. There’s a book that came out a few years ago which was a sociological study of some Princeton men—I forget the name of it. One of them said something which I thought was extraordinary. He wanted to perform the sexual act under every variety of condition, emotion, and mood available to him. I was struck with this not because I ever wanted necessarily to have that kind of sexual life but because it seemed to me that was what I was trying to do with my writing. I edit on a spectrum which runs from the high, clear manic impressions of a drunk that has made one electrically alert all the way down to the soberest reaches of a low mood where I can hardly bear my words. By the time I’m done with writing I care about, I usually have worked on it through the full spectrum of my consciousness. If you keep yourself in this peculiar kind of shape, the craft will take care of itself. Craft is very little, finally. But if you’re continually worrying about whether you’re growing or deteriorating as a man, whether your integrity is turning soft or firming itself, why, then, it is in that slow war, that slow rearguard battle you fight against diminishing talent, that you stay in shape as a writer and have a consciousness. You develop a consciousness as you grow older which enables you to write about anything, in effect, and write about it well. That is, provided you keep your consciousness in shape and don’t relax into flabby styles of thought. They, after all, surround one everywhere. The moment you borrow other writers’ styles of thought, you need craft to shore up the walls. But if what you write is a reflection of your own consciousness, then even journalism can become interesting. One wouldn’t want to spend one’s life at it, and I wouldn’t ever want to be caught justifying journalism as a major activity (it’s obviously less interesting than to write a novel), but it’s legitimate to see it as a venture of one’s ability to keep in shape rather than as an essential betrayal of the chalice of your art.
Indeed, many good writers get smashed en route. In that sense, they are like race-car drivers, and the punishment they take stops them eventually. They write less well, or they take a tremendously long time to write, or they lose the desire to write.
Of course, it’s virtually as if writers are there to be ruined. Look at the list: booze, pot, too much sex, too little, too much failure in one’s private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition, frustration. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice—as one gets older, one becomes aware of one’s cowardice. The desire to be bold, which once was a joy, gets heavy with caution and duty. And finally there’s apathy. About the time it doesn’t seem too important anymore to be a major writer, you know you’ve slipped far enough to be doing your work on the comeback trail.
The hardest thing for an older writer to decide is whether he’s burned-out or merely lying fallow. I was ready to think I was burned-out before I even started The Naked and the Dead. I had written a few good things in college and now had to wonder whether my time in the Army had blunted that talent. That is exactly how little sense a young writer can have of his or her own literary future.
If you can, I think it’s a good idea to rotate your crops. Once you’ve written a novel that’s factual and realistic and big, awfully close to what happened, then it’s probably a good idea that your next novel be as fanciful as possible. Yes—if you can, rotate those crops.
Once you are committed to earning your living from your pen, you discover that you can push yourself. It’s analogous to what athletes do when they take steroids to gain more strength. Ultimately damaging, but they set records. We do the same thing. You can force yourself to write much more than you want to. And the writing will not necessarily deteriorate. Not necessarily. But you can end up with a bad nervous system or a shortened life. Of course, one can always hope for transcendence. Sometimes working much harder than one wants to work can liberate energy. Sometimes.
I’ve often felt that those times when you can work or make love with great energy occur when your best and worst motives are working in cooperation for once.
The literary life is not all about envy. There is a corollary. Good writers are as competitive as good athletes. When I come across an interesting novel, I don’t go at it as other people do. I read critically, the way one athlete will watch another’s performance. Not watch it with venom—quite the contrary. You might say to yourself, “His spiral is tighter than mine and he’s got five more yards on me at least, but I scramble better.” The ideal is to give a good novel its credit and never overlook its power by deciding too quickly that the work is overrated, which is exactly the dreadful tendency underwritten by the envy chronic to the writer’s occupation. Is this because we are obliged to work alone so much of the time?
A few words on rewriting and research.
Rewriting is where your working experience over the years has its day. There comes a time when you know how to get the maximum out of what you’ve done. The only way to accelerate this skill when you are young is to have the courage to look at it when you’re about ready to destroy it. If something still comes through, then it may well have the merit to be worked upon further. It is also not bad to read things at the top of your feelings in order to get a sense of what the maximum might be. If nothing else, all this will give you a tolerance for the extraordinary range of reaction you can receive in the classroom. You realize that the people who don’t like your work aren’t necessarily evil and the people who love your stuff don’t have to be altogether illustrious.
Research is another matter. The trick in doing a historical novel, for example, is to digest the research. You have to avoid that awful stance wh
ere you say, in effect, “Hello, I’m Saint-Simon and I’m at the court of Louis XIV. Madame de Maintenon is very angry this morning.” Better to remind yourself that Madame de Maintenon does not necessarily feel that she is the Madame de Maintenon we know through Saint-Simon.
In addition, one must always be on guard against anachronisms. You learn how hard it is to separate what belongs only to your time from the era you are trying to re-create.
A CODA TO “CRAFT”
By now, I’m a bit cynical about craft. I think there’s a natural mystique in the novel that is more important. One is trying, after all, to capture reality, and that is extraordinarily and exceptionally difficult. Craft is merely a series of way stations. I think of it as being like a Saint Bernard with that little bottle of brandy under his neck. Whenever you get into trouble, craft can keep you warm long enough to be rescued. Of course, this is exactly what keeps good novelists from becoming great novelists. Robert Penn Warren might have written a major novel if he hadn’t had just that extra little bit of craft to get him out of all the trouble in All the King’s Men. If Penn Warren hadn’t known anything about Elizabethan literature, the would-be Elizabethan in him might have brought off a fantastic novel. As it was, he knew enough about craft to use it as an escape hatch. And his plot degenerated into a slam-bang of exits and entrances, confrontations, tragedies, quick wails, and woe. But he was really forcing an escape from his literary problem, which was the terror of confronting a political reality that might open into more and more anxiety. Craft protects one from facing endless expanding realities—the terror, let us say, of losing your novel in the depths of philosophical insights you are not ready to live with. I think this sort of terror so depresses us that we throw up evasions—such as craft. Indeed, I think this adoration of craft makes a church of literature for that vast number of writers who are somewhere on the bell-shaped curve between mediocrity and talent.
The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing Page 12
