Yet plainly there was talent signaling its need to find a voice, and the voice was heard. An extremely gifted teacher, Hiram Haydn, was conducting a writing course at the New School for Social Research, and I enrolled. Haydn was a pedagogue in the older, nonpejorative sense of the word, which is to say a man who could establish a warm rapport with young students. He had a fine ear for language, and something about my efforts, groping and unformed as they were, caught his fancy and led him to an encouragement that both embarrassed and pleased me.
Hiram Haydn was also an editor in a book publishing house. He said that he felt my talents might be better suited to the novel and suggested that I start in right away, adding that his firm would underwrite my venture to the extent of a $100 option. While hardly a bonanza, this was not nearly as paltry as it might sound. One hundred dollars could last a frugal young bachelor quite a longtime in 1947. More importantly, it was a note of confidence that spurred my hungry ambition to gain glory and, perhaps, even a fortune. The only drawback now—and it was a considerable one—was that I had no idea as to how I would go about starting a novel, which suddenly seemed as menacing a challenge as all the ranges and peaks of the Himalayas. What, I would ask myself, pacing my damp Lexington Avenue basement, just what in God's name am I going to write about? There can be nothing quite so painful as the doubts of a young writer, exquisitely aware of the disparity between his capabilities and his ambition—aware of the ghosts of Tolstoy, Melville, Hawthorne, Joyce, Flaubert, cautionary presences crowding around his writing table.
That winter, between Christmas and New Year's Day, a monumental blizzard engulfed New York City. The greatest snowfall in sixty years. During that snowbound time two things occurred that precipitated me into actual work on my novel, as opposed to dreaming. The first of these was my receipt of a letter from my father in my hometown in Virginia (after three days the mail had begun to arrive through the drifts), telling me of the suicide of a young girl, my age, who had been the source of my earliest and most aching infatuation. Beautiful, sweet, and tortured, she had grown up in a family filled with discord and strife. I was appalled and haunted by the news of her death. I had never so much as held her hand, yet the feeling I had felt for her from a distance had from time to time verged on that lunacy which only adolescent passion can produce. The knowledge of this foreshortened life was something that burdened me painfully all through those cold post-Christmas days.
Yet I continued to read in my obsessed way, and the book which I then began—and which became the turning point in my struggle to get started—was Robert Penn Warren's All the King’s Men. I was staggered by such talent. No work since that of Faulkner had so impressed me—impressed by its sheer marvelousness of language, its vivid characters, its narrative authority, and the sense of truly felt and realized life. It was a book that thrilled me, challenged me, and filled me with hope for my own possibilities as a writer. And so it was that soon after finishing All the King’s Men, I began to see the first imperfect outline of the novel—then untitled—which would become Lie Down in Darkness. I would write about a young girl of twenty-two who committed suicide. I would begin the story as the family in Virginia assembled for the funeral, awaiting the train that returned her body from the scene of her death in New York City. The locale of the book, a small city of the Virginia Tidewater, was my own birthplace, a community so familiar to me that it was like part of my bloodstream.
And so even as the book began to take shape in my brain I became excited by the story's rich possibilities—the weather and the landscape of the Tidewater, against which the characters began to define themselves: father, mother, sister, and the girl herself, all doomed by fatal hostility and misunderstanding, all helpless victims of a domestic tragedy. In writing such a story—like Flaubert in Madame Bovary, which I passionately admired—I would also be able to anatomize bourgeois family life of the kind that I knew so well, the WASP world of the modern urban South. It was a formidable task, I knew, for a man of my age and inexperience, but I felt up to it, and I plunged in with happy abandon, modeling my first paragraphs on—what else?—the opening chapter of All the King’s Men. Any reader who wishes to compare the first long passage of Lie Down in Darkness with the rhythms and the insistent observation and the point of view of the beginning pages of Warren's book will without difficulty see the influence, which only demonstrates that it may not always be a bad thing for a young writer to emulate a master, even in an obvious way.
Lie Down in Darkness also owes an enormous debt to William Faulkner, who is of course both the god and the demon of all Southern writers who followed him. Writers as disparate as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy have expressed their despair at laboring in the shadow of such a colossus, and I felt a similar measliness. Yet, although even at the outset I doubted that I could rid myself wholly of Faulkner's influence, I knew that the book could not possibly have real merit, could not accrue unto itself the lasting power and beauty I wanted it to have, unless the voice I developed in telling this story became singular, striking, somehow uniquely my own. And so then, after I had completed the first forty pages or so (all of which I was satisfied with and which remain intact in the final version), there began a wrestling match between myself and my own demon—which is to say, that part of my literary consciousness which too often has let me be indolent and imitative, false to my true vision of reality, responsive to facile echoes rather than the inner voice.
It is difficult if not impossible for a writer in his early twenties to be entirely original, to acquire a voice that is all his own, but I was plainly wise enough to know that I had to make the attempt. It was not only Faulkner. I had to deafen myself to echoes of Scott Fitzgerald, always so easy and seductive, rid my syntax of the sonorities of Conrad and Thomas Wolfe, cut out wayward moments of Hemingway attitudinizing, above all, be myself. This of course did not mean that the sounds of other writers could not and did not occasionally intrude upon the precincts of my own style—T. S. Eliot, who was also a great influence at the time, showed definitively how the resonance of other voices could be a virtue—but it did mean, nonetheless, the beginning of a quest for freshness and originality. I found the quest incredibly difficult, so completely taxing that after those forty pages I began contemplating giving up the book. There seemed no way at all that I—a man who had not even published a short story—could reconcile all the formidably complex components of my vision, all of the elements of character and prose rhythms and dialogue and revelation of character, and out of this reconciliation produce that splendid artifact called a novel. And so, after a fine start—I quit.
I went down to Durham, North Carolina, where I had gone to college, and there took a tiny backstreet apartment, which I shared with a very neurotic cocker spaniel. Here I tried to write again. I toyed with the novel but it simply would not move or grow; the dispirited letters I wrote to Hiram Haydn must have told him that his one hundred dollars had gone down the drain. But plainly he was not to be discouraged, for after a whole year had gone by he wrote me from New York suggesting that my energies might be recharged if I once again moved north. It seemed a reasonable idea, and so in the summer of 1949, after transferring ownership of my spaniel to a professor of philosophy at Duke, I came back to the metropolis, still so impecunious that I had to take a cheap room far away from Manhattan's sweet dazzle, in the heart of Flatbush. (I stayed there only a month or so but it was an invaluable experience, demonstrating the serendipitous manner in which life often works to a writer's advantage: that month's residence provided the inspiration for a novel I wrote much later, Sophie’s Choice.) In Brooklyn, too, I was unable to write a word.
But salvation from all my dammed-up torment came soon, in the form of two loving friends I had met earlier in the city. Sigrid de Lima, a writer who had also been in Haydn's class, and her mother, Agnes, recognized my plight and invited me to live in their fine old rambling house up the Hudson in the hills behind Nyack. There, in an atmosphere of faith and affection and charit
y (a homelike ambience which I plainly needed and whose benison I have never been able to repay), I collected my wits and with a now-or-never spirit set forth to capture the beast which had so long eluded me.
And as I began to discipline and harness myself, began for the first time to examine as coldly and as clinically as I could the tough problems which before this I had refused to face, I had a fine revelation. I realized that what had been lacking in my novelist's vision was really a sense of architecture—a symmetry, perhaps unobtrusive but always there, without which a novel sprawls, becoming a self-indulged octopus. It was a matter of form, and up until now this was an issue that out of laziness or fear, perhaps both, I had tried to avoid. I did not have to construct a diagram or a “plot”—this I have never done. I merely had to keep aware, as I progressed with the narrative in flashback after flashback (using the funeral as the framework for the entire story), that my heroine, Peyton Loftis, would always be seen as if through the minds of the other characters; never once would I enter her consciousness.
Further, she would be observed at progressive stages of her life, from childhood to early adulthood, always with certain ceremonials as a backdrop—country-club dance, a Christmas dinner, a football game, a wedding—and each of these ceremonials would not only illuminate the tensions and conflicts between Peyton and her family but provide all the atmosphere I needed to make vivid and real the upper-middle-class Virginia milieu I had set out to describe. Only at the end of the book, toward which the entire story was building—in Peyton's Molly Bloom–like monologue—would I finally enter her mind, and I hoped this passage would be all the more powerful because it was suddenly and intensely “interior,” and personal. This, at any rate, was the scheme which I evolved, and from then on the writing of the book, while never easy (what writing is?), took on a brisk, self-generating quality in which I was able to command all other aspects of the story—dialogue, description, wordplay—to my own satisfaction, at least.
—
I completed Lie Down in Darkness on a spring evening in 1951 in a room on West Eighty-eighth Street in Manhattan, where I had moved after my liberating year in Rockland County. I finished Peyton's monologue last (having already written the ultimate scenes), and if to the present-day reader the passage has an added sense of doom and desperation, this may be because, a few months before, I had been called back by the Marine Corps to serve in the Korean War. Thus I think I had, like Peyton, only meager hopes for survival. I was twenty-five years old and—like Peyton—was much too young to die. But I survived, happy beyond my craziest dreams at the generally good reviews and at the fact that Lie Down in Darkness even reached the best-seller list. This was on the same list as two other first novels which, said Time magazine later on that year, expressed like mine a depressing and negative trend in American letters: From Here to Eternity and The Catcher in the Rye.
[Hartford Courant Magazine, January 3, 1982.]
“I’ll Have to Ask Indianapolis—”
There was a time in my life when Indianapolis figured very large as an influence on me. About two hundred years ago—it was 1951, to be exact—I finished my first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. In those post–World War II years there was a reverent, I should say almost worshipful, aura that surrounded the writing and publishing of novels. This is not to say that even today the novel as a literary form has lost cachet or distinction (though there are critics who would argue that position), but in those days to be a young novelist was a little like being a rock star in our time. The grand figures of the previous generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell—were still very much alive, and we young hopefuls were determined to emulate these heroes and stake our claim to literary glory. The first among the newcomers to make his mark was Truman Capote, whose brilliant tales and lovely novel Other Voices, Other Rooms filled me, his exact contemporary, with inordinate envy. Soon after this came The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, a writer of such obvious and prodigious gifts that it took the breath away. Following on Mailer's triumph was James Jones's monumental From Here to Eternity, which was quickly succeeded by that classic which forever crystallized the soul of the American adolescent, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I don't think it was vainglory on my part, as I was writing my own novel and was watching these fine books appear one after another, to consider myself an authentic member of the same generation and to want to make Lie Down in Darkness a worthy companion to those works.
I wrote the first pages of Lie Down in Darkness while I was living in New York City in the basement of a brownstone on upper Lexington Avenue. It was the winter of 1947. I was twenty-three years old and had just been fired from my job as junior editor with the McGraw-Hill Book Company—a fiasco I described much later in another book of mine, Sophie’s Choice. There was a blizzard raging outside—it's still memorialized in weather annals as the greatest New York blizzard of the century—and those opening pages were written in passion and in the incomparable assurance of youth, and were never later touched or revised.
After the blizzard subsided I had a stack of manuscript pages and a burning desire to see them amplified with a full-fledged novel. But I sensed that I needed guidance and, even more than guidance, encouragement. I had heard of a lively and interesting class in fiction writing at the New School for Social Research, and I enrolled in this class, conducted by an engaging, scholarly teacher named Hiram Haydn. He was the ideal preceptor for a writing course, strict and no-nonsense regarding the substance of one's text, quick to detect softness or sloppiness or sentimentality, yet eager to find and nurture those radiant beams of true talent that occasionally appear in such a class. I was enormously pleased when I realized that he liked my work and, beyond that, thrilled that through him I was able to establish a publishing connection. For, as it turned out, Haydn had just been hired as New York editor of the Indianapolis-based house of Bobbs-Merrill. It also turned out that he had been given the authority to sign up for book contracts those among his students who he felt had literary promise. I sensed in Hiram an enormous zeal and idealism, a man determined to transform Bobbs-Merrill from a rather commercial enterprise, one whose chief previous glory had been the perennially huge best-seller The Joy of Cooking, into a publishing house that would honor and nurture good writing. And so I was flabbergasted and filled with joy when he offered me an option on my first novel and a check for an amount that was somewhat modest in those days, even by Indiana standards—one hundred dollars.
For the next three years I struggled to complete the book, moving all over the map, to North Carolina, to Brooklyn, to a small town up the Hudson River, to a cramped apartment that I shared with a young sculptor who was as poor as I was, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Money was a major problem for me—I had next to none except for a tiny stipend from my generous father—and the income I could expect derived entirely from what Hiram could shake from the coffers of Bobbs-Merrill. This is where the word Indianapolis began to loom large in my destiny. Whenever, literally down to my last single dollar, resorting to pawning the Elgin wristwatch I had received on my fifteenth birthday, or going to a grocery store and trying to redeem, for a box of frozen Birds Eye peas, the coupon my sculptor friend had received upon complaining about a worm he had found in another box of peas—when, in these straits, I approached Haydn for an advance on my royalties, the reply would come, “I'll have to ask Indianapolis.” Mercifully, the response from this city was almost always favorable, ensuring my humble survival, but in any case the name Indianapolis acquired the quality of an incantation, rather portentous and ominous at the same time, like Hanoi during the time of Vietnam or Moscow throughout the Cold War.
The talismanic nature of Indianapolis became even more apparent somewhat later when, exhaustedly, I finished the last chapter of the book and went off as a Marine lieutenant to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where I began training for combat in the Korean War. This was a dark time indeed. Firmly believing that in September, when the book
was scheduled to be published, I would be fighting the Chinese in Korea, I spent the spring and summer despairingly in the Carolina swamps, at least part of the time correcting the galleys of Lie Down in Darkness. Where Indianapolis came in once again was through the views of Bobbs-Merrill's management over matters of literary taste and propriety.
That time—the late 1940s and early ’50s—was a watershed period in our literature. Although some years earlier Ulysses had been approved by the federal courts for adult consumption, Joyce's masterpiece was virtually unique in being exempt from the scrutiny of the censors and the puritans. But in the years following World War II there began a profound if gradual change toward permitting writers to express themselves more freely, particularly in the use of the vulgar vernacular and in matters of sex. I emphasize the gradualness of the transition. For example, in The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, Norman Mailer was forced to use, for the common vulgarism describing sexual intercourse, not the four-letter word but a foreshortened three-letter epithet, fug. Among other results, this prompted the raunchy old actress Tallulah Bankhead, upon meeting young Mailer for the first time, to say, “Oh, you're the writer who doesn't know how to spell fuck.” But the times were changing. The first book in American literature to employ this and other Anglo-Saxon expletives with absolute freedom was James Jones's From Here to Eternity; and even The Catcher in the Rye, published in that same year, 1951, used the word, although in a way that was intended to demonstrate its offensiveness. It's interesting, by the way, that even today The Catcher in the Rye is among the books most frequently yanked off the library shelves of public schools, usually at the behest of angry parents who, ironically and certainly stupidly, seem to be unaware that in this one case the word is seen by the young hero, Holden Caulfield, as objectionable.
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 41
