Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays
It is not easy to explain such disturbance to people who do not work at literature. Someone who has never tried fiction will hardly be quick to understand that in the study a writer often does feel godlike. There one sits, ensconced in judgment on other people. Yet contemplate the person in the chair: he or she could be hung over and full of the small shames of what was done yesterday, or what was done ten years ago. Old fiascos wait like ghosts in the huge house of the empty middle-aged self. Consciously or unconsciously, writers must fashion a new peace with the past every day they attempt to write. They must rise above despising themselves. If they cannot, they will probably lose the sanction to feel like a god long enough to render judgment on others.
Yet the writer at work must not tolerate too much good news either. At the desk it is best if one does not come to like oneself too much. Wonderfully agreeable memories may arrive on certain mornings, but if they have nothing to do with the work they must be banished or they will leave the writer too cheerful, too energetic, too forgiving, too horny. It is in the calm depression of a good judge that one’s scribblings move best over the page. Indeed, just as a decent judge will feel that society is injured if he or she gives an unfair verdict, so does an author have to ask constantly if he or she is being fair to the characters in a book. For if the author does violate the life of a character—that is, in the ongoing panic of trying to keep a book amusing, proceeds to distort the created people into more comic, more corrupt, or more evil forms than the writer secretly believes they deserve—well, then the writer is injuring the reader. It may be subtle injury, but it is still a moral crime. Few writers are innocent of such a practice; on the other hand, not so many artists can be found who are not guilty of softening their portraits. Some authors don’t want to destroy the sympathy that readers may feel for an appealing heroine by the admission she shrieks at her children; sales might fly out the window. It takes as much literary integrity to be tough, therefore, as it does to be compassionate. The trail is narrow. It is difficult to keep up one’s literary standards through the long, slogging reaches in the middle of a book. The early pleasures of conception no longer sustain the writer, who plods along with the lead feet of habit, the dry breath of discipline, and the knowledge that on the other side of the hill the critics—who also have their talent to express—are waiting. Sooner or later you come to the conclusion that if you are going to survive, you had better, where it concerns your own work, become the best critic of them all. An author who would find the resources to keep writing from one generation to the next does well to climb above the ego high enough to see every flaw in his or her own work. Otherwise, he or she will never be able to decide what are its merits.
Let yourself live, however, with an awareness of your book’s lacks and shortcuts, its gloss where courage might have produced a real gleam, and you can bear the bad reviews. You can even tell when the critic is not exposing your psyche so much as turning his own dirty pockets out. It proves amazing how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. There is even hope that if the book is better than its reception, one’s favorite readers will eventually come to care for it more. The prescription, therefore, is simple: one must not put out a job with any serious taint of the meretricious. At least the prescription ought to be simple—but then, how few of us ever do work of which we are not in fact a bit ashamed? It comes down to a matter of degree. There is that remark of Engels to Marx, “Quantity changes quality.” A single potato is there for us to eat, but ten thousand potatoes are a commodity and have to be put in bins or boxes. A profit must be made from them or a loss will certainly be taken. By analogy, a little corruption in a book is as forgivable as the author’s style, but a sizable literary delinquency is a diseased organ, or so it will feel if the critics begin to bang on it and happen to be right for once. That will be the hour when one’s creditors do not go away. I wonder if we have not touched the fear that is back of the writing in many a good novelist’s heart, the hazard beneath all others.
This much said, we might quit with an agreeable moral reinforcement: one must do one’s best to be honest. Unfortunately, there is more to be taken into account. Writing is like love. One never comes to understand it altogether. The act is a mystery, and the more you labor at it, the more you become aware that it is not answers which are being offered after a life of such activity so much as a greater appreciation of the scope of our literary mysteries. The ultimate pleasure in spending one’s days as a writer is the resonance you can bring afterward to your personal experience. The mystery of the profession—where do those words come from, and how account for their alchemy on the page?—can not only arouse terror at the thought of powers disappearing but may also inspire the happiness that one is in contact with the source of literature itself. Now, of course, we cannot find direct answers to such prodigious questions. It is enough to amuse ourselves by one or another approach to the problem. In my college years, students used to have one certainty. It was that environment gave the whole answer; one was the product of one’s milieu, one’s parents, one’s food, one’s conversations, one’s dearest and/or most odious human relations. One was the sum of one’s own history as it was cradled in the larger history of one’s time. One was a product. If one wrote novels, they were merely a product of the product. With this working philosophy I did one book—it happened to be The Naked and the Dead—which was wholly comfortable. I would not have known what an author was suggesting by speaking of any of his or her works as uncomfortable. The Naked and the Dead seemed a sure result of all I had learned up to the age of twenty-five, all I had experienced and all I had read—the recognizable end of a long, active assembly line. I felt able to account for each part of it.
Such an undisturbing view of the making of one’s own literature was, however, soon lost. You must forgive me, but I am now obliged—and inescapably, I fear—to speak of my own works. It is because I am an authority about the particular conditions under which they were written. That is the only matter on which I may be an authority, and if I were to discuss the novels of other authors in the same manner, I would merely be speculating about how they went at it. My own work I do know. I can say, then, that the next book on which I embarked after The Naked and the Dead was such a mystery to me that to this day I cannot tell you where it came from. I used to feel as if this second novel, Barbary Shore, were being written by someone else. Whereas The Naked and the Dead had been put together with the agreeable effort of a young carpenter able to put up a decent house because he is full of the techniques and wisdom of those who built houses before him, the text of Barbary Shore often felt as if it were being dictated to me by a phantom in the middle of a forest. Each morning I would sit down to work with no notion of how to continue. My characters were strangers. Each day, after a few hours of blind work (because I never seemed to get more than a sentence or two ahead of myself), I would find that I had pushed my plot and people three manuscript pages further forward into their eventual denouement. Yet I never knew what I was doing nor where it came from. It is fortunate that I had heard of Freud and the unconscious, or I would have had to try to postulate such a condition myself. An unconscious mind was the only explanation for what was going on. I was certainly left aware, however, of two presences cooperating in a literary work—and the second, foreign to me, had the capacity to take over the act of authorship from the first.
Since then, I have not written a novel which did not belong to one category or the other. Some, of course, shared both. They came out of the deepest parts of my unconscious but were also the results of long, conscious preparation. I see The Deer Park and Ancient Evenings as fair subscriptions to these two categories, whereas my novel The Executioner’s Song was so close to the facts of a real event that many would argue that it wa
s not a novel at all. At the other extreme I find Why Are We in Vietnam? That work emerged in a voice not even remotely like my own. When I attempt to read it aloud to audiences, I am in need of an actor with a good Texas accent to step up from the audience and do the job instead. Yet I wrote that book in three happy and bemused months. Some novels take years, and some novels shift the weights and balances of your character forever by the act of writing them, but this work took only three months and passed through me with the strangest tones, wild and comic to an extreme. I used to go to my desk each morning, and the voice of my main character, a highly improbable sixteen-year-old genius—I did not even know if he was white or black, since he claimed to be one or the other at different times—would commence to speak. I had no idea where he came from nor where we were going. Such books make you feel like a spirit medium. I needed only to show up for work at the proper time and—I cannot call him he—it would begin to speak. One thinks of such books as gifts, compared with others; one hardly has to work at all.
Sometimes when I am feeling tolerant to the idea of karma, demiurges, spirits of the age, and the intervention of angels, saints, and demons, I also wonder if being a writer over a long career does not leave you open to more than one source for your work. In a long career one may come forth with many values that are products of one’s skill and education, of one’s dedication, but I also wonder if once in a while the gods do not look about and have their own novels to propose and peer down among us and say, “Here is a good one for Bellow,” or “That would have been a saucy dish for Cheever; too bad he’s gone,” or, in my own case, “Look at poor old Mailer worrying about his job again. Let’s throw him something wicked.”
Who knows? If we are for the most part sturdy literary engineers full of sound literary practice, cannot we also be agents for forces beyond our comprehension? Perhaps our books do on occasion come to us from sources we do not divine. I applaud the idea of that. Given our large and unrequited hungers, it is nice to believe that we can also be handed, in passing, a few gifts we do not quite deserve. How agreeable to feel akin to the force that put paintings on the walls of caves, set stonecutters to exactitudes that would permit Gothic arches, and gave the calculus to Newton’s age. No, it is not so ill to sense that we are also heir to emanations from some unaccountable and fabulous source. Nothing lifts our horizons like a piece of unexpected luck or the generosity of the gods.
1990s
Review of American Psycho
(1991)
“THE COMMUNISTS,” says someone at a literary party, “at least had the decency to pack it in after seventy years. Capitalism is going to last seven hundred, and before it’s done, there will be nothing left.”
If there is reality to American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis—if, that is, the book offers any insight into a spiritual plague—then capitalism is not likely to approach its septicentennial, for this novel reverses the values of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Where Bonfire owed some part of its success to the reassurance it offered the rich—“You may be silly,” Wolfe was saying in effect, “but, brother, the people down at the bottom are unspeakably worse”—Ellis’s novel inverts the equation. I cannot recall a piece of fiction by an American writer that depicts so odious a ruling class—worse, a young ruling class of Wall Street princelings ready, presumably, by the next century to manage the mighty if surrealistic levers of our economy. Nowhere in American literature can one point to an inhumanity of the moneyed upon the afflicted equal to the following description. I think it is best to present it uncut from the original manuscript:
“Listen, what’s your name?” I ask.
“Al,” he says.
“Speak up,” I tell him. “Come on.”
“Al,” he says, louder.
“Get a goddamn job, Al,” I say, earnestly. “You’ve got a negative attitude. That’s what’s stopping you. You’ve got to get your act together. I’ll help you.”
“You’re so kind mister. You’re kind. You’re a kind man,” he blubbers. “I can tell.”
“Ssshhh,” I whisper. “It’s okay.” I start petting the dog.
“Please,” he says, grabbing my wrist, but lightly, with kindness. “I don’t know what to do. I’m so cold.”
I ask him, “Do you know how bad you smell?” I whisper this soothingly, stroking his face. “The stench. My god …”
“I can’t …” he chokes, then swallows, shaking. “I can’t find a shelter.”
“You reek,” I tell him again. “You reek of … shit …” I’m still petting the dog, its eyes wide and wet and grateful. “Do you know that? Goddamnit Al, look at me and stop crying like some kind of faggot,” I shout. My rage builds then subsides and I close my eyes, bringing my hand up to the bridge of my nose which I squeeze tightly, then sigh, “Al … I’m sorry. It’s just that … I don’t know, I don’t have anything in common with you.”
The bum’s not listening. He’s crying so hard he’s incapable of a coherent answer. I put the bill slowly back into the other pocket of my Luciano Soprani jacket and with the other hand stop petting the dog and reach into the other pocket. The bum stops sobbing abruptly and sits up, looking for the fiver or, I presume, his bottle of Thunderbird. I reach out and touch his face gently, once more with compassion and whisper, “Do you know what a fucking loser you are?” He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long thin knife with a serrated edge and being very careful not to kill the bum push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the handle up, instantly popping the retina and blinding him.
The bum is too surprised to say anything. He only opens his mouth in shock and moves a grubby, mittened hand slowly up to his face. I yank his pants down and in the passing headlights of a taxi can make out his flabby black thighs, rashed because of constant urinating in his pantsuit, the stench of shit rises quickly into my face and breathing through my mouth, on my haunches, I start stabbing him below the stomach, lightly, in the dense matted patch of pubic hair. This sobers him up somewhat and instinctively he tries to cover himself with his hands and the dog starts barking, yipping really, furiously, but it doesn’t attack, and I keep stabbing at the bum now in between his fingers, stabbing the back of his hands. His eye, burst open, hangs out of its socket and runs down his face and he keeps blinking which causes what’s left of it inside the wound to pour out, like red, veiny egg yolk. I grab his head with the one hand and push it back and then with my thumb and forefinger hold the other eye open and bring the knife up and push the tip of it into the socket, first breaking the protective film so the socket fills with blood, then slitting the eyeball open sideways and he finally starts screaming once I slit his nose in two, spraying me, the dog with blood, Gizmo blinking trying to get the blood out of his eyes. I quickly wipe the blade clean across his face, breaking open the muscle above his cheek. Still kneeling I throw a quarter in his face, which is slick and shiny with blood, both sockets hollowed out, what’s left of his eyes literally oozing over his lips, creating thick, webby strands when stretched across his screaming open mouth. I whisper calmly, “There’s a quarter. Go buy some gum you crazy fucking nigger.” Then I turn my attention to the barking dog and when I get up, stomp on its front paws while it’s crouched down ready to jump at me, its fangs bared, and immediately crunch the bones in both its legs and it falls on its side squealing in pain, its front paws sticking up in the air at an obscene, satisfying angle. I can’t help but start laughing and I linger at the scene, amused by this tableau. When I spot an approaching taxi, I slowly walk away.
Afterwards, two blocks west, I feel heady, ravenous, pumped-up, as if I’ve just worked out heavily, endorphins flooding my nervous system, my ears buzzing, my body tuning in, embracing that first line of cocaine, inhaling the first puff of a fine cigar, sipping that first glass of Cristal.
Obviously, we have a radioactive pile on our hands. Canceled by Simon & Schuster two months before publication at an immediate cost to the publisher of a $300,000 advance, picked up almos
t at once by Vintage Books, and commented upon all over the media map in anticipation of Christmas, although the book will now not come out much before Easter, we are waiting for a work with not one, not two, but twenty or thirty scenes of unmitigated torture. Yet the writer may have enough talent to be taken seriously. How one wishes he were without talent! One does not want to be caught defending American Psycho. The advance word is a tidal wave of bad cess.
The Sunday New York Times Book Review took the unprecedented step of printing a review, months in advance, on December 16. In the form of an editorial titled “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” it is by Roger Rosenblatt, a “columnist for Life magazine and an essayist for ‘The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,’ ” who writes in a style to remind one of the critical bastinadoes with which Time magazine used to flog the ingenuous asses of talented young writers forty years ago.
American Psycho is the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore. But that is unfair to sophomores. So pointless, so themeless, so everythingless is this novel, except in stupefying details about expensive clothing, food and bath products, that were it not the most loathsome offering of the season, it certainly would be the funniest.… Patrick Bateman … is a Harvard graduate, twenty-six years old, is single, lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, nurtures his appearance obsessively, frequents health clubs by day and restaurants by night and, in his spare time, plucks out the eyes of street beggars, slits the throats of children and does things to the bodies of women not unlike things that Mr. Ellis does to prose.…