The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (3 page)

Admittedly the man who has educated himself is in a better position than the man not educated at all. But his work is sure to bear the mark of his limitation. If one studies the work of the self-educated—and we do not mean here the man who starts out with limited but rigorous and classical education, like Herman Melville—what one notices at once is the spottiness and therefore awkwardness of their knowledge. One forgives the fault, but the fact remains that it distracts and makes the work less than it might have been. One finds, for instance, naively excited and lengthy discussions of ideas that are commonplace or have long been discredited, or one finds curious, quirky interpretations of old myths—interpretations that, though interesting in themselves, suffer by comparison with what the myths really say and mean. We read, let us say, a story about Penelope as a grudging, recalcitrant wife. The writing may be superb, but when we think of Homer’s portrait of the true, perfect wife, as courageous, cunning, and devoted as her husband, Homer’s version so outshines the new one that we turn almost in disgust from the new writer’s work. True, one can as easily get spotty knowledge from university graduates, and one can as easily get crackpot opinions from university professors as from independent study. The success of fools in the university world is one of God’s great mysteries. But it’s beside the point that the man who’s been through university study can have knowledge as spotty as the self-made man’s. The university can do no more than offer opportunities—opportunities made available nowhere else: a wealth of books, at least a few first-rate courses, professors, and fellow students, also lectures, debates, readings, and gatherings where anyone at all, if he’s not too shy, can talk with some of the best novelists, poets, musicians, painters, politicians, and scientists of the age. If foolishness abounds in universities, it is only within that
same university world that the honest understanding of literature is a conscious discipline. No one can hope to write really well if he has not learned how to analyze fiction—how to recognize a symbol when it jumps at him, how to make out theme in a literary work, how to account for a writer’s selection and organization of fictional details.

We need not be much distressed by the fact that as a rule painters have very little good to say of art historians and aestheticians, or that writers, even our best-educated writers, often express impatience with English professors. The critic’s work—that is, the English professor’s—is the analysis of what has already been written. It is his business to systematize what he reads and to present his discoveries in the way most likely to be beneficial to his students. If he’s good at his job, he does this more or less dispassionately, objectively. He may be moved by a particular work, and may let his students know it, but though tears run down his cheeks, his purpose is to make structure and meaning crystal clear. This can lead—from the artist’s point of view—to two evils. First, the professor, and indeed his whole profession, may tend to choose not the best works of literature but those about which it is most possible to make subtle observations. Since the novels of Anthony Trollope contain almost no obscure allusions and no difficult symbolism, they are hard to teach. One stands in front of class mouthing platitudes, snatching about for something interesting to say. On the other hand, one can dazzle one’s students almost endlessly, or encourage one’s students to dazzle one another, with talk about allusion and symbol in the work of ingenious but minor writers. Subtly and insidiously, standards become perverted. “Good” as an aesthetic judgment comes to mean “tricky,” “academic,” “obscure.”

This perversion of standards leads to the second evil: The literature program wastes the young writer’s time. Instead of allowing him to concentrate on important books, from Homer’s
Iliad
to John Fowles’
Daniel Martin
, it clutters his reading
hours with trivia, old and new. To the extent that a given program feels obliged to treat English and American literature in their historical development, the offense is likely to be compounded. Though no one will deny that writers like Thomas Otway or, say, George Crabbe have both their innate and their historical interest, they have no more relevance for the serious young writer than has, for instance, James D. Watson’s little book on the discovery of DNA. Probably less.

But the student is no helpless robot in the program. Strange to say—since writers so often speak harshly of English professors—young writers are almost always the darlings of the department, especially if they’re good and serious young writers; so that it’s almost always possible for the writer to work out some special arrangement, getting the courses he needs and avoiding those likely to be useless to him. (Who can hate a student who wants Dante instead of Dryden, Joyce instead of Jonathan Edwards?) And in any event, no law requires that the student leave college with a degree—discounting practical considerations. All that’s required is that the student get, somehow, the literary background he needs.

One last remark and we can end this digression on the importance, for the serious young writer, of formal education.

The argument that what the writer really needs is experience in the world, not training in literature—both reading and writing—has been so endlessly repeated that for many it has come to sound like gospel. We cannot take time for a full answer here—how wide experience, from Zanzibar to the Yukon, is more likely to lead to cluttered texture than to deep and moving fiction, how the first-hand knowledge of a dozen trades is likely to be of less value to the writer than twenty good informants, the kind one gets talking to in bars, on Greyhound buses, at parties, or on sagging park benches. The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs. The novelist Nicholas Delbanco has remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything
one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death. The writer’s business is to make up convincing human beings and create for them basic situations and actions by means of which they come to know themselves and reveal themselves to the reader. For that one needs no schooling. But it’s by training—by studying great books and by writing—that one learns to
present
one’s fictions, giving them their due. Through the study of technique—not canoeing or logging or slinging hash—one learns the best, most efficient ways of making characters come alive, learns to know the difference between emotion and sentimentality, learns to discern, in the planning stages, the difference between the better dramatic action and the worse. It is this kind of knowledge—to return to our earlier subject—that leads to mastery.

However he may get it, mastery—not a full mental catalogue of the rules—must be the writer’s goal. He must get the art of fiction, in all its complexity—the whole tradition and all its technical options—down through the wrinkles and tricky wiring of his brain into his blood. Not that he needs to learn literature first and writing later: The two processes are inseparable. Every real writer has had Melville’s experience. He works at the problem of Ahab and the whale (the idea of an indifferent or malevolent universe), he happens to read Shakespeare and some philosophy books at the same time, and because of his reading he hits on heretofore unheard-of solutions to problems of novelistic exploration. Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

In other words, art has no universal rules because each true artist melts down and reforges all past aesthetic law. To learn to write well, one must begin with a clear understanding that for the artist, if not for the critic, aesthetic law is the enemy. To the great artist, anything whatever is possible. Invention, the spontaneous generation of new rules, is central to art. And since one does not learn to be a literary artist by studying first
how to be something different from a literary artist, it follows that for the young writer, as for the great writer he hopes to become, there can be no firm rules, no limits, no restrictions. Whatever works is good. He must develop an eye for what—by his own carefully informed standards—works.

Basic Skills, Genre, and Fiction as Dream

If there are no rules, or none worth his attention, where is the beginning writer to begin?

Often one glance at the writer’s work tells the teacher that what this student writer needs first, before stirring an inch in the direction of fiction, is a review of fundamentals. No one can hope to write well if he has not mastered—absolutely mastered—the rudiments: grammar and syntax, punctuation, diction, sentence variety, paragraph structure, and so forth. It is true that punctuation (for instance) is a subtle art; but its subtlety lies in suspending the rules, as in “You, don’t, know, a god, damned, thing,” or “He’d seen her before, he was sure of it.” No writer should ever have to hesitate for an instant over what the rule to be kept or suspended is. If he wishes, the teacher may deal with the student’s problems as the course goes along (as one deals with spelling), but this is not at all the best way. Learning to write fiction is too serious a business to be mixed in with leftovers from freshman composition. The teacher, if he knows what he’s doing, is too valuable to be wasted in this way; and the student, once he learns that he can get rid of most problems quickly and easily, is certain to want to do so. With the proper help and the proper book, any good student can
cover the fundamentals, once and for all, in two weeks. The proper book, in my opinion, is W. W. Watt’s
An American Rhetoric
, the most accurate and efficient book on composition available, also the most interesting and amusing. Usually the student can do and correct the exercises himself, though occasionally he may need to take a problem to his teacher. If he finds that he needs help frequently, it’s a fairly clear sign that he’ll never be a writer.

Let us suppose the writer has mastered the rudiments. How should he begin on fiction? What should he write about, and how can he know when he’s done it well?

A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister. For some writers, the advice may work, but when it does, it usually works by a curious accident: The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of just this kind—realistic fiction of the sort we associate with
The New Yorker
, the
Atlantic Monthly
, or
Harper’s
. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre. A better answer, though still not an ideal one, might have been “Write the kind of story you know and like best—a ghost story, a science-fiction piece, a realistic story about your childhood, or whatever.”

Though the fact is not always obvious at a glance when we look at works of art very close to us in time, the artist’s primary unit of thought—his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work—is
genre
. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of music. A composer writes an opera, a symphony, a concerto, a tone poem, a suite of country dances, a song cycle, a set of variations, or a stream-of-consciousness piece (a modern psychological adaptation of
the tone poem). Whatever genre he chooses, and to some extent depending on which genre he chooses, he writes within, or slightly varies, traditional structures—sonata form, fugal structure, ABCBA melodic structure, and so forth; or he may create, on what he believes to be some firm basis, a new structure. He may cross genres, introducing country dances into a symphony or, say, constructing a string quartet on the principle of theme and variations. If he’s looking for novelty (seldom for any more noble reason), he may try to borrow structure from some other art, using film, theatrical movement, or something else. When new forms arise, as they do from time to time, they rise out of one of two processes, genre-crossing or the elevation of popular culture. Thus Ravel, Gershwin, Stravinsky, and many others blend classical tradition and American jazz—in this case simultaneously crossing genres and elevating the popular. Occasionally in music as in the other arts, elevating popular culture must be extended to mean recycling trash. Electronic music began in the observation that the beeps and boings that come out of radios, computers, and the like might sound a little like music if structure were imposed—rhythm and something like melody. Anything, in fact—as the Dadaists, Spike Jones, and John Cage pointed out—might be turned into something like music: the scream of a truck-tire, the noise of a windowshade, the bleating of a sheep.

We see much the same in the visual arts. In any culture certain subjects become classical, repeated by artist after artist—for instance, in the Christian Middle Ages, the theme of the dead Christ’s descent from the cross, the martyrdom of St. Stephen, the mother and child. As the surrounding culture changes, the treatment of classical subjects changes, popular culture increasingly impinges, new forms arise—literary illustration replacing Biblical illustration, secular figures parodying religious figures, “real life” edging out illustrative painting, new ventures of thought (psychology, mathematics) transforming traditional still lifes, rooms, and landscapes to
dream images or spatial puzzles. The process of change in the visual arts, in other words, is identical to that in music. Sometimes it rises out of genre-crossing, as when Protestant Flemish painters present a secular family portrait in the triangular organization of Catholic holy-family painters; sometimes it rises out of an elevation of the popular, or of trash, as on Giotto’s campanile, in Matisse’s cut-outs, or in the trash collages of Robert Rauschenberg; and sometimes change comes—the usual case—out of both at once.