On Becoming a Novelist (6 page)

The writer with a truly accurate eye (and ear, nose, sense of touch, etc.) has an advantage over the writer who does not in that, among other things, he can tell his story in concrete terms, not just feeble abstractions. Instead of writing, “She felt terrible,” he can show—by the precise gesture or look or by capturing the character’s exact turn of phrase—subtle nuances of the character’s feeling. The more abstract a piece of writing is, the less vivid the dream it sets off in the reader’s mind. One can feel sad or happy or bored or cross in a thousand ways: the abstract adjective says almost nothing. The precise gesture nails down the one feeling right for the moment. This is what is meant when writing teachers say that one should “show,” not “tell.” And this, it should be added, is
all
that the writing teacher means. Good writers may “tell” about almost anything in fiction except the characters’ feelings. One may tell the reader that the character went to a private school (one need not show a scene at the private school if the scene has no importance for the rest of the narrative), or one may tell the reader that the character hates spaghetti; but with rare exceptions the characters’ feelings must be demonstrated: fear, love, excitement, doubt, embarrassment, despair become real only when they take the form of events—action (or gesture), dialogue, or physical reaction to setting. Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.

Another indicator of the novelist’s talent is intelligence—a certain kind of intelligence, not the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but the storyteller’s—an intelligence no less subtle than the mathematician’s or the philosopher’s but not so easily recognized.

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.

I have described here, you may think, a curious and dangerous beast. (In fact, good writers are almost never dangerous—a point I will need to develop, but not just yet.) Though the tone is half-joking, my description of the writer is meant to be accurate. Writers would clearly be madmen if they weren’t so psychologically complicated (“too complex,” a famous psychiatrist once wrote, “to settle on any given madness”)—and some go mad anyway. The easiest way to talk about this special sort of intelligence is perhaps to describe what it does, what the young novelist must sooner or later be equipped to do.

I have said that writers are addicted to stories, written or oral, bad or good. I do not mean, of course, that they can’t tell the difference between bad and good stories, and I must now add that some bad stories make them furious. (Some writers get more angry, some less; some, in the presence of the kind of fiction that makes other good writers howl and throw things, do not show their anger, but turn their fury inward, sinking into suicidal gloom.) The kind of fiction that makes good writers cross is not
really
bad fiction. Most writers will occasionally glance through a comic book or a western, even a nurse novel if they find it at the doctor’s office, and finish the thing with no hard feelings. Some happily read bad and good detective fiction, sci-fi’s, sodbusters (fat novels about families in the South or West), even—perhaps especially—children’s books. What makes them angry is bad “good” fiction, whether it’s for children or for grownups.

It would be a mistake to blame the anger on professional jealousy. No one is more generous with his praise than a novelist who has just read a good novel by someone else, even if the author has been his lifelong enemy. One may be nearer the mark in blaming the anger on the novelist’s insecurity, though that is not quite right, either. If one works very hard at doing a thing one considers important (telling a story extremely well), one is annoyed to see someone else do it badly or, worse, fraudulently, while claiming to belong in the same high league. One’s honor is sullied—the honor of the whole profession is sullied—and one’s purpose in life is undermined, especially if readers and reviewers seem unable to tell the difference between the real thing and the fake, as often they can’t. One begins to doubt that one’s standards have any value, even any roots in reality. One becomes crabby, petulant, eager to fight. Since excellence in the arts is a matter of taste—since one cannot really prove one work better than another, at least not in the same clear way mathematicians can prove one another right or wrong—the widespread celebration of a stupid book offends the true writer. Like a child who knows he’s right but cannot make his parents see, and has neither the power nor the authority to beat them, the writer offended by an alleged masterpiece that he knows to be phony may throw the tantrums of the helpless, or sulk, or turn sly (may turn to, as Joyce put it, silence, exile, cunning).

Nothing is harder on the true writer’s sense of security than an age of bad criticism, and in one way or another, sad to say, almost every age qualifies. No depressed and angry writer at the present moment can fail to notice, if he raises his heavy head and looks around, that fools, maniacs, and jabberers are everywhere—mindless, tasteless, ignorant schools of criticism publishing fat journals and meeting in solemn conclave, completely misreading great writers, or celebrating tawdry imitation writers to whom not even a common farm duck would give his ear; other schools maintaining, with much talk of Heidegger, that nothing a writer writes means anything, the very existence of his page is an amusing accident, all the words are a lunatic blithering (for all the writer’s care), since language is by nature false and misleading, best read from the bottom of the page to the top. (Even Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, critics like Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish maintain in their dissimilar ways, is mere raw material for “the art of criticism.”) In a literary culture where the very notion of a “masterpiece” is commonly thought barbaric, where good writing is called reactionary or otherwise self-limiting, and where the worst writers are regularly admired (so it seems to the novelist in his gloomy funk, and a twenty-year list of best-sellers and Book-of-the-Month Club selections would prove him right), who’s to say that all the carefully achieved standards of the bravest, most disciplined writer are not quackery and lob law? (Even in his funk the writer clings to his rhetoric and his OED.)

But it is not finally insecurity (his sense that his honor and purpose cannot survive the blind stampede of Nietzsche’s “herd”) that makes the true novelist hate fake art, though insecurity is involved. The practice of reading and writing fiction, like the practice of law or medicine, gives benefits only the man engaged in the practice can really know, know immediately and fully, in the quality of his life and vision. An analogy from the experience of painters may help. A man who regularly does oil paintings—landscapes, let us say—develops an acute eye for color and light, shapes, volumes, details of form. The novelist develops an acute eye, sometimes bordering on the psychic, for human feelings and behavior, tastes and habitats, pleasures, sufferings. The fake novelist not only fails to develop that gift but by his fakery impedes it, not only in himself but in his readers as well, at least insofar as they’re tricked.

I said earlier that the writer who works closely with detail—studying his characters’ most trivial gestures in the imagined scene to discover exactly where the scene must go next—is the writer most likely to persuade and awe us. That close scrutiny is one among many elements that make up the practice of fiction; let it serve as a clue to the value of authentic practice—and to the waste and harm in fictional malpractice. The true writer’s scrutiny of imagined scenes both feeds on and feeds his real-life experience: almost without knowing he’s doing it, the writer becomes an alert observer. He may even become such a watcher of people that he seems an oddity to his friends. It is said (I think—sometimes by accident I make these things up) that Anthony Trollope, when he went to a party, would sit for ten minutes or more, intently staring at one guest after another, hardly answering when people addressed him, much to the embarrassment of the company. Whether or not that story is true, it is a fact that a party with good writers can be, for the uninitiated, unnerving. Joyce Carol Oates’s gazelle eyes dominate the room, especially when she chooses not to talk, trying to be (one suspects) inconspicuous. Stanley Elkin’s style is to keep the floor at any cost, telling funny stories; but behind the thick glasses, the enlarged, keenly focused myopia makes the listener wonder if perhaps
he
will be the next funny story. (In fact, Elkin’s stories are always generous. If anyone must play the fool in one, he takes the part for himself.) Bernard Malamud has an alarming way of listening when people speak. He focuses intently on gestures, turns of phrase; he may abruptly ask why the person speaking with him wears dark glasses. One could say the same kinds of things about other writers, though of course not about all other writers; many are highly socialized and never let it show that they are watching. The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers. That is one of the joys, as well as one of the curses, of the writer’s occupation. Psychologists perhaps get some of this same pleasure, but psychologists, whatever their claims and intentions, are essentially interested in the aberrant mind. Writers care about all possibilities of human nature.

I might mention another embarrassment involved in the writer’s habit of close attention. Once when I was driving through Colorado with a friend, traveling down a narrow mountain pass, we came upon an accident. A pickup truck and a car had collided, and from fifty feet away we could see the blood. We pulled over and ran to help. All the time I was running, all the time I was trying, with my friend’s help, to pry open the door of the car in which a nine-months-pregnant woman had been impaled through the abdomen, I was thinking: I must remember this! I must remember my feelings! How would I describe this? I do not think I behaved less efficiently than my nonliterary friend, who was probably not thinking such thoughts; in fact, I may possibly have behaved more swiftly and efficiently, trying in my mind to create a noble scene. Nonetheless, what I felt above all was disgust at my mind’s detachment, its inhumane fascination with the precise way the blood pumped, the way flesh around a wound becomes instantly proud, that is, puffed up, and so on. I would have been glad at that moment to be a literary innocent.

For better or worse, the practice of fiction changes a person. The true novelist knows things another man with his own specialization does not know and might not wish to. The false practitioner, on the other hand, knows less than nothing. Not only can it be said that reality is obscure to him; his bad techniques—his learned misapprehensions (think of the disPollyanna science fiction writer)—distort his vision, so that he sees falsely. The true novelist despises the false one both because the false practitioner fools himself, manipulating characters instead of trying to understand them, and because he teaches his readers (at best) nothing.

What the novelist does besides despise false novels is try to write true ones. His complex intelligence, in other words, gathers its various and disparate powers to make up a satisfying story. The best way I can think of to make this point concrete is to speak of what good fiction requires.

Good fiction sets off, as I said earlier, a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind. It is “generous” in the sense that it is complete and self-contained: it answers, either explicitly or by implication, every reasonable question the reader can ask. It does not leave us hanging, unless the narrative itself justifies its inconclusiveness. It does not play pointlessly subtle games in which storytelling is confused with puzzle-making. It does not “test” the reader by demanding that he bring with him some special knowledge without which the events make no sense. In short, it seeks, without pandering, to satisfy and please. It is intellectually and emotionally significant. It is elegant and efficient; that is, it does not use more scenes, characters, physical details, and technical devices than it needs to do its job. It has design. It gives that special pleasure we get from watching, with appreciative and impressed eyes, a
performance
. In other words, noticing what it is that the writer has brought off, we feel well served: “How easy he makes it look!” we say, conscious of difficulties splendidly overcome. And finally, an aesthetically successful story will contain a sense of life’s strangeness, however humdrum its makings.

If a young novelist fully appreciates all these qualities of successful fiction and regularly pursues them in his own work, one does not need to make guesses about his potential: he’s already there. Most young novelists are aware of, and interested in, only some few of these qualities and might even deny that others are important. Partly this is an effect of lost innocence, the innocence the writer must now regain. Every child knows intuitively (insofar as he likes stories at all; some children don’t) what the requirements are for good fiction, but by the time he’s reached high-school age, he’s grown a trifle confused, bullied by his teachers into reading what is in fact trash, scorned if he reads a good comic book, and warned, if he picks up
Crime and Punishment
, “Harold, you’re not ready for that.” By the time he’s a sophomore or junior in college, he’s likely to be quite profoundly confused, imagining, for instance, that “theme” is the most important value in fiction.