The Spooky Art (13 page)

The average young author is not that ill in childhood or that harshly used by early life. His little social deaths are sometimes balanced by his small social conquests. So he writes in the style of others while searching for his own, and tends to look for words more than rhythms. In his haste to dominate the world (rare is the young writer who is not a consummate prick), he also tends to choose his words for their precision, their ability to define, their acrobatic action. His style often changes from scene to scene, from paragraph to paragraph. He may know a little about creating mood, but the essence of good writing is that it sets a mood as intense as a theatrical piece and then alters that mood, enlarges it, conducts it over to another mood. Every sentence, precise or imprecise, vaulting or modest, is careful not to poke a hyperactive finger through the tissue of the mood. Nor do the sentences ever become so empty of personal quality that the prose sinks to the ground of the page. It is an achievement that comes from having thought about one’s life right to the point where one is living it. Everything that happens seems capable of offering its own addition to one’s knowledge. One has arrived at a personal philosophy or has even reached that rare plateau where one is attached to one’s philosophy. At that juncture, everything one writes comes out of one’s own fundamental mood.

Some such development may have gone on in me over the ten years from the publication of
The Naked and the Dead
to the commencement of work on
Advertisements for Myself.
In any event, it became the book in which I tried to separate my legitimate spiritual bile from my self-pity, and maybe it was the hardest continuing task I had yet set myself. What aggravated every problem was that I was also trying to give up smoking, and as a corollary of kicking nicotine, I was thrust into the problem of style itself.
In those days, my psyche felt as different without cigarettes as my body felt in moving from air to water. It was as if I perceived with different senses, and clear reactions were blunted. Writing without cigarettes, the word I looked for almost never came, not in quick time. In compensation, I was granted a sensitivity to the rhythm of what I wrote and that helped to turn my hand in the direction of better prose. I began to learn how difficult it is to move from the hegemony of the word to the resonance of the rhythm. This can be a jump greater than a leap into poetry. So,
Advertisements for Myself
was a book whose writing changed my life.

In
The Deer Park
I had been trying to find a style through three drafts. The first had been Proustian—not first-rate Proust, of course. Attempted Proust. Failed Proust. The second draft was located somewhere between the English novel of manners and Scott Fitzgerald—not good, but in that general direction. Then I found a tone that was not like the others. It fit the essential material. So I learned how style literally repels certain kinds of experience and can be equal to a dominating wife who is ever ready to select your suits. If a writer insists on a specific tone, despite all inner warnings, it can even limit the varieties of experience that will enter the book.

Finding one’s own manner is elusive. While it certainly helps to develop a unique style, first you have to learn how to write. Back in the Fifties, Nelson Algren was giving a writing class in Chicago and invited me to sit in. He read a story by one of the kids. Third-rate Papa. Afterward, I said to Nelson, “Why did you pay that much attention? He was just copying Hemingway.” And Algren, who was about ten years older than me and knew that much more, said, “You know, these kids are better off if they attach themselves to a writer and start imitating him, because they learn a lot doing that. If they’re any good at all, sooner or later they’ll get rid of the influence. But first, they have to get attached to somebody.” That was useful.

On the other hand, it takes so long to find your own manner. It comes down to a set of decisions on which word is valuable and what is not, in every sentence you write. That’s one element. Another is the overall consistency. You have writers who are exceptionally talented but are still what I would call great amateurs.
The most notable example would be a writer as significantly gifted as Toni Morrison. Her style can shift from chapter to chapter—her strength is not in protecting the tone. She can write beautifully for pages, and then in a following chapter dawdle along in pedestrian mode. It violates what she is at her best, her distinctive voice, those distinctive insights.

Style is character. A good one will not come from a bad, undisciplined character. Now, a man may be evil, but I believe that people can be evil in their essential nature and still have good character. Good in the sense of being well tuned, flexible, supple, adaptable, principled. Even an evil man can have principles; he can be true to his own evil, which is not so easy either. And then I think one has to develop one’s physical grace. Writers who are possessed of some may tend to write better than writers who are physically clumsy. It’s my impression this is so. I certainly couldn’t prove it.

Style is also a reflection of identity. Given a firm sense of yourself, you can write in a consistent vein. But should your identity shift, so will your presence change in your prose. Needless to say, illness, tragedy, huge frustration, age itself are bound to alter every firm notion of yourself.

And, of course, one’s subject matter will also affect one’s words. A journalistic voice can get into the workings of a good many topical novels. But then you wouldn’t want Henry James to describe the life of Gary Gilmore. There is such a vice as too much splendid writing. For what Henry James wanted to do, however, his language was ideal. He recognized before anyone else that polite social life, despite its ridiculous or affected aspects, also presents a spectrum of small options present at every moment. In social life, a person often chooses among three or four equally agreeable alternatives, even to making the choice of being a little warmer or a little cooler than he or she originally expected to be toward a given person. James had an extraordinary sense of that unforeseen vibration in the almost wholly expected, and he created a fictional world out of such insight, a world that depended altogether on his unique voice.

It is comforting to argue that some major writers develop a style out of the very avoidance of their major weakness. Hemingway
was not capable of writing a long, complex sentence with good architecture in the syntax. But he turned that inability into his personal skill at writing short declarative sentences or long run-on sentences connected by conjunctions. Faulkner, to the contrary, was not capable of writing simply, but his over-rich, congested sentences produced an extraordinary mood. In turn, Henry Miller could rarely tell a full story well. He preferred his excursions away from the story, and those asides are what make him exceptional.

You know, a good skier rarely worries about a route. He just goes, confident that he’ll react to changes in the trail as they come upon him. It’s the same thing in writing: You have to have confidence in your technique. That is the beauty of mustering the right tone at the right time—it enables you to feel like a good skier, nice and relaxed for the next unexpected turn.

There are two kinds of writers. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, Melville and James, write with an air that is inimitable. There are other writers, usually less famous, who go along in a variety of modes. I’m in the latter camp. The same can be said of painters. Matisse painted in one recognizable vein, while Picasso entered a hundred before he was done. Style was the cutting tool by which he could delineate a reality. He saw it as a tool rather than as an extension of his identity. I’ve found his attitude to be useful for myself. It’s better if one’s writing is close to the material one is working with—a fairly formal prose for one occasion, casual for another.

Metaphors? You ask about metaphors. I had a dear friend, Charlie Devlin, who helped me greatly with
The Naked and the Dead
, and in fact was the model, considerably removed, for the character named McLeod in
Barbary Shore.
Charlie was a quiet, saturnine forty-year-old Irishman who was living full-time in the small rooming house where I took a cubicle (four dollars a week) to finish
The Naked and the Dead.
We used to have long literary conversations. At a certain point I showed him the manuscript. He tore it apart. He could be a severe critic. He said, “It’s a better book than I thought it would be, but you have no gift for metaphor.” Then he said, “Metaphor reveals a writer’s true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.” I never forgot this lecture, and
began to work with might and main on my life and my metaphors. I would claim they have improved with age.

On the other hand, good dialogue depends on your ear. There has to be something in each speech that relies on the previous one. But I don’t even want to talk about dialogue. Some people have marvelous stuff, some don’t, but that’s only one aspect of writing, it is not
the
aspect, and besides, I don’t think you can teach it. Most kids who have talent start off with good dialogue. They’re happy it’s there, and they have fun—that can start you as a writer. Those who are not gifted at dialogue will, hopefully, be endowed with philosophy or good language.

If one wants an example of superb dialogue where the bar is set about as high as it can go, then read William Kennedy or Joan Didion. But make no attempt to imitate either. Superb dialogue is inimitable. It is the indispensable aid, however, to most short stories.

A short fictional piece has a tendency to look for climates of permanence—an event occurs, a man is hurt by it in some small way forever. The novel moves as naturally toward flux. An event occurs, a man is injured, and a month later is working on something else. The short story likes to be classic. It is most acceptable when one fatal point is made. Whereas the novel is dialectical. It is most alive when one can trace the disasters which follow victory or the subtle turns that sometimes come from a defeat. A novel can be created out of short stories only if the point in each story is consecutively more interesting and incisive than the point before it, when the author in effect is drilling for oil.

While Dwight Macdonald gave us no great body of books, he did spend his talents in writing some of the better political and literary criticism of our time. More important than his oeuvre, however,
was his influence. He was one of the best teachers of writing in the world. He gave no classes, but if one had learned a little about writing already, there were so many avenues to follow in the felicities of his style. Dwight had something fabulous to offer. It was to search for the
feel
of the intellectual phenomenon. Describe what you see as it impinges on the sum of your passions and your intellectual attainments. Bring to the act of writing all of your craft, care, devotion, lack of humbug, and honesty of sentiment. And then write without looking over your shoulder for the literary police. Write as if your life depended on saying what you felt as clearly as you could, while never losing sight of the phenomenon to be described. If something feels bad to you, it is bad. Others received the same message from Hemingway, but it took Dwight Macdonald to give the hint to many a young intellectual that the clue to new discovery rests not so much on the idea with which you begin a sentence as in the closeness of your attack on the continuation, and your readiness to depart from preconceived intentions by the insight provided in an unexpected and happy turn of phrase.

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.