In writing I prefer the understatement but am aware that I frequently fail to make my point with the average reader. Thousands of people read Hawaii without recognizing it as a strong statement on race relations, and this same failure to understand has happened with several of my other books, notably The Source and The Covenant, so I am no longer surprised when readers fail to grasp what I have been trying for hundreds of pages to say. Despite such failure, I refuse to beat drums or clothe either myself or my characters in cheap glory to make an obvious statement, and if I am often misunderstood, that is the penalty I must pay for my kind of writing.
If there were so many things I could not do, what could I do rather better than average? I could tell a story, and sometimes we forget what a powerful gift that is. I am sure that at the dawn of civilization when hunters went out to kill a mammoth on which their clan would have to live for the next six months, some man, not necessarily one of the shrewdest when it came to tracking the beast or bravest when the animal was cornered, returned at night to sit by the campfire and relate the incidents of that day. He told of the bird that guided his hunt; he told of the heroic resolution of the prey, noble and defensive with skills not encountered before; he identified the men who led the assault and the one on whom all depended when it seemed that the mammoth would escape; and this fireside narrator lent that day a glory that it could never otherwise have gained.
This facility to tell a rousing, meaningful story is a cultural commodity whose value will never deteriorate. I cannot foresee what form the book, which has been so precious to me, will take in the next century; perhaps its form will be lost in electronics with libraries becoming centers for films and disks. But I am positive that regardless of how the narrative is circulated, the men or women who can create it will continue to be invaluable. Societies require accounts that record experience, lampoons that ridicule pompous and empty-headed leaders, ballads that sing of youthful love, and the interpretation of those values held dear by the human community. The art of the storyteller is historically precious and I am proud to have pursued it.
My preceptors were not the poets and romancers of medieval France; they were the virile dreamers who created the sagas of Norway or the Eddas of Iceland. I felt totally alienated from Jane Austen but close to Alain René Lesage, no affinity with Henry James but a great deal with Miguel Cervantes, none with Scott Fitzgerald but much with Mark Twain. I was a storyteller and did my best to add a few links to the chain that reaches back to the cavemen. I had enormous respect for those artists I did not follow, but I did not want them as my teachers.
I seem also to have had some talent in creating the ambiance in which my stories would be narrated—the look of the land, the feel of the season, the pressure of the atmosphere, the sweep of the ocean, the endlessness of the desert. I have not been afraid of using conventional description and introducing even longer segments of it than most writers do. But I have tried not to allow it to slow down the narrative; I have been careful to maintain what I deem to be the proper balance by cutting descriptive passages rather than adding to them. I have felt that a man or a society can be fully understood or appreciated only when seen as part of a natural setting, whether it be a large American city, a small Boer town in South Africa or a dust-bowl farm in Nebraska.
I have also been keenly attentive to how my characters earn their living. They work at specific jobs, earn specific amounts, face specific problems and reach specific solutions. I have found it irritating, especially in many European novels, that not one of the characters about whom I am reading has ever done a day’s work; we should at least see how they manipulate those who do. I am obviously not a writer of proletarian literature, but I certainly have proletarian instincts and I like to observe the rise and fall of personal ambitions or the success or failure of dynasties. I want my characters to be involved in the hunt, in the reaping, in the marketplace and in the boardroom. While doing my research on Texas I knew with varying degrees of intimacy seven multimillionaires, vivid men, the wheeler-dealers of that vast state, and with several I was invited to watch the intimate unfoldings of their business ventures. In later years, when oil and real estate plummeted, I watched all seven slide into bankruptcy, four in only their peripheral holdings, three completely, and to watch such a collapse of a friend’s empire is sobering.
I have wanted to know how my characters reacted to religion and have done rather more writing about this than other writers, gently and often indirectly. My entire Israeli novel, The Source, is based on that theme, as well as much of the South African one and large passages in both Hawaii and Centennial. What few remember is that in Space, long before the misbehaviors of our television evangelists gained publicity, I anticipated their problems and unsavory deeds in the character of Dr. Strabismus. Although I was approached numerous times in recent years to move to Ireland and write about that tormented land, I refrained because I did not know enough about the roots of the religious tensions, but I think I do understand Islam and am regretful that I was unable to write an extended book about it. In the earliest days of my studies I decided that if I did tackle that subject, I would not be a partisan of the Shiites.
I have had solid instruction on the problems of race relations, having lived in a wide variety of societies and with men and women of every kind of racial background. From childhood I have been congenial with all groups and have tried my best to empathize with them. I have had close friends in all parts of the world, and it astounds some Americans when I say that I have at least seven or eight times lived for fairly long periods with people who spoke not a word of English and I not a word of their languages. I recall that once I shared a cab near Warsaw with a businessman from Boston and we had a lively conversation with the driver, who spoke no English. Although we understood no Polish, we somehow learned that he had two children, owned his own cab, liked Chopin, did not like the Russians, and had relatives in Chicago.
This affection for people of all races has dictated much of my behavior. When I brought my new wife home to my aunts in Bucks County, not a center of ecumenism, they were not surprised that she was Japanese, for they knew I had been working in Japan, but they were appalled that she was a Democrat. When Mari asked: ‘Aunt Laura, have you ever known any Democrats?’ she replied: ‘Yes, I think there was a family that lived out on the edge of town, but they were not very nice people.’
If I have had any obsession as a writer, it has been with the condition of women in American life and elsewhere. I have found all societies, all religions fearfully unfair to women and, whenever possible, have done my best to redress the imbalances. When a young woman came to our town to work as a lawyer—and I wonder where she received that advice—I was one of the first to employ her. I had a woman agent, a woman accountant, a woman office manager and for more than thirty years a woman copy editor at Random House who has kept my manuscripts free from anachronisms, solecisms and misspellings.
I have done my best to introduce women into all my stories, sometimes revising entire chapters to maintain a balance. This effort is partly the result of my having read perhaps a dozen books on South Africa before first going there and having found that although the Dutch settled there in the 1650s, women and children were not mentioned in any of the books, not in any way at all, much before the 1820s. The reader would have thought that the heroic Dutchmen who had settled that marvelous land had all been the products of spontaneous generation. They had no mothers, no sisters, nor any childhood, either; in adult male majesty they ruled the land.
My experience in Yucatán while working on Caribbean reinforced my antipathy to the downgrading of women. I was working with a premier Mayan scholar who was shocked when I told him that my plans for the Mayan chapter involved a mother taking her son on a pilgrimage to three of the holy shrines popular with people seeking divine guidance. He said this was quite impossible, that women would never have been allowed to make such a journey and that as a matter of fact, women played no role in Mayan society what
ever. He said: ‘Look at the frescoes depicting Mayan life, acres of them. You don’t see women. They played no role in Mayan life and for you to suggest that your mother would be allowed to take her son to a place like Palenque—’
I said: ‘In my book that woman will go both to Chichén Itzá and Palenque,’ and he said: ‘If she does, you’ll be a laughingstock.’ She went and I was.
I have been unable to understand such subordination of women, just as I have been unable to understand why Judaism denigrates women so sorely, why the Catholic Church has kept them as second-class citizens, why the Mormons are so reluctant to admit women to positions of leadership, why Quakerism separated the sexes in their meetings, and especially why Islam treats them so abominably. I once spent extended periods in Afghanistan, in every part of the country, and although I was entertained lavishly, I was never allowed to see a woman; always they were hidden under chadors that covered them from crown to ankle.
I am incapable of understanding why the United States has not adopted the Equal Rights Amendment, but a friend explained: ‘The mood of the mullah exists here, too, in all our religions: women are evil, not to be trusted, always to be governed by their men.’
The problem of the emancipation of women has been a particularly difficult one for me to grapple with because the English language is horribly sexist. All things virtuous are masculine, evil and corrupt things feminine; positive aspects are usually masculine; negative feminine. I do not sit at my typewriter one day of my life without confronting this problem of the inadequacy of our language in dealing with equality between the sexes; I must make a score of decisions each day as to how to express an ordinary thought, and I can find no solution. I am a prisoner within the prejudices of my own tongue.
I hope the reader has noticed that I try to vary the impersonal pronouns he and she, sometimes saying he and she, less often she and he but only because it is less euphonious, quite often merely she to indicate both sexes, and none of the solutions are any good. He/she, which some advocate, is worse, and abominations like sher’s should not even be discussed. Try to correct this sentence by substituting he or she locutions for the five masculine terms involved: ‘If a man wants to protect his reputation, he must himself rebut any scandal that touches him.’ Listen to the hopeless jumble when I decide to fight sexism: ‘If a man or woman wants to protect his or her reputation, he or she must himself or herself rebut any scandal that touches him or her.’ Would anyone seriously propose that such sentences be written?
I wish we might launch a movement to make the pronouns they, them and their acceptable usage after the dual locutions: ‘If a man or woman wants to protect their reputation, they must themselves rebut any scandal that touches them.’ The more I read that final sentence the more I like it, because the only canon it offends is old-fashioned pickiness. I hope that writers braver than I will insist upon using this alternative or something similar. It is needed.
• • •
Two problems confront writers every day they sit down to work on their novels. First: any book that is explicitly about a subject is bound to be a bad one, for then it becomes a tract. Good books can be faithful to a central idea, but they must tell the story through the beliefs and actions of their characters. The second writing problem is one I am always aware of but am never able to handle with complete satisfaction. Narration consists in knowing how to alternate effectively two types of writing that I have defined as carry and scene. Carry is the less exciting but often more cerebral segment in which the author conveys such diverse information as what has been happening previously, or what his characters strive for in their lives, or what the condition of the nation is, or where the police are concentrating their efforts. Done well, it can be marvelously rewarding, and the carry segments of War and Peace are among the best ever written. Carry segments do not usually contain dialogue, and even if they do, it is brief. Scene, on the other hand, consists of characters observed in personal contact with other characters, as in a Jane Austen tea party, or a Raymond Chandler holdup or a Stendhal argument among a group of soldiers. In such scenes dialogue becomes preeminent, and when handled with skill it creates tension, reveals hitherto hidden character and advances the plot. Casual readers consider this their favorite part of any book and often skip the carry sections in their desire to rush ahead to the next scene, but in doing so they miss some of the best parts of the book, the writer’s observations.
I believe that intuitively most writers favor one type of narration over the other. Doctorow wrote an entire novel without using dialogue—a tour de force. Dickens used scene as well as anyone who ever wrote. Faulkner was superb in some of his carry, Hemingway in his scene. I have done some quite good material in carry, but editing for me often involves recasting that material into scene, at which I am not particularly gifted.
Sometime in the late 1950s an idea struck me that no one else either before or since has brought up; it is quite precious to me, and I have been willing to gamble my professional life upon it.
Because I had worked overseas so much, I had never had an unbroken span of time in which to acquaint myself with television, which meant that when I did have a chance to view it seriously, it was already a mature art form. As I sat night after night staring at the tube and reveling in the variety of material it brought even then, I discovered that television existed within a cruel time constraint. Programs had to start rigorously on the hour or half hour; to accommodate advertising they had to be broken into short segments and when time was allocated to these interruptions, the typical hour program was allowed only forty-eight minutes.
I also saw that the staple fictional fare of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post—the serial mysteries, serial Westerns and episodic humorous material, such as the black comedy of Octavius Roy Cohen and the crafty tales of Clarence Budington Kelland—was doomed. Television would provide such entertainment in even more accessible form. I grieved to see the magazines that had helped me get started perish, while those that did survive bought no fiction at all: I heard critics sound their doleful warnings: ‘Television makes reading obsolete. Books in general will fade, and the novel will absolutely vanish.’
Then, one evening after I had been well indoctrinated into the mystery and magic of the tube, I had a vision as clear as if the words ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ had been written on my wall: ‘When people tire of the forty-eight-minute television novel, they will yearn for a substantial book within whose covers they can live imaginatively for weeks. The eighteenth-century discursive-type novel will enjoy a vigorous rebirth, because readers will demand it.’
I never deviated from that judgment, but I must clarify one point. I did not write my long novels because I knew there would be a market for them; my mind does not work that way—I have never been geared to the marketplace. What my discovery meant was that I was free to write the kinds of books I had had in mind since that night on Tontouta: long, solid accounts of people and places in interesting corners of the world. If I could write those books with skill, I was confident that readers would support them. Subsequent events proved I was right.
I decided early on to choose as my subject the entire earth, all terrains, all peoples, all animals, and in my major works I have hewn fairly closely to that aim. I love the earth, cherish its ambiguities and do what I can to help protect it. I have climbed the great mountains, probed the deserts and explored all the oceans. To know this earth as I have known it is to know a grandeur that is inexhaustible, and it has always been my desire to communicate that sense to others.
Since I had traveled most of the world, I had the entire canvas to choose from in my writing, but I found myself focusing constantly upon those areas that I foresaw as emerging into international importance: Afghanistan, about to be embroiled in a terrible war with Soviet Russia; Hawaii, about to blend its rich social fabric into the mainland tapestry as a new state; Poland, that battleground of history about to explode in a variety of wildly different directions; South Af
rica, whose future seemed to be so violent and so dark; Israel, the cradle and the chosen land of three of the world’s major religions; and Alaska, where continents and ideologies meet and clash.
Because I wrote about each of these areas well before they erupted into major headlines, I was sometimes praised for having uncanny prescience, but that was not true; what I had was a strong grounding in geography, totally self-taught but very pragmatic. The other day a group of students asked me: ‘If you’re interested in the entire world, how do you decide what to write about next?’ and I replied: ‘Painfully.’
I always carry in the back of my mind six or seven ideas that I am sure will be powerful subjects for books, but upon closer inspection I find that only two or three are really viable. It requires at least three years to write a major book, and the risk is ever present that midway through the task the writer will lose interest and thus lose his entire book. Therefore, I have rarely chosen a subject about which I have not speculated for some dozen years, nor a locale in which I have not lived as an ordinary citizen.‡
Notes among my papers will show that I frequently contemplated a possible subject for up to twenty years before feeling competent to tackle it, and I still carry after four or five decades appealing and cogent themes that I ought to have attempted but didn’t. Five of the subjects to which I applied a good deal of preliminary investigation or even considerable composition form an interesting group of lost opportunities: a novel on the siege of Leningrad on which I had made a substantial beginning; a novel on Mexico, two thirds done, whose manuscript I lost; and three others that I planned in considerable detail but never started. I should have halted all other work and moved to South America and tried to unravel its mysteries; with Iberia, my book on Spanish culture, already finished I would have had a head start, and the kind of book I would have written ought certainly to be done. I was on the verge of starting a novel that would have covered the entire Arab world, which I knew at first hand. I may be the only American writer who has lived in all corners of that fascinating area—from Indonesia and Malaya on the east to Spain on the west—save only Saudi Arabia, which would not let me in. In recent stormy decades such a book would have been invaluable. And I always wanted to write a short, poetic novel about Turkey, which I once knew well and which sometimes seems to have more beautiful buildings of the Greek classical period than Greece itself. Of course, one can do only so much, but those failures rankle and it irritates me beyond telling to realize that I shall never attempt them.