The Spooky Art (19 page)

I’ve always been fascinated with spies and their spiritual associates—actors. The latter can, of course, not be wholly equated to spies, but they do have the experience of embodying a false life for the duration of a given role, and that characterization can become more real than their own identity. The few times I’ve acted, I’ve been struck by how alive you can feel during the impersonation, sometimes more real than in your own life. When a spy feels friendship for someone he is going to betray, the friendship is still real. The average journalist is, in that sense, a spy.

S
ince good novelists have to be brave on the one hand but prudent on the other, we make up a delicate species. More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take critical abuse. A good writer, therefore, does well to see himself as a strong, weak person, full of brave timidity, sensitive and insensitive. In effect, we have to learn how to live in the world with its bumps and falls and occasionally startling rewards while protecting the core of what once seemed a frightfully perishable sensitivity.

If you start a novel before you’re ready, it’s exactly as if you are a young athlete out in a contest with professionals who are far beyond you. Not ready, you get clobbered. You receive a painful lesson in identity. One does well to build up a little literary experience before trying a long piece of work. On the other hand, if you can accept in advance the likelihood of ending in failure, a young writer can learn a good deal by daring to embark on the long voyage that is a novel.

I’ve virtually said as much before, but it is so worth repeating. I tend to look at my contemporaries in the way an athlete looks at
rival athletes. You try to have a state of mind where you see everything they do that’s better than what you can bring off, yet you certainly look to remain aware of those of your skills that are superior to theirs. Good athletes look at their peers in that manner. After all, they have to face each other.

Of course, this is not often true for authors. But we act as if it is. That’s because if we are good enough, our games can have their conclusions a hundred years after we are gone.

The energy I put into my public, performing self probably helped my mind and hurt my work. I believe it gave me an understanding of the complexity of the world that I would not have had if I’d stayed at home. I would have tended then to have a much more paranoid vision of how sinister things are. They can be, but not in the way I used to think. That is one of the better tests of the acumen of the writer. How subtle, how full of nuance, how original, is his or her sense of the sinister?

City life produces caustic wit. In New York and Chicago, it serves as a tonic. It even functions as a bridge to others, one of the essences of a city. But if you live in the country, such readiness for confrontation can get you hurt. People who live in the country have one similarity to convicts. All too often they have nothing to think about but the occasional insult they have received. That is one good reason city and country people do tend to make each other nervous.

In the world, you have to learn how to live with deceit. Trotsky once made the incisive remark that the only way you can tell the truth is by a comparison of the lies. While you may never be able to find out who is lying more, you can come close to the relations between two liars. Especially if they are married. We may even be able to say with some certainty, “They hate each other,” or, “Isn’t it extraordinary how they love each other despite all?”

You also have to learn to live with the possibility of violence. The few times in my life I’ve been associated with real danger stay with me and remain a
source
for writing. I have a theory concerning crucial experiences that I’ve expressed from time to time but it might be worth stating again. Certain events, if they are dramatic or fundamental to us, remain afterward like crystals in our psyche. Those experiences should be preserved
rather than written down. They are too special, too intense, too concentrated to be used head-on. Whereas if you project your imagination through the crystal, you can end up with an imaginative extrapolation of the original events. Later, coming from another angle, you may obtain another scenario equally good and altogether different from the same crystal. It is there to serve as a continuing source so long as you don’t use it up by a direct account of what you felt.

Actors, in their way, may use the same primal experiences to fuel many an emotional aspect of many a role. Sometimes, in the long run of a play, they can use up such a source and have to find another.

I think Hemingway got into trouble because he had to feel equal to his heroes. It became an enormous demand. He could not allow a character in his books to be braver than he was in his private life. It’s a beautiful demand, and there’s honor in forcing oneself to adhere to such a code, but it does cut down on the work you can get out. While it’s legitimate to write about a man who’s braver than yourself, it is better to recognize him quickly as such. I believe I could put a heavyweight champion of the world into a novel and make him convincing, even enter his mind without having to be the best old fighter-writer around. I would look to use one or another of the few crystals I possess that are related to extraordinary effort.

Hemingway’s death was cautionary to me. His suicide was as wounding as if one’s own parent had taken his life. I keep thinking of John Gardner’s unforgettable remark that when a father commits suicide, he condemns his son to the same end. Well, of course, you can go to suicide by more ways than killing yourself. You can rot yourself out with too much drink, too many failures, too much talk, too many wild and unachieved alliances—Hemingway was a great cautioning influence on all of us. One learned not to live on one’s airs, and to do one’s best to avoid many nights when—thanks to Scott Fitzgerald’s work—one knew it was three o’clock in the morning.

All the same, many of us also knew what it was to come home after a dull, ugly party, full of liquor but not drunk, leaden with boredom, angry, a little sick, on the edge of what might legitimately be called despair. Sometimes, it was so bad, one tried to
put down a few words about it. But writing at such a time is like making love at such a time. Hopeless. It desecrates one’s future, yet one does it anyway because at least it is an act. The premise is that what comes out might be valid because it is the record of a mood. What a mood. Full of vomit, self-pity, panic, paranoia, megalomania,
merde
, whimpers, and excuses. The bends of Hell. If you purge it, if you get to sleep and tear it up in the morning, you hope it did no more harm than any other debauch.

Few good writers come out of prison. Incarceration, I think, can destroy a man’s ability to write. The noise in prison is tremendous. Plus the paranoia—you do have to fear or distrust too many of the people you are among. The tension of past events is always there: You hassled someone three weeks ago when you were feeling strong; today, you are weak and the other guy is in the yard working out with weights. You get his bad looks. Then there is the daily injustice, which is inevitable—some guards have a hard-on just for you.

Most convicts may not have a very good sense of the rights due others, but they have a close to absolute sense of what is due them. They’re not getting their rights most of the time. And injustice breeds obsession. In turn, obsession blots out the power to write well. Obsession is like a magnetic field. You keep being pulled back into a direction you have not chosen. All this militates against writing with clarity. It kills nuance! Given the variety of people in prison, you’d think that writers would ferment like yeast, but they don’t. Only the best survive to be able to write once they get out.

One of the hardest things about being a young writer is that every day you spend writing is the day you don’t meet this fabulous woman who will be the best heroine in American fiction—at least in your willing hands. Now I’m happily removed from all that. Work used to be the great stone on one’s back. Today, it’s the opposite. I can’t quite carry the analogy out to say that the boulder has become a lighter-than-air balloon, but, I confess, work now nourishes me as much as it wears one down.

The literary world is a dangerous place to inhabit too frequently if you want to get serious work done. It’s almost necessary to take on airs in order to protect oneself. And these airs have to be
finely tuned if they are to do the job. Capote had a wonderful set and walked around like a little fortress. Hemingway committed suicide working on his airs. He took the literary world much too seriously. His death is there now as a lesson to the rest of us: Don’t get involved at too deep a level or it will kill you and—pure Hemingway—it will kill you for the silliest reasons: for vanity, or because feuds are beginning to etch your liver with the acids of frustration. Hemingway did his best to eschew much of that world, but he established a fief with a royal court of followers. He may have worked as hard on that as on his books. I would repeat: His airs killed him.

A writer, no matter how great, is never altogether great; a small part of him is seriously flawed. Tolstoy evaded the depths that Dostoyevsky opened; in turn Dostoyevsky, lacking Tolstoy’s majestic sense of the proportions of things, fled proportion and explored hysteria. A writer is recognized as great when his work is done, but while he is writing, he rarely feels so great. He is more likely to live with the anxiety of “Can I do it? Should I let up? Will dread overwhelm me if I explore too far? Or depression deaden me if I do not push on? Can I even do it?” As he writes, the writer is reshaping his character. He is a better man and he is worse, once he has finished a book. Potentialities in him have been developed, other talents have been sacrificed. He has made choices on his route and the choices have shaped him. By this understanding, a genius is a man of large talent who has made many good choices and a few astounding ones. He has had the wit to discipline his cowardice and he has had the courage to be bold where others might cry insanity. Yet no matter how large his genius, we can be certain of one thing—he could have been even greater.

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.