The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

  As a corollary to the above: To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your more opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you even as you are setting it down, a truth—it certainly feels like a truth—that used to elude you.

  Reading the work of good writers is, of course, an indispensable nutrient for developing your style when you are young. After you have arrived, however, there comes a point where perversely, or from necessity, you don’t want to read too much. It becomes impossible to look at each good novel as it comes out. If you’re trying to do your own writing, it’s distracting. Generally, you stay away from the work of contemporaries for a year or two at a time: It saves a good deal of reading. It is amazing how many much-touted novels disappear in eighteen months. The underlying force in book reviewing is journalism. The editor of a book review has a section which he hopes to make interesting. If, for two or three days, a newspaper is filled with news about a murder, one can be certain it is treated implicitly as the most exciting murder in the last twenty years. So it is with war novels, first novels, novels about homosexuality or politics, novels by authors of the Establishment, and historical novels. If I had a chapter of a novel for each review I’ve read of a new war novel which was said to be as good as The Naked and the Dead or From Here to Eternity, I would have fifty chapters. One never knows, of course. Maybe a few of these books are as good as they’re said to be, and even if they’ve since disappeared, they will emerge again in ten or twenty years or in a century, but it is sensible to ignore what is said about a book when it first appears. There is too much direct and personal interest in the initial opinions, and much too much log-rolling. The editor of a large book review is of course not owned by the Book-of-the-Month Club or the Literary Guild, but on the other hand, the editor would just as soon not give more than two or three bad reviews in a year to book-club choices. Nor is his attitude dissimilar when it comes to choosing a reviewer for the novel that a big publishing house has chosen for its big book of the season. Considering how bad these books can be, it’s impressive what attention they get. The slack (since a book review, depending on local tradition, can have just a certain proportion of good reviews or it will be seen as no more than a puff sheet) is taken up by misassigning small, determined literary types onto most of the medium good novels, which then receive snide treatment and/or dismissal.

  The point is that any serious novelist knows enough to stay out of the flurry which hits a new book. Every year, whether the books deserve it or not, four or five first novelists will be provided a brilliant debut and four or five respectable young novelists will receive the kind of review that “enhances their reputation as one of the most serious and dedicated voices in the vineyard of literature.”

  So you stay away. If your friends and young writers and girls at cocktail parties keep talking about certain books, if the talk is intriguing because you begin to have less and less of a clear impression of the books as the months go by, then they come to install themselves on your reading list. And every year, or two years, or three, you go off on a binge for a month and gorge on the novels of your contemporaries and see how they made out on their night with the Bitch.

  Nor is it always natural for magazine writers to be at home in the novel. Even in the upper reaches of feature work, you still move on quickly to a new subject, another set of people. So you do not form those novelistic habits that are learned best when you are young, exactly the need never to be satisfied with any of your characters just because they have come alive for you. Indeed, the intoxication of creating a person on a page can prove blinding to an untried novelist’s vision of what the character is going to need in his or her development through the narrative. What the young novelist learns, and it can take half a life, is that it is much easier to create a character than to develop him, or, even harder, her. So an inner caution develops. Unless your literary figures keep growing through the events of the book, your novel can go nowhere that will surprise you. Because if the character comes alive on one particular note and stays alive on that note, then there is nowhere to proceed but into the plot.

  Part of the problem for feature writers is that they have to bring to life the figures they write about, and must not only do it in a few days or a few weeks but be sharp in every sentence and entertaining (if possible), and then on the next assignment they move on to another person in another occupation. Tom Wolfe became the best of them when it came to capturing the off-edge of each person’s dialogue and all the details of their shoes, asses, hairdos, and stomach rumblings. He saw a room in the way a shark sees prey. Details were ectoplasm to him, and luminescence.

  He worked for years doing bigger and better articles, then books, high-octane books, but he had formed bad habits. The basic pattern was to go right into new material, bring it off, and move on to the next job. Your characters had to come alive, but since you didn’t stay with them, you hardly needed a second note. You could always hold the reader for the length of a magazine piece.

  Of course, a great many of Dickens’s characters were also Johnny One-Note. Yet, what notes! Besides, one did not read at that time to explore into character in the way we feel is necessary today. The stakes are higher now. Given the Twentieth Century, so full of vast achievements and horrors, it is viscerally important that our understanding of men and women keep pace with the mechanisms of society. If Wolfe is as good as or better than any other American writer in his power to capture the surface of wholly diverse elements in America, he comes in last of all major American writers when it’s a matter of comprehending a little more about men and women. Indeed, this may be the most important purpose of the novelist today. Surely we are not going to leave it to the jargon-ridden expertise of the oral guns-for-hire in the TV human relations media business, or the fundamentalists’ search for the all-purpose power-grip over other humans. We need only contemplate one more time how we are steeped in a nausea-broth of TV pundit-heads, coming to an intellectual climax every night.

  FIRST PERSON VERSUS

  THIRD PERSON

  Third person and first person are at least as different as major and minor keys in music.

  In the first person, you gain immediacy but lose insight, because you can hardly move into other people’s heads without using a few devices, usually dubious.

  The Deer Park underlined the difficulty. At one point, the young man who was telling the story stated that he was shifting from first person to third. He was now old enough, went his claim, to understand people he had not understood before. Because he now had more of an idea of how they think, he would write about them in third person. I believe it worked, but I would not swear to it.

  In first person, the style has to be altogether tuned to the man who’s telling the story. (Only once did I have a woman as the narrator. And that was Marilyn Monroe in Of Women and Their Elegance.)

  When your prime character is a man, the key choice is not how bright he is, because however smart, he can’t be more intelligent than you are. That’s easy. You dumb him down to taste or bring him up to your level. The real question is, How tough is he? Do you have the inner sanction to create a man who’s braver and tougher than yourself? The answer is yes. Contra Hemingway—yes! You can do that by exercising your critical imagination. It must not be wish fulfillment! You are entitled to guess how you might act if you were that much more of a hero.

  I don’t know how to pose the question for an author who’s female. Can she, for example, write about a woman who is more sensitive than herself? Probably not. She could write about a woman who uses her sensitivity and sensibility more than herself, because she can then key on all the frustrated times in her existence when the sensitivity and sensibility she possessed were not appropriate to a harsh occasion. Following question: Can a woman write about another woman more passionate than herself? Probably. Or a woman who’s colder than herself? Without doubt.
r />   In the third person, there’s a different set of difficulties.

  With a full use of the third person, you are God—well, of course, not quite, but, one way or another, you are ready to see into everyone’s mind. That is never routine. There is, of course, an easier approach—point-of-view third person, where you remain in one character’s mind but are still viewing your protagonist from outside, and usually from above. In the classic vein of third person, however, where you enter each and every one’s consciousness, it is not routine to get over the embarrassment that you are able to accommodate certain characters’ minds with considerably more skill than you can with others’. This Olympian third person, this Tolstoyan presence, needs experience, confidence, irony, insight, and lordly detachment. When it can be done, hurrah. Most of the great nineteenth-century novels achieve just that tone. Today, it’s usually up to the novelists who write best-sellers. In their case, God is always ready to offer an adjective adequate to their means. Teeming excitement, unendurable suspense, delightful joy, grim misery, dogged courage. But let me not froth at the mouth. There was a time when I used to do that myself.

  First person point of view, however, remains a fine tool. You can get to places you don’t arrive at any other way. Of course, you can also injure your writing hand. As an instrument, it’s double-edged. Hemingway had a marvelous sense of its limitations and used it to create his style. He dramatized its first edict: Do not talk about things that could prove embarrassing. They don’t feel right in the telling, not when the “I” stands at the head of the sentence. So there’s a tendency, most marked in Hemingway, to keep most of his revelations at arm’s length. As, for example, the famous last sentences of A Farewell to Arms.

  We live in a time that is astonishingly more open, but the edict, adjusted, still remains. First person cannot be as free as the separation between author and protagonist offered by the third person.

  It was not until I struggled with Advertisements for Myself that I began to recognize how curious it was to be working in the first person. Now, many writers good and bad have been employing that mode for centuries, but I had to come to this remarkable conclusion on my own. The first person was not all that available a way to write. It proved to be a very interesting and exciting mode of literary presence, with large limitations, and you really do have to understand it as such—especially if you’re dealing with your own presence. Nothing is more difficult than to become comfortable writing about yourself in the first person. It’s highly unnatural, because “I” makes up only about a third of the consciousness of any human being. “I” may be the prow of the ego, but you do get into all sorts of other places where you want “one” to talk about different aspects of yourself. And then there is even second person, you, employed as if it is first person: “You get up, you brush your teeth, you feel lousy this morning.” (In the first period of awakening, you can indeed feel like a vague entity slightly outside yourself.) And there is also the third person when used as a substitute for “I”—for one, the character named Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. Using the third person in this manner may be a special condition of first person, but it is legitimate. There is a part of the ego that is superior to ourselves—that person who observes us carefully even as we’re doing bizarre things, that special persona, possessed of immaculate detachment, who is always saying, “Oh, are we really doing well right now?” A wonderful voice. Because it enables you to treat yourself as one more character in a field of characters.

  Nonetheless, I have considerable regard for the first person. Once I even dared to cross the line with it. That began on a given night, in a small Paris hotel room, when I couldn’t sleep. The room was tiny, the double bed took up almost all the floor, and you could break your toe trying to walk around. I didn’t want to go rummaging in my suitcase for a book, so I picked up a Gideon Bible (in English!) on my bedside table and started reading. I hadn’t looked at the New Testament for thirty or forty years, but I recalled that a man named Fulton Oursler once sold over a million copies of a book called The Greatest Story Ever Told. Now, with the bona fide Gospels in my hand, I thought, Well, this may be the greatest story, but it is certainly being told abominably. Sayings popped out of the New Testament that were worthy of Shakespeare, but much in the double columns was poorly described. An ungainly prose pronged with golden nuggets. I thought, There have got to be a hundred novelists in the world who can do a better job. I’m one of them.

  The notion was intriguing. When I thought of all the hypocrites and corruptibles and power seekers who had been living with the Gospel for centuries, standing foursquare on any gnomic chunk of text they could use to abet their aims, I decided, Why not just tell the story? It is, in fact, a fascinating one. The narrative keel is mind-boggling. We are dealing with a man who is obliged to recognize through the evidence itself that he is the Son of God. The difficulty of such a book would be to write about a man considerably nicer than myself. That is never easy. To fashion a character who is meaner than yourself—a piece of cake. But to do someone who is better? Jean Malaquais once remarked that you can write about any character but one. “Who is that?” “A novelist more talented than yourself.”

  I thought, This is analogous. A finer sense of morality is also a higher talent. Yes, the problems were interesting.

  I decided my character had to be more of a man than a god, an existential man, dominated by the huge cloud that he is the Son of God. Jesus, as the protagonist, doesn’t feel worthy, but he is ready nonetheless to do his best every step of the way. Not in command of every situation, but will do his best. And he does have his startling successes.

  Moreover, I had to decide whether to travel in first person or third. First person would have everyone saying: “That egomaniac. Does Mailer now think he’s Jesus Christ? What an over-inflamed vanity!” That’s the bad side, I thought, but at least I can avoid the larger mistake of doing it in the third person. Because that would soon get mixed up with the actual text of the Gospels, and the reader would wonder, Is this sentence from the New Testament or was it added? That can only make for a squirrelly experience as one reads. All right, then. First person. Damn the torpedoes, first person. Play the Ace.

  It became interesting. If it was too biblical in the beginning, I did have an editor who is totally irreligious, Jason Epstein. He was appalled that I was writing this book. We’re friends, but he’s one tough editor. And he’s most often all too right or altogether wrong. So, you have to make a quick decision. Yes, the style was too biblical.

  After which, it was relatively easy. The book was short enough for me to work up seven variations on the style. I had to find the balance between a biblical rhythm and a contemporary one—something that would not inflict a biblical grip on one’s mind yet would keep the echo. Before I was done, it all took a year from that night in that much-too-small hotel room on the Ile St.-Louis.

  REAL LIFE VERSUS

  PLOT LIFE

  The CIA, in its actual workings, is the antithesis of the average spy novel, which, best-seller-oriented, tends to present a perfect clock that ticks to its conclusion. In Harlot’s Ghost, one of my characters remarks that she came into the CIA because she loved spy novels. Now, her complaint was that she could never—precisely because she was inside—experience the full run of a scenario. On occasion, her work put her into the equivalent of a spy novel, but only, let us say, for Chapters Five and Six. She hadn’t been there at the beginning, and was soon shifted to another assignment. Often, one did not learn how it all turned out. That struck me as being about what life is like: The gun over the mantelpiece does not often get fired. We live in and out of ongoing plots every day of our lives, but they are discontinuous. Nothing can be more difficult to encounter than a life story that accompanies us through a beginning, middle, and end. There is only our own that is not missing most of the pages, yet how discontinuous it seems all the same! One could make the case that our love of plot—until it gets very cheap indeed—comes out of our nee
d to find the chain of cause and effect that so often is missing in our own existence.

  The decisions you make while writing fiction can leave you uneasy. If your characters come alive, that’s fine; they will carry you a part of the way. But finally, your people have to make what might be termed career decisions. Does your protagonist want to go abroad in the foreign service, or does he decide to stay in New York with the amazing young model he has just met? Needless to say, such choices are non-operative for writers who have the story complete in their mind before they begin. So I repeat: I look to find my book as I go along. Plot comes last. I want a conception of my characters that’s deep enough so that they will get me to places where I, as the author, have to live by my wits. That means my characters must keep developing. So long as they stay alive, the plot will take care of itself. Working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.

  Working on The Executioner’s Song, I came to the realization that God is a better novelist than the novelists. The story was not only incredible, but it most certainly had happened. If I had conceived it, the work would have been more dramatic but less true. I learned all over again that the way things come about in life is not the way they work in novels. (Unless you are Theodore Dreiser!) It would have seemed wasteful to me to have a novel with two really fascinating characters who didn’t get together for a scene. Whereas, what I discovered in The Executioner’s Song was that the characters I was most interested in didn’t always meet, and when they did, the results were often disappointing.