The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

by Norman Mailer

  I’ve found that I can’t do serious writing without getting into a mild depression. (Note! I am not speaking of a clinical depression.) An ongoing bad mood can be, however, a vital part of the process, because to begin with, it’s perilous to fall in love with what you’re doing. You lose your judgment. And for the simplest reason—the words, as you are writing them, stir up your feelings too much. Odds are, if they excite you disproportionately, they may do much less to others. (This accounts for the bewilderment of novice writers when a story they have written that charged them up to the heights appears to have little impact on others.)

  With veteran writers, a mild working depression is not always simple to explain. The deeper your theme and the more material you are bringing up from your unconscious to support it, the more you may be exhausting the possibilities of other themes-in-waiting. So gloom can descend. Certain large possibilities won’t get written about after all. No book I wrote kept me in a more sustained bad mood (while doing it) than The Armies of the Night. I was putting so much in, and at so fast a rate—the first three-quarters of the book was written for Harper’s magazine over a stretch of eight weeks—that I was probably uprooting all sorts of possibilities for future projects. Gloom descends when you have wounded too many psychic tissues in your determination to achieve one urgent goal.

  Sometimes, the only way you can be certain you are attracted to a new subject is that you know so little about it and yet are drawn toward it. Perhaps you possess one deep insight into the subject—a special kind of purchase that will accelerate your comprehension as you proceed. It’s more amusing, for instance, to read a mystery novel if early on you have an idea who did it, a feeling that you and the author share something. In such happy condition, you are going, right or wrong, to get more out of the book than others. I think something of the sort can also occur in historical research. Reading about ancient Egypt, I felt I knew something about burial customs that the average Egyptologist didn’t—not more about the details, which I hadn’t learned as yet, but more about the underlying reason for some of the practices. That was enough to fire up the wish to pursue it a long way further.

  I’ve always had the feeling that it doesn’t make much sense to take on a subject if others can do it as well. As an instance, I never felt my childhood was so unique to me that it was worth recording. On the other hand, I conceal, sometimes from myself, what there is to write about those years. It can be wasteful to plunge into what you have to say on a subject before you’re ready to give your full commitment.

  This may sound odd to people who do not write. They usually have not come in contact with the authority of the unconscious to resist one’s conscious will. Over and over again, I discover that my unconscious is going to disclose to me what it chooses, when it chooses. You can, to a limited degree, force it to respond, but that rarely occasions much happiness on either side. Sometimes I think you have to groom the unconscious after you’ve used it, swab it down, treat it like a prize horse who’s a finer animal than you.

  Practically, how do you go about this? How do you groom the unconscious? I don’t have a conscious clue. The trouble with relying on metaphors is that they too can desert you just as quickly as anyone or anything else.

  Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. It’s a simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write. The point is that you have to maintain trustworthy relations. If you wake up in the morning with a hangover and cannot get to literary work, your unconscious, after a few such failures to appear, will withdraw.

  It is likely that your unconscious is never all that much in love with you. The battle between the ego and the unconscious is, I think, a war of some dimension. In many people it’s equal to an unhappy marriage, and marriages depend, after all, upon trust. Unhappy marriages depend immensely on what little mutual trust there is. So, you have to establish decent relations with your working depths, and you might as well recognize that this procedure is possibly as difficult to achieve as any far-reaching union with someone outside your skin.

  The unconscious presence within may have as many interests, aspects, principalities, chasms, terrors, underworlds, other-worlds, and ambitions as yourself. Your unconscious may even have ambitions that are not your own. For practical purposes, it may be worth thinking of it as a separate creature. If you are ready to look upon your unconscious as a curious and semi-alienated presence in yourself with whom you have to maintain decent relations—if you are able to see yourself as some sort of careless general (of the old aristocratic school) and picture the unconscious as your often unruly cohort of troops—then, obviously, you wouldn’t dare to keep those troops out in the rain too long; certainly not at the commencement of any serious campaign. On the contrary, you make a pact: “Work for me, fight for me, and I will honor and respect you.”

  To repeat: The rule is that if you say to yourself you are going to write tomorrow, then it doesn’t matter how badly you’re hungover or how promising is a sudden invitation in the morning to do something more enjoyable. No, you go in dutifully, slavishly, and you work. This injunction is wholly anti-romantic in spirit. But if you subject yourself to this impost upon yourself, this diktat to be dependable, then after a period of time—it can take weeks, or more—the unconscious, nursing its disappointments, may begin to trust you again.

  This is a burden on young writers who are not only ambitious but wild enough to feel that their wildness is part of their talent. They hate to submit to the heavy hand (that awful, severe, unbending demand for moderation) and obey the rule that you have to show up.

  On the other hand, you can sometimes say to yourself, “I’m not going to work tomorrow,” and the unconscious may even by now be close enough in accord not to flood your mind with brilliant and all-too-perishable material. That is also important. Because in the course of going out and having the lively day and night you’re entitled to, you don’t want to keep having ideas about the book you’re on. Indeed, if you are able on your day off to avoid the unpleasant condition of being swarmed with thoughts about a work-in-progress when there is no pen in your hand, then you’ve arrived at one of the disciplines of a real writer.

  The rule in capsule: If you fail to show up in the morning after you vowed that you would be at your desk as you went to sleep last night, then you will walk around with ants in your brain. Rule of thumb: Restlessness of mind can be measured by the number of promises that remain unkept.

  PHILOSOPHY

  PRIMITIVE MAN,

  ART AND SCIENCE,

  EVIL AND JUDGMENT

  Since the primitive had senses that were closer to the animal, he also had fears not unlike the animal. Those fears, obviously, were intense. Anyone who has ever felt dread in any real way knows it’s a near to unendurable experience; one will do almost anything to avoid it. One is tempted to advance the notion that civilization came out of human terror at having to face dread as a daily condition. So we worked to elaborate a civilization that would insulate us from the exorbitant demands of existence. I’m not speaking now of those early and unbelievably pressing concerns of growing crops or killing enough game to be able to live. I’m conceiving of a greater terror, where the trees virtually spoke to one and the message one took in from the rustling of the leaves and the swaying of the branches was accurate: the storm they were ready to tell you about—the terrible storm that was coming in a few weeks—would wash the river over its banks and flood your settlement. That warning proved to be prophetic. Small wonder if man did everything he could to remove himself from such intimacy with nature. He even escalated the costs of tribal war in order to found large nations—anything to avoid a daily existence filled with dread. Carnage ensued and philosophy developed. I
s it possible that at the heart of Divinity, Irony is well installed? Carnage walks the aisles of history hand in hand with philosophy. If there is no afterworld where the contest continues, then existence is indeed absurd.

  Primitive man had to see himself surrounded by a circle of forces—demons, gods, friendly forces, impersonal forces. If I think of a primitive walking through a forest, I expect his movement to be different from ours. If we pass through the woods on an easy trail, we walk; if it’s not open, we bushwhack. But the primitive may have stopped before a certain tree and bowed. Before another, he may have lain prostrate, even abject, on the ground; where there was familiarity with a relatively modest divine force, just a nod of the head as he passed by. That was no more than was required unless the tree gave an indication that it was annoyed. How did it speak? By many shades of distinction in the rustling of its leaves.

  If we accept these suppositions, then consciousness had to be more intense for the primitive. He was always a protagonist. His day was heroic or ghastly. For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself. Terrified and heroic, it is no wonder that the life span of primitive man was shorter than ours.

  By pagan times, of course, societies as developed as the Romans’ were ready to rely on rituals and special relation to their gods. Earlier, among the Egyptians, amulets could even be the equal in value of estate holdings. If you are trying to form and maintain a society, you can’t have people going off every moment to propitiate forces on their own. You do well to get them believing there is a central force, society itself, which offers the best approach to propitiation of the gods. Can one go so far as to suggest that there is a buried element in many talented writers that unconsciously expects their work to serve not only literature but as acts of conjuration or propitiation? What, when you get down to it, was Joyce, as one mighty example, trying to show us in Finnegans Wake?

  The artist seeks to create a spell. Today, of course, the artist is no primitive man; he is all but completely insulated from the senses primitive man once had. By now, the artist usually acts as a mediator between magic and technology. But no matter how technologized he becomes, his central impulse is to create a spell equivalent to the spell a primitive felt when he passed a great oak and knew something deeper than his normal comprehension was reaching him. Perhaps the primitive felt close to what we feel when we see a great painting on a museum wall. We are near then to something we can’t even call knowledge. It’s larger, less definable, and certainly more resonant.

  While the physicist is stirred, if uncomfortably, by feeling the presence of magic in his experiment and the artist is often drenched in statistical detail (since he has to deal with a world that grows more and more technical and difficult to comprehend), at bottom their interests are opposed. Finally, the physicist is trying to destroy the fundament of magic, and the artist is trying to undermine the base of technology. The artist believes (and this is the greatest generalization I can make) that all cosmic achievement is attainable within the human frame—that is, if we lead lives witty enough and skillful enough, bold enough and, finally, illumined enough, we can accomplish every communication and reach every vault within the cosmos that technology would attempt to take by force: telepathy rather than telephony.

  An equation sign can also be seen as a statement of metaphor. When you say: “y equals x to the 2nd power,” you are in effect establishing a metaphor. Or, the obverse: An artist in a gallery, looking at a painting, says, “I see God in the yellow.” All right, that can be stated mathematically. The yellow of this painting is a function of God. Either way, artist or physicist is trying to penetrate into the substance of things. In that sense, the physicist and the artist are closer to one another than the artist and the gallery owner, or the physicist and the engineer.

  I’ve long had the notion that when highly charged people have a confrontation—Shakespearean characters, for example—coincidences will occur. Indeed, if there is any order in the cosmos, it should not be so exceptional that this is so. If a general, let us say, is getting ready for battle and there are gods and devils surrounding him, they are certainly involved in the outcome. Whether the general wins or loses the contest on that day will have an effect on the fortunes of these gods. So they’re going to be paying attention, are they not? In turn, the general is going to be aware of them—at least insofar as he has sensitivity to their presence. Such a man is not necessarily foolish or psychotic if he spends his last ten minutes in bed debating whether he should first put his left foot down on the floor or choose the right. Perhaps he is calling on the left or right echelon of his gods. We can also assume that these gods will be doing their best to create startling coincidences. A coincidence, after all, excites us with the livid sense that there’s a superstructure about us, and in this superstructure are the agents of a presence (or a spiritual machine) larger than our imagination. When a warlike general bends his knee in prayer, it is as likely that he is calling upon a demon as invoking Jesus Christ. Of course, he may be thinking that he calls on the Lord. Doubtless he has never encountered Kierkegaard’s dictum that when we feel most saintly, we could be working for the devil.

  J. MICHAEL LENNON: Many of your characters over the years have carried on negotiations with evil—Marion Faye, D.J., Rojack—I take it that you would not agree with Hannah Arendt on the essential banality of evil?

  NORMAN MAILER: I wouldn’t agree with Hannah Arendt at all, not at all. Of course, she can make a case. There are any number of prodigiously evil people who have, from the writer’s point of view, disappointing exteriors. Eichmann, superficially speaking, was a little man, an ordinary man in appearance, and vulgar and dull, but to assume therefore that evil itself is banal strikes me as exhibiting a prodigious poverty of imagination. You know, one of the paradoxes I always found in the liberal temperament is that they are immensely worshipful of Freud—even though most of his ideas are antipathetic to the notion of liberalism itself. But liberals do go to Freud as if he is their umbilical cord for cerebral nourishment. The reason is simple: Freud’s stance is reductive, and liberals don’t like to believe in the vast power of the unconscious or the evil of true murderousness residing in the most ordinary people. To accept the surface for the reality is to perform the fundamental liberal reflex. In effect, liberals are near to saying, “I don’t see God, so why do you assume God exists?” Talk of the devil is off the charts. Out of that has come, I think, their present bankruptcy. Liberalism has no exciting ideas to offer anymore. I think this enervation comes because it has not been able to deal with the most haunting question of the twentieth century, which is not Communism but Nazism. Liberalism can’t come near to understanding this incredible phenomenon that took over a country of the most decent, hardworking, and clean people in the world, this incredible phenomenon of a fascism that went far beyond the bounds of totalitarianism into the most despicable and extraordinary extermination of vast numbers of people. And this, coming out of a nation that had always been exceptionally—even comically—law-abiding, suggested that the unconscious was truly a place of hideous ambushes and horrors. Liberals, unable to weave that thought into their philosophy, were happy to welcome Hannah Arendt’s phrase. But I think to speak of the banality of evil is precisely to point us further in the wrong direction. Evil has dimensions. Evil is mysterious. It can be palpable or invisible. It can appear to be banal or, equally, can show itself as intensely dramatic. September 11 does come to mind.

  Back to Kierkegaard. He was ready to suggest that at the moment we’re feeling most saintly, we may in fact be evil. And that moment when we think we’re most evil and finally corrupt, we might, by the startling judgments of God, be considered saintly. The value of this notion is that it strips us of the fundamental arrogance of assuming that at any given moment any of us has enough centrality—that is, possesses a seat from which we can expound our dogma or determine our own moral value. I may have a fairly well formed cloud of intuitions ab
out the nature of the good, and, like a cloud, it has, to a certain degree, its structure; yet the form is capable of altering quickly. A cloud changes shape over a few moments, but it remains a cloud. It’s not just simply an unformed chaos. That, I would propose, is as close as we get to any moral truth. This is why I love the novel. It is, I would repeat, the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity—which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment. Given the complexity of the last century and the surrealistic knockdowns of the first two years of this century, quick judgment has become a need analogous to the kind of all-consuming hunger that is ready to eat grass and dirt to fill the void. Or, go to McDonald’s.

  The moment you moralize in your novel, your book is no longer moral. It has become pious. Piety not only corrodes morality but consorts with corruption. Piety and corruption go together like hot dogs and mustard. They have to. No one can fulfill the demands of piety; as a daily demand, it is inhuman. So it inspires its opposite—just for the sheer health of the body, if not the soul. Whereas morality, when subtle, brings proportion to human affairs. Tolstoy is a great writer—maybe he is our greatest novelist—because no other can match his sense of human proportion. We feel awe supported by compassion when we read Tolstoy. A remarkable achievement. We are in the rare presence of moral evaluations that are severe yet ultimately tender.

  I’ve used this example before, but it bears repeating: Anyone who worries about whether he is going to hurt somebody’s feelings by his work is no more a writer than a surgeon who says to himself, “In making this incision, I am going to give this young woman a scar on her belly that could injure her love life for the next thirty years.” The surgeon just makes the cut. He may be right or wrong in the need for the operation, but he keeps a necessary insensitivity to the rest of the context. Writers also have their own kind of restricted vision. They cannot afford to say to themselves, “This portrait is going to scar my good friend.” Or my father. Or my sister. If they feel such sentiments, they can’t write. Indeed, a great many young writers think of all the people they’re going to hurt or, worse, those they’re going to make enemies of, and, full of funk, begin to brood on the retribution that will ensue. So there has to be something a bit maniacal about a young man or woman who would be an exciting writer. He or she has to be willing to get that book out no matter how many psychic casualties are left in its passage. On the other hand, a good young writer does well not to take an immediate advantage over people he dislikes by dumping on them in his pages. It’s a bad habit to cash such easy checks. Ergo, the moral vision of the young writer is on a tightrope.