No matter. With talent as large as this, one could forgive the obvious eye for success. Many a large talent has to go through large borrowings in order to find his own style, and a lust for popular success while dangerous to serious writing is not necessarily fatal. Yes, one could accept the pilferings from other writers, given the scope of this work, the brilliance of the concept—to catch rural America by a trip on a raft down a great river! One could even marvel uneasily at the depth of the instinct for fiction in the author. With the boy Huckleberry Finn, this new novelist had managed to give us a character of no comfortable, measurable dimension. It is easy for characters in modern novels to seem more vivid than figures in the classics but, even so, Huckleberry Finn appeared to be more alive than Don Quixote and Julien Sorel, as naturally near to his own mind as we are to ours. But how often does a hero who is so absolutely natural on the page also succeed in acquiring convincing moral stature as his adventures develop?
It is to be repeated. In the attractive grip of this talent, one is ready to forgive the author of Huckleberry Finn for every influence he has so promiscuously absorbed. He has made such fertile use of his borrowings. One could even cheer his appearance on our jaded literary scene if not for the single transgression that goes too far. These are passages that do more than borrow an author’s style—they copy it! Influence is mental, but theft is physical. Who can declare to a certainty that a large part of the prose in Huckleberry Finn is not lifted directly from Hemingway? We know that we are not reading Ernest only because the author, obviously fearful that his tone is getting too near, is careful to sprinkle his text with “a-clutterings” and “warn’ts” and “anywheres” and “t’others.” But we have read Hemingway—and so we see through it—we know we are reading pure Hemingway disguised:
We cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim … then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres … the first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black anymore … by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water and the east reddens up and the river.
Up to now I have conveyed, I expect, the pleasure of reading this book today. It is the finest compliment I can offer. We use an unspoken standard of relative judgment on picking up a classic. Secretly, we expect less reward from it than from a good contemporary novel. The average intelligent modern reader would probably, under torture, admit that Heartburn was more fun to read, minute for minute, than Madame Bovary, and maybe one even learned more. That is not to say that the first will be superior to the second a hundred years from now but that a classic novel is like a fine horse carrying an exorbitant impost. Classics suffer by their distance from our day-to-day gossip. The mark of how good Huckleberry Finn has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page, awkward here, sensational there—absolutely the equal of one of those rare incredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade. So I have spoken of it as kin to a first novel because it is so young and so fresh and so all-out silly in some of the chances it takes and even wins. A wiser older novelist would never play that far out when the work was already well along and so neatly in hand. But Twain does.
For the sake of literary propriety, let me not, however, lose sight of the actual context. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel of the nineteenth century and its grand claims to literary magnitude are also to be remarked upon. So I will say that the first measure of a great novel may be that it presents—like a human of palpable charisma—an all-but-visible aura. Few works of literature can be so luminous without the presence of some majestic symbol. In Huckleberry Finn we are presented (given the possible exception of Anna Livia Plurabelle) with the best river ever to flow through a novel, our own Mississippi, and in the voyage down those waters of Huck Finn and a runaway slave on their raft, we are held in the thrall of the river. Larger than a character, the river is a manifest presence, a demiurge to support the man and the boy, a deity to betray them, feed them, all but drown them, fling them apart, float them back together. The river winds like a fugue through the marrow of the true narrative which is nothing less than the ongoing relation between Huck and the runaway slave, this Nigger Jim whose name embodies the very stuff of the slave system itself—his name is not Jim but Nigger Jim. The growth of love and knowledge between the runaway white and the runaway black is a relation equal to the relation of the men to the river for it is also full of betrayal and nourishment, separation and return. So it manages to touch that last fine nerve of the heart where compassion and irony speak to one another and thereby give a good turn to our most protected emotions.
Reading Huckleberry Finn one comes to realize all over again that the near-burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair, and woe to us if it ends in detestation and mutual misery. Riding the current of this novel, we are back in that happy time when the love affair was new and all seemed possible. How rich is the recollection of that emotion! What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind’s recollection after hope has soured and passions are spent? It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of Huckleberry Finn is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea.
The Hazards and Sources of Writing
(1985)
KURT VONNEGUT AND I are friendly with one another, but wary. There was a period in our lives when we used to go out together a great deal because our wives like each other. Kurt and I would sit there like bookends. We’d be terribly careful with one another; we both knew the huge cost of a literary feud, so we certainly didn’t want to argue. On the other hand, neither of us would be caught dead saying to the other, “Gee, I liked your last book,” and then be met with a silence because the party of the second part could not reciprocate. So we would talk about anything else—Las Vegas or the islands of the Hebrides. We only had one literary conversation during such evenings in New York. Kurt looked up and sighed. “Well, I finished my novel today,” he said, “and it like to killed me.” When Kurt is feeling heartfelt he speaks in an old Indiana accent I can hardly reproduce. His wife murmured, “Oh, Kurt, you always say that when you finish a book,” and he replied, “Well, I do, and it is always true, and it gets more true, and this last one like to killed me more than any.”
Whatever could he have meant? I happen to know. It is the bond Kurt and I can count on. We understand each other in that fashion, which certainly provides a theme for the evening: “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.”
When we contemplate the extraordinary terrain one must traverse to put a novel together, it may help to divide this region of endeavor into three self-contained lands: the techniques, the hazards, and the sources. We could speak of all the techniques, comprised of plot, of point of view and pace and novelistic strategies—but like an old mechanic, I have a tendency to mumble over such technical matters. “Put the thingamajig before the whoosits,” is how I would probably state a practical literary problem to m
yself. Therefore, I am going to move over to the second and third parts of this most arbitrary division of the subject, and speak of the psychology—or, it may be closer to say, the existential state—of the novel writer, once having passed his or her apprenticeship. The years given over to becoming an established writer are subject to all the hazards of the profession—those perils of writer’s block and failing energy, alcoholism, drugs, and desertion. For many a writer deserts his or her writing to go into a collateral profession in advertising or academia, trade journals, publishing … the list is long. What is not routine is to become a young writer with a firmly established name. Luck as well as talent can take one across that first border. Some do surpass the trials of acquiring technique and actually making a living at this bizarre profession. It is then, however, that less-charted perils begin.
I would like to speak at length of the hazards of writing, the cruelties it extorts out of mind and flesh, and then, if we are not too depressed by all these bleak prospects revealed, we can slip over to the last of the three lands, which is comparable to a kingdom beneath the sea, for it resides in no less a place than the mysterious dimension of our unconscious, the source of our aesthetic flights—and no human, no matter how professional, can speak with authority of what goes on there. We will be able only to wander at the edges of such a magnificent region and will have to be satisfied with the quickest glimpses of its wonders. No one can explore the mysteries of novel writing to their deepest source.
Let me commence with the hazards. I know something of them, and I ought to. My first published story came out forty-seven years ago, and the first novel I wrote that saw print is going to be forty-two this spring. Obviously, I have been accustomed to thinking of myself as a writer for so long that others even see me that way. I consequently hear one lament, over and over, from strangers: “Oh, I too would have liked to be an author.” One can almost hear them musing aloud about the freedom of the life. How felicitous to have no boss and face no morning rush to work, how exciting to know the intoxications of celebrity. If those are superficial motives, people also long to satisfy the voice within which keeps repeating: “What a pity that no one will know how unusual my life has been! There are all those secrets I cannot tell!” Years ago I wrote, “Experience, when it cannot be communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.” I often ponder the remark.
Once in a while your hand will write out a sentence that seems true, and yet you do not know where it came from. Ten or twenty words seem able to live in balance with your experience. It may be one’s nicest reward as a writer. You feel you’ve come near the truth. When that happens you can look at the page years later and meditate again on the meaning. So I think I understand why people want to write. All the same, I am also a professional, and there is another part of me, I confess, that is less charitable when strangers voice literary aspirations to me. I say to myself, “They can write an interesting letter, so they assume they are ready to tell the stories of their lives. They do not understand how much work it will take to pick up even the rudiments of narrative.” If the person who has spoken to me in this fashion is serious, however, I warn them gently. “Well,” I say, “it probably takes as long to learn to write as to play the piano.” One shouldn’t encourage people to write for too little. It’s a splendid life when you think of its emoluments, but it is death to the soul if you are not good at it.
Let me keep my promise, then, and explore a little into the gloomier regions of my vocation. To skip at one bound over all those fascinating years when one is an apprentice writer and learning every day (at least on good days), there is in contrast an abominable pressure on the life of a mature novelist. For as soon as you finish each hard-earned book, the reviews come in—and the reviews can be murderous. Contrast an author’s reception to an actor’s. With the notable exception of John Simon, theater critics do not often try to kill performers. I believe there is an unspoken agreement that thespians deserve to be protected against the perils of first nights. After all, the actor is daring a rejection that can prove as fearful as a major wound. For human beings so sensitive as actors, a hole in the ego can be worse than a hole in the heart. Such moderation does not carry over, however, into literary criticism. Meretricious, dishonest, labored, loathsome, pedestrian, hopeless, disgusting, disappointing, raunchy, ill-wrought, boring—these are not uncommon words for a typical bad review. I remember, and it is thirty-eight years ago, that my second novel, Barbary Shore, was characterized by the massive authority of the reviewer at Time magazine as “paceless, tasteless, graceless.” I am still looking forward to the day when I meet him. You would be hard-put to find another professional field where criticism is equally savage. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers, perhaps even physicists, do not often speak publicly of one another in this manner.
Yet the unhappiest thing to say is that our critical practice may even be fair—harsh, but fair. After all, one prepares a book in the safety of the study. Nothing short of your self-esteem, your bills, your editor, or your ego is forcing you to show the stuff. You put your book out, if you can afford to take the time, only when it is ready. If economic necessity forces you to write somewhat faster than is good for you, well, everyone has their sad story. As a practical matter, not that much has to be written into the teeth of a gale, and few notes need be taken on the side of a cliff. An author usually does the stint at his desk, feeling not too hungry and suffering no pains greater than the view of the empty pad of paper. Of course, that white sheet can look as blank as a television screen when the station is off the air, but that is not a danger, merely an empty presence. The writer, unlike more active creative artists, labors in no immediate peril. Why, then, should open season not begin so soon as the work comes out? If talented authors were to have it better than other professionals and artists in all ways, there would be a tendency for talented authors to multiply, so the critics keep our numbers down.
In fact, not too many good writers do remain productive through the decades. There are too many other hazards as well. We are poked and jerked by the media to come in and out of fashion; each drop from popularity can feel like a termination to one’s career. Such insecurity is no help to morale, since even in their best periods, all writers know one recurring terror. Does it stop tomorrow? Does it all stop tomorrow? Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the white page each morning, and you do not know where your words are coming from, those divine words. So your professionalism at best is fragile. You cannot always tell yourself that fashions pass and history will smile at you again. In the literary world it is not easy to acquire the stoicism to endure, especially if you have begun as an oversensitive adolescent. It is not even automatic to pray for luck if it has been pessimism itself which gave force to your early themes. Maybe it is no more than blind will, but some authors stay at it. Over and over they keep writing a new book and do it in the knowledge that upon publication they will probably be savaged and unable to fight back. An occasional critic can be singled out for counterattack, or one can always write a letter to the editor of the book section, but such efforts at self-defense are like rifle fire against fighter planes. All-powerful is the writer when he sits at his desk, but on the public stage he may feel as if his rights are puny. His courage, if he has any, must learn to live with comments on his work. The spiritual skin may go slack or harden to leather, but the effort to live down bad reviews and write again has to be analogous to the unspoken, unremarked courage of people who dwell beneath the iron hand of a long illness and somehow resolve enough of their inmost contradictions to be able to get better. I suppose this is equal to saying you cannot become a professional writer and keep active for three or four decades unless you learn to live with the most immediate professional condition of your existence, which is that superficial book reviewing is irresponsible, and serious literary criticism can be close to merciless. The conviction that this condition is, on balance, fair has to grow roots deep enough
to bear comparison to the life-view of a peasant who farms a mountain slope and takes it for granted that he was meant to toil through the years with one foot standing higher than the other.
Every good author who has managed to forge a long career must be able, therefore, to build a character that will not be unhinged by a bad reception. That takes a rugged disposition. Few writers are rugged when young. In general, the girls seldom look like potential beauty contest winners, and the boys show small promise of becoming future All-Americans. They are most likely to be found on the sidelines, commencing to cook up that warped, passionate, sardonic view of life which will bring them later to the attention of the American public. But only later. Young writers usually start as loners. They are obliged to live with the recognition that the world had better be wrong or they are wrong. On no less depends one’s evaluation of one’s right to survive. Thanks to greed, plastics, mass media, and various abominations of technology—lo, the paranoid aim of a cockeyed young writer has as much opportunity to center on the ultimate target as the beauty queen’s wide-eyed lack of paranoia. So occasionally young writers end up winning a place for a little while. Their vision has projected them forward—but rarely for long. Sooner or later, the wretched, lonely act of writing will force them back. Composition arouses too much commotion in the psyche to allow any writer to rest happily.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 44
