On Becoming a Novelist (5 page)

What is wrong with the young writer who imitates TV instead of life is essentially no different from what’s wrong with the young writer who imitates some earlier writer. It may feel more classy to imitate James Joyce or Walker Percy than
All in the Family;
but every literary imitation lacks something we expect of good writing: the writer seeing with his own eyes.

This is not to say that imitation cannot be a useful tool of the writer’s apprenticeship. Some writing teachers favor literary imitation as a means of learning, and in the eighteenth century imitation was the chief way of learning to write. As I said earlier, one can learn a good deal by typing out, word for word, a great writer’s story: the activity helps the beginning writer pay close attention. And one can learn by studying a writer one admires and transforming all he says to one’s own way of seeing. But as a rule, the more closely one looks at the writer one admires, the more clearly one sees that his way can never be one’s own. Open a novel of Faulkner’s and copy a few paragraphs, but change the particulars to fit the world you know yourself. Take, for instance, the opening of Faulkner’s
The Hamlet:

Frenchman’s Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty-miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, it had been the original grant site of …

If I were to translate this to something I know, I might begin:

Putnam Settlement was a section of drab high ground in low, drab country, six miles south of Batavia….

Already I find myself in trouble. People in western New York don’t think in terms of “sections”; I must substitute some more appropriate word, and except for some vague evasion like “stretch,” I can think of no word the people with whom I’m familiar would really use. Moreover, Putnam Settlement would not think of itself in relation to Batavia or anywhere else, partly because Putnam Settlement, like Batavia, isn’t really a “place,” not even a “definite yet without boundaries” sort of place. Faulkner has treated in his opening sentence something of grave importance to those who proudly proclaim themselves Southerners, namely, place and all that implies—history, kin connections, identity. Perhaps because they were never humiliated by the loss of a civil war, perhaps because their culture is more open to strangers, perhaps for other reasons, western New Yorkers don’t feel the same fierce concern about place that traditional Southerners feel. Where I come from, one place runs into another without much noticing. Place names are less matters of pride than points of orientation. Not far from Putnam Settlement there’s a village called Brookville where there hasn’t been a house or barn in years. People still speak of it as if they knew what they meant, which they do, but no one knows who lived there in 1800 or would dream of describing it to a stranger as a place. One mentions Brookville when directing someone to Charley Walsh’s farm.

Faulkner’s second sentence, “Hill-cradled and remote …,” raises further problems. First there’s the sonorous Southern grandeur of the opening phrase, with its rhetorical suspension of meaning. Anyone with Putnam Settlement in mind would be embarrassed to be caught framing sentences in the style of a congressman or the
National Geographic.
The place, insofar as it is one, won’t support it. (That’s why people frequently don’t talk, in western New York; they just point.) Nor would anyone who lives in the proximity of Putnam Settlement think about mentioning the lay of the land. If you live in rich bottom country with hills surrounding, like the people of Faulkner’s Frenchman’s Bend, it makes sense to think in terms of large, enclosed landscapes. In Putnam Settlement you think of the weeds along the road (Queen Anne’s lace), the large, dead cherry and apple trees, the sagging, long-since-abandoned barns. The main value of trying to use Faulknerian devices for western New York turns out to be that the attempt shows dramatically how subject matter influences style.

A good novelist creates powerfully vivid images in the reader’s mind, and nothing is more natural than that the beginning novelist should try to imitate the effects of some master, because he loves that writer’s vivid world. But finally imitation is a bad idea. What writers of the past saw and said, even the recent past, is history. It is obvious that no one any longer talks or thinks like the characters of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. It is perhaps less obvious that hardly anyone under thirty talks like the characters of Saul Bellow or his imitators. The beginning novelist can learn from his betters their tricks of accurate observation, but what he sees must be his own time and place or else, as in the very best historical fiction, the past as we, with our special sensibility (not better but new), would see it if we went back. The beginning writer need not worry too much if his work is in trivial respects derivative—in fact, nothing is more tiresome than writing that strains after what the poet Anthony Hecht once called “a fraudulent and adventitious novelty.” Aping another writer’s style is foolish, but the noblest originality is not stylistic but visionary and intellectual; the writer’s accurate presentation of what he, himself, has seen, heard, thought, and felt.

The writer’s accuracy of eye has partly to do with his character. For some novelists, as for most poets and many short story writers, the main accuracy required by their art has to do with self-understanding. Novelists of this kind—Beckett, Proust, many writers who favor first-person narration—specialize in private vision. What they need to see clearly and document well is their own feelings, experience, prejudice. Such a novelist may hate nearly all of humanity, as Celine does, or large groups of people, as does Nabokov. What counts in this case is not that we believe the private vision to be right but that we are so convinced by and interested in the person who does the seeing that we are willing to follow him around. Sometimes, as in the case of a writer like Waugh, we laugh at a misanthropic cynicism we would not consider adopting for ourselves—much as we might laugh at an amusing crank at a party. All that is required to keep us following such a writer is that he fully understand that he is, in the ordinary view, a crackpot, and that he present himself as such, creating a distinct and interesting persona. He must work up his act with the skill of a master clown—however grim his ultimate purpose—understanding how normal people are likely to react to him and manipulating that reaction to his advantage. In other words, he must understand, with a full measure of ironic detachment, his tics and oddities, so that he can present them to us by conscious art, and not by slips that cause us embarrassment for him and lead us to avoid him. Think of the superbly controlled sadist-snob image Alfred Hitchcock created for himself. Think of Nabokov as he presented himself both in his writing and in television interviews; using a snob accent as artfully fabricated as the language of Donald Duck, he reveled in such goofiness as, breaking in on himself, “Careful now! Here comes a metaphor!” The persona need not be comic, as these examples would seem to suggest. Another writer might play Wolfman; yet another might put on, as William S. Burroughs has done, the zombie style.

If we ask ourselves what usefulness or value such writers have, we at once recognize that they’re so various as to make no single answer possible. Some, like Evelyn Waugh, allow us the pleasure of a moral holiday: we relax our fair-mindedness and civility and for a brief period take nasty delight in hearing the worst said of people and institutions we, too, in our more childish moments, love to scorn. Some, like Nabokov, present serious and moral visions of the world but do it in such a way (by irony and nastiness) that no underlying softness or piety undermines the effect. Some, like Donald Barthelme, simply present themselves as fascinating oddities of nature—or of literature gone awry. The list of possibilities might be extended. What all such writers have in common is their bold idiosyncrasy, their happy pursuit of their own unique paths in the labyrinthine pluralistic woods. Sometimes such writers explicitly deny, as William Gass does, that fiction is capable of presenting anything broader than a quirky individual vision. Whatever their claims, they present, in effect, portraits or comic cartoons of the artist, and we judge them exactly as we judge stand-up comedians like Bill Cosby or comic actors like W. C. Fields, by the consistency and accuracy of observation with which they present to us their staged selves, their friends, enemies, memories, peculiar hopes and crank opinions.

For another kind of novelist the accuracy required is, I think, of a higher order, infinitely more difficult to achieve. This is the novelist who moves like a daemon from one body—one character—to another. Rather than master the tics and oddities of his own being and learn how to present them in an appealing way—and rather than capture other people in the manner of a cunning epigrammist or malicious gossip—he must learn to step outside himself, see and feel things from every human—and inhuman—point of view. He must be able to report, with convincing precision, how the world looks to a child, a young woman, an elderly murderer, or the governor of Utah. He must learn, by staring intently into the dream he dreams over his typewriter, to distinguish the subtlest differences between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and acknowledging their frailties. Insofar as he pretends not to private vision but to omniscience, he cannot as a rule, love some of his characters and despise others.

What chiefly astonishes us in the work of this highest class of novelists—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner—is the writer’s gift for rendering the precise observations and feelings of a wide variety of characters, even entering the minds (in Tolstoy’s case) of animals. The beginning novelist who has the gift for inhabiting other lives has perhaps the best chance for success.

The writer who does not have this gift can usually develop it to some extent, once he has decided he needs it. True, if his irrational hatreds or loves run deep he may be permanently stymied. (No one readily admits that his hatreds are irrational. The stubborn conviction that one is right to spurn most kinds of people can itself be a stymieing force. Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.) Once one has recognized that the novelist ought to be able to play advocate for all kinds of human beings, see through their eyes, feel with their nerves, accept their stupidest settled opinions as self-evident facts (for them), one simply begins to do it; and doing it again and again—carefully rereading, reconsidering, revising—one gets good at it.

By certain tricks and certain exercises one can sharpen one’s gift for seeing the world as others see it. Every writer finds his own. Some may pore over fat astrology books, not for comfort or a head start on disaster but for hints to the complex oddities of human character (the total character of a Pisces vs. the total character of a Leo, whether or not one believes these respective traits have to do with people’s birth dates). Some read psychological case studies or “ladies’ magazines” or, alas, “men’s”; some play with phrenology, palmistry, or the Tarot. What one has to get, one way or another, is insight—not just knowledge—into personalities not visibly like one’s own. What one needs is not the facts but the “feel” of the person not oneself.

For some people, of course, no tricks or exercises can help. For one reason or another these people seem never able to guess what others are thinking and feeling. They walk through a lifelong mystery, wondering why people are smiling at them or frowning at them, puzzling over exactly what so-and-so might have meant by that kiss on the cheek or that peculiar sneer in the supermarket. What works for most human beings doesn’t work for them. We see a given expression on someone’s face, and by mentally or even physically imitating that expression we understand what
we
would have meant by it, and by a leap of faith we assume that the other person meant the same. Or someone speaks crossly to us for no apparent reason, and on the basis of the theory that other people are essentially like ourselves we are able to figure out the real or imagined slight, or the stomach pain, or whatever, that caused the person’s anger. Why some people cannot do this (assuming that we who think we can are not fooling ourselves) is probably a question for psychologists. It seems obvious that at least in some cases the problem lies in a neurosis. We have all encountered people who displace their anger at parents or themselves into anger at some social group: the Klansman who hates liberals and imputes evil motives to the liberal’s most casual remarks, or the liberal who confidently imputes racial bigotry to anyone who expresses doubt about the value of welfare programs. But whatever the cause, it seems likely that some people can never learn to empathize with their neighbors, at least not with the confidence and clarity it takes to be a novelist of Tolstoy’s kind. Such people have no choice, if they wish to be novelists, but to be the spokesmen of private, idiosyncratic vision. They are committed by character to one kind of novel and not the other.

To be psychologically suited for membership in what I have called the highest class of novelists, the writer must be not only capable of understanding people different from himself but fascinated by such people. He must have sufficient self-esteem that he is not threatened by difference, and sufficient warmth and sympathy, and a sufficient concern with fairness, that he wants to value people different from himself, and finally he must have, I think, sufficient faith in the goodness of life that he can not only tolerate but celebrate a world of differences, conflicts, oppositions.

Both the novelist of idiosyncratic vision and the novelist who seeks a more dispassionate understanding can improve the vividness of his fiction by learning to see characters in the light of their metaphoric equivalencies, though in one case the character who emerges will be someone seen from outside, colored by the writer’s bias, and in the other case the character may seem someone as real and complex as we are ourselves. Perhaps the best exercise for heightening one’s gift for discovering such equivalencies is the game called “Smoke.” The player who is It thinks of some personage living or dead and gives his fellow players a starting clue—“living American,” “dead Asian,” or whatever—then each player in turn asks a question in the form: “What kind of——are you?” (What kind of smoke, what kind of vegetable, what kind of weather, building, part of the body, and so forth.) As the answers pile up, everyone playing the game finds he has a clearer and clearer sense of the personage whose name he is seeking, and when someone finally guesses the right answer, the effect is likely to have something like the power of a mystical revelation. No one who has played the game with even moderately competent players—people capable of suspending intellect for the deeper knowledge of the poetic mind—can doubt the value of metaphor for the creation of vivid character.