The example is extreme. Just so. There is a kind of critic who writes only about the dead. He sees the great writers of the past as simple men. They are born with a great talent, they exercise it, and they die. Such critics see the mastery in the work; they neglect the subtle failures of the most courageous intent and the dramatic hours when the man took the leap to become a great writer. They do not understand that for every great writer, there are a hundred who could have been equally great but lacked the courage. The writer, particularly the American writer, is not usually—if he is interesting—the quiet master of his craft; he is rather a being who ventured into the jungle of his unconscious to bring back a sense of order or a sense of chaos; he passes through ambushes in his sleep and, if he is ambitious, he must be ready to engage the congealed hostility of the world. If a writer is really good enough and bold enough he will, by the logic of society, write himself out onto the end of a limb that the world will saw off. He does not go necessarily to his death, but he must dare it. And some of us do go into death; Thomas Wolfe most especially, firing the passions which rotted his brain on those long paranoid nights in Brooklyn when he wrote in exaltation and terror on the top of a refrigerator. And Hemingway, who dared death ten times over and would have had to dare it a hundred more in order to find more art, because each time he passed through death the sweet of new creativity was offered.
Well, few of us dare death. Most of us voyage out a part of the way into our jungle and come back filled with pride at what we dared and shame at what we avoided, and because we are men of the middle and shame is an emotion no man of the middle can bear for too long, we act like novelists, which is to say that we are full of spleen, small gossip, hatred for the success of our enemies, envy at the fortunes of our friends, ideologues of a style of fiction which is uniquely the best (and is invariably our own style), and so there is a tendency for us to approach the books of our contemporaries like a defense attorney walking up to a key witness for the prosecution. At his worst, the average good novelist reads the work of his fellow racketeers with one underlying tension—find the flaw, find where the other guy cheated.
One cannot expect an objective performance therefore when one novelist criticizes the work of other novelists. It is better to realize that a group of men who are to a degree honest and to another extent deceitful (to the reader, or to themselves, or to both) are being judged by one of their peers, who shares in the rough their proportions of integrity and pretense and is likely to have the most intense vested interest in advancing the reputation of certain writers while doing his best to diminish others. But the reader is at least given the opportunity to compare the lies, a gratuity he cannot always get from a good critic writing about a novelist, for critics implant into their style the fiction of disinterested passion when indeed their vested interest, while less obvious, is often more rabid, since they have usually fixed their aim into the direction they would like the art of the novel to travel, whereas the novelist by the nature of his endeavor is not only more ready to change but by the character of the endeavor itself is obliged to be ready for a new approach.
Virtually every writer, come soon or late, has a cramped-up love affair which is all but hopeless. Of Human Bondage could be the case study of half the writers who ever lived. But the obsession is opposed to art in the same way a compulsive talker is opposed to good conversation. The choice is either to break the obsession or enter it. The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist. As did Henry Miller!
When it comes to being judged on a moral scale, good novelists are usually in the middle: not too good, and preferably not too evil. The evil, after all, do see more advantages to telling lies than truth. Not a good practice for a novelist. Fiction is the only overriding lie you are permitted.
On the other hand, if your character is awfully decent, you are, to a degree, estranged from humanity. So it helps if your character is average lousy but with striking contrasts and excellent elements. Then the contradictions in your moral makeup will work for you.
MIND AND BODY,
EGO AND WORK
It may be that part of the ability to remain a writer is to learn how to protect your ego through the years. One does ring oneself around with ego protections, the first of which, unhappily, is prudence. The price: Inspiration does not manage to blow the door open as often. Still, you do carry out the main brunt of your projects. That, of course, is exactly the major function of the ego—this dogged, determined, and often ugly servant of civilization itself.
If we think of all the attitudes we take on to fortify the ego or plug holes in it, blind patriotism is probably the most expensive. That is why we will look long and far before we find a good writer who is also a blind patriot. A reasonably dependable ego is crucial to a hardworking author, but an ego that is much more powerful than our literary needs is a superhighway straight into mediocrity. A good many best-selling authors can line up for that one.
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself. Various kinds of poisons—essences of fatigue—get secreted through your system. As you age, it grows worse. I believe that is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in prizefighters. I think often of the aging boxer who has to get into shape for one more fight and knows the punishment it will wreak on his body. No wonder it puts him in gloom. What characterizes every older fighter I have seen training for a fight is the bad mood that hangs over him and his camp. The only good thing likely to come out of it will be money. For the rest is close to a foregone conclusion. Even if he wins the fight—even if he wins it well—he is not going to get a new purchase on life out of a dazzling success, not in the way he did as a young fighter. That’s also true in my profession. Often, you have to make grave decisions: Am I going to attempt this difficult venture or not? At a certain point, you must believe that the work will yet prove truly important. Or else why suffer the slow self-destruction it will entail? Writing a novel over two or three years of the hardest work sometimes does the kind of damage to the body that is equal to obliging someone who has never smoked before to consume two or three packs a day for months. In reaction, I think, I’ve become an interested amateur about medicine; when you are a writer, you are, in a certain sense, doctor to yourself. You can always feel tensions and ailments creeping into you. It goes with the territory. Your factory is yourself. You are always examining the mill for potential breakdowns, anticipating troubles, and so you become alert to the relation not only between yourself and other people but between yourself and your body. Writing impinges on that body; writing depends ultimately on that body. Proust, with his asthma, was like an important industrialist who manages to get out an extraordinarily consistent product even if one wing of the plant is notoriously subject to breakdown.
Writing can also be a way of using up a large and uncomfortable presence in yourself. It’s famously known, for instance, that pornographers end up impotent. That’s probably a myth with a certain amount of predictability. If you work a muscle hard, it tends to develop; overworked, it can break down. I think something of the same is true of imagination. Force it too far, and it can cease to return anything. We write novels out of two cardinal impulses (other than to make a living and the desire to be famous). One is to understand ourselves better, and the other is to present what we know about others. Of course, it is often impossible to comprehend anyone else until one has plumbed the bottom of certain preoccupations about oneself. That is why the writer is always at risk of using his or her talent for therapy—which can be closer to creative inanition than to art.
Since we are often obliged to write in a state of ignorance about our real motives, one way to tell whether we are engaged only in therapy is that the work engages no risk or, to the contrary, is so wild that it will find no public and no publisher. Therapy, taken by its bottom line, is always self-indulgence,
self-absorption.
There is always fear in trying to write a good book. That is one reason why there are many more people who can write well than do. And, of course, many can’t take the meanness of the occupation. There’s nothing so very attractive about going into a room by yourself each day to look at a blank piece of paper (or monitor) and make calligraphic marks. To perform that act decade after decade punishes through the very monotony of the process. The act of writing itself, taken as a physical act, is less interesting, for example, than painting or, certainly, sculpture, where your body is more exercised in the doing.
Like all occupations, writing also presents its unique elements of risk. In the case of the novelist, it is to his ego. You really don’t want to get into a theme where you take no real chances, especially if it is a long book. How to dignify the time it uses up?
I’m always a little uneasy when my work comes to me without much effort. It seems better to have to forge the will to write on a given day. I find that on such occasions, if I do succeed in making progress against resistance in myself, the result is often good. As I only discover days or weeks later. (The Armies of the Night, for example, was written in the face of considerable resistance and gloom!) With all else, I was talking about myself in the third person. While it seemed interesting up to a point to speak of a protagonist named Norman Mailer, it was, on the other hand, damned odd. I was halfway into the book before I got used to it. It is even a dislocating way to regard oneself. Yet by the time I was done, I missed this character of Norman Mailer so much that I brought him back for book after book. It never worked as well again. The commitment has to be there. In The Armies of the Night, I was a true protagonist of the best sort—half-heroic, three-quarters comic.
Usually, on an average working day, you try to raise yourself to a level where you can pick up your story again. You have to pass through a peculiar hour or two, getting yourself in shape for the daily stint. That is equal to saying you have to face yourself each morning. While every salesman, teacher, executive, fireman, or cop does exactly that one way or another on many a morning (and many a pickpocket as well!), the writer must do it alone, day after day after day, a matter of brooding and drifting, and possibly getting into what’s bothering you, or even just unwinding a bit. Since you are ready, however, as a novelist to sit in judgment on others, you are obliged to look sooner or later each morning on everything in yourself that’s weak or second-rate or irrelevant.
When I’m writing, therefore, I am rarely in a good mood. A part of me prefers to work at a flat level of emotion. Day after day, I see hardly anyone. I’ll put in eight or ten hours, of which only three or four will consist of words getting down on the page. It’s almost a question of one’s metabolism. You begin, after all, from a standing start and have to accelerate up to a level of cerebration where the best words are coming in good order. Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives. If you’re trying for something at all interesting or difficult, then you cannot predict what the results of your work will be. If it’s close enough to the root, people can be psychically injured reading you. Full of heart, he was also heartless—a splendid oxymoron. That can be the epitaph for many a good novelist.
Today, most of my ideas arae less involved with new exploration than with occupying thematic territories I reconnoitered years ago. If you no longer have the pleasure of enjoying your mind in the way you could when young, you have, at least, more worldly knowledge to work with. In 1972, while interviewing Henry Kissinger, I asked him if he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of his White House work, and he said in effect, “I am working with ideas I formed at Harvard years ago. I haven’t had a new idea since I’ve been on this; I just work with the old ones.” By now, I know what he meant. There are just so many new thoughts you can have. There comes a time in your life when you have no choice but to implement them. To quote from The Deer Park: “… for experience when it is not communicated to another must wither within and be worse than lost.” One owes the reader a fee when quoting oneself, but here the tariff feels acceptable.
I can sit with an empty mind. If I do think of something, then all right, I think of it. But a tired brain is happy to contemplate nothing.
On the other hand, our continuing existence as novelists often depends on lively hypotheses. They fructify one’s fiction. For example, it is likely that one of the covert motives of jealousy is that it always offers a powerful hypothesis. The moment a husband or wife does not trust the mate, his or her life may become painful, but it is undeniably interesting. Let’s say the husband comes in after work and by the way he puts his hat and coat away, the wife can think, Yes, yes, he’s feeling guilty. So she can keep the hypothesis going—at least so long as new evidence does not absolutely refute the premise. Then, perhaps, she finds out that the woman she is convinced he is having an affair with has been teaching in China for the last half-year. All right, thereby ends this hypothesis. Now the wife either has to find a new mistress out there or reassess her acumen.
The above, you might say, is a private chart of reality. We also keep world-size charts. A huge geographical and/or philosophical map. The West is in decline—a large hypothesis. Depending on the character of one’s mind, one can have an immensely complicated worldview or a narrower and most restricted map, where all you can say is, “I know this region well. Let the rest remain uncharted.” Very few of us have a reasonably filled-in vision of the world. We tend to develop only those areas we are interested in.
As a perfect example, how many Americans had Afghanistan anywhere on their chart until September 11? Now we are picking up bits and tidbits about Islam. A flurry! A superficial but lively work-in-progress is proceeding.
To dignify this notion, let me propose that indeed we do try to use these charts, whether good or superficial, to serious purpose. For we are all navigating through life. That is one reason why good novels have a quality that other forms of communication do not offer. It’s very hard to think of an interesting protagonist who is not always moving between choices. And you, as the writer, have to monitor these decisions. When your characters come alive for you, which is one of the more agreeable if undeniably eerie aspects of serious novel-writing—when you find yourself having dialogues with them or at the least thinking about how they might react in certain situations that have nothing to do with your novel—then they do bear comparison to a prominent and troublesome friend.
A specific example: At one point in the middle of Harlot’s Ghost, I thought it would be interesting to send my protagonist—who was a young man in the CIA (and very much under the tutelage of a very high CIA official called Harlot)—to Israel. Why? Because Harlot is in competition with the gray eminence of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton. Harlot feels Angleton not only has too much of a hegemony in the CIA but is also on the inside track with the Mossad. So Harlot decides to send over his subaltern. Perhaps the young man will be able to submarine Angleton just a bit.
That appealed to me. And I thought: Do I dare? Then realized: Can’t be done. The research will take a year. I’ll have to go over to Israel. Never having been in Israel before, that’ll be another book, probably, and I’ll have to find out about the Mossad. My chart was no help there. All I had was a blank area that said “Truly major intelligence organization.” Learning about the Mossad would be even more difficult than picking up on the CIA. I deliberated for all of a restless week before I was ready to tell myself, “You could wreck this book by sending Harry Hubbard to Israel. At best, you’ll lose much too much time.” Instead, I had him do something less bold. But that is the way we make such novelistic decisions. Very much as we do in life.
GENDER, NARCISSISM,
MASTURBATION
If you believe in fiction, if you believe in the power of the novelist, then all subjects are possible. Of course, certain choices present more obstructions than others. It would be harder, as
an example, for a male novelist to learn about the small irritations of a woman’s day than to imagine what her sex would be like. A novelistic element in sex, after all, is the feeling of nearness to the Other. It’s one of the compelling reasons for sex precisely because such sentiments live almost entirely outside formal sacraments and private codes. It may be indeed why pious people so often feel driven to break their own deepest sexual prohibitions. It’s because the experience of meeting the Other is incomparable. Which is why I say it’s easier—if you are going to write about those of the opposite gender—to limn them sexually than attempt to get into the nitty-gritty of their daily life.
Another word on gender. Women certainly have every right to create men at war, but I think it might be recognized that it’s likely to be less comfortable for them. War, after all, is essentially a male invention. How often have women shown the same inventiveness and hellishness that men have at war? How can they approach that near-psychotic mix of proportion and disproportion which is at the heart of mortal combat? On the other hand, if we ask whether men and women can write equally well about bravery, I would say yes. How are we to define bravery, after all? Take a woman who is awfully timid—let’s say she was terrorized through her childhood. She has an all-too-acute awareness of how bad things can come upon you suddenly. When she’s an old lady and every bone in her body is aching, it may be an act of courage for her to cross a busy street all by herself. She doesn’t know if she can make it across before the lights change, yet she has to do it. For her own honor, if you will. And she does it. That may be more brave, given the relative situation, than the bold act of a soldier who’s been trained to be courageous, who is bonded to the soldiers he is with, who lives with the idea that there’s no disgrace in life worse than not being up to the military occasion. You can’t speak of true bravery in combat for such a good soldier until he has exhausted his code to that point where he feels, Yes, I may lose—I may lose my heart, my dignity, my honor. I’m scared. I’m terrified. I can’t move. If, at this point, he still proceeds to press himself forward, then his behavior is courageous.
The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing Page 14
