The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, Page 2

  SM: What do you think were some of the early influences in your life? What reading, as a boy, do you recall as important?

  NM: The Amateur Gentleman and The Broad Highway were glorious works. So was Captain Blood. I think I read every one of Jeffrey Farnol’s books, and there must have been twenty of them. And every one of Rafael Sabatini’s.

  SM: Did you ever read any of them again?

  NM: No, now I have no real idea of their merit. But I never enjoyed a novel more than Captain Blood. Nor a movie. Do you remember Errol Flynn as Captain Blood? Some years ago I was asked by a magazine what were the ten most important books in my development. The book I listed first was Captain Blood. Then came Das Kapital. Then The Amateur Gentleman.

  SM: You wouldn’t say that Das Kapital was boyhood reading?

  NM: Oh no, I read that many years later. But it had its mild influence.

  SM: It’s been said often that novelists are largely nostalgic for their boyhood, and in fact most novelists draw on their youthful experiences a great deal. In your novels, however, the evocation of scenes from boyhood is rare or almost absent.

  NM: It’s difficult to write about childhood. I never felt I understood it in any novel way. I never felt other authors did either. Not particularly. I think the portrait of childhood which is given by most writers is rarely true to anything more than the logic of their novel. Childhood is so protean.

  SM: What about Twain, or Hemingway—who drew on their boyhoods successfully?

  NM: I must admit they created some of the psychological reality of my own childhood. I wanted, for instance, to be like Tom Sawyer.

  SM: Not Huck Finn?

  NM: The magic of Huck Finn seems to have passed me by, I don’t know quite why. Tom Sawyer was the book of Twain’s I always preferred. I remember when I got to college I was startled to find that Huckleberry Finn was the classic. Of course, I haven’t looked at either novel in thirty years.

  WRITING COURSES

  I don’t know if it still is true, but in the years I went to Harvard (so long ago as 1939 to 1943) they used to give a good writing course. In fact, it was not one good course but six. English A was compulsory for any Freshman who did not get a very good mark on the English College Entrance Boards, and five electives followed: English A-1, English A-2, up to English A-5, a vertiginous meeting place for a few select talents, whose guide was no less than Professor Robert Hillyer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. By Senior year, I was taking English A-5. In fact, I must have been one of the few students in Harvard history who took all but one of the writing courses (A-4 was missed) and must even be one of the few living testimonials to the efficacy of a half-dozen classes in composition and the art of the short story. I entered college as a raw if somewhat generous-hearted adolescent from Brooklyn who did not know the first thing about a good English sentence and left four years later as a half-affected and much imperfect Harvard man who had nonetheless had the great good fortune to find the passion of his life before he was twenty. I wanted to be a writer. And had the further good luck to conceive this passion in Freshman year in a compulsory course in elementary composition. That much will be granted to the forces of oppression.

  English A at Harvard in 1939 put its emphasis on teaching a student to write tolerably well—an ability we certainly had to call upon over the next three years. The first stricture of the course was a wise one: Writing is an extension of speech, we were told. So we were instructed to write with something of the ease with which we might speak, and that is a good rule for beginners. In time it can be absorbed, taken for granted, and finally disobeyed. The best writing comes, obviously, out of a precision we do not and dare not employ when we speak, yet such writing still has the ring of speech. It is a style, in short, that can take you a life to achieve.

  At Harvard, however, they knew how to get us to begin, and there were fine men teaching English A, and they took me up the ladder of the electives. Over four years of such courses, one would have had to have a determined purchase on a lack of talent not to improve. I improved. In those four years, I learned a little about sentence construction and more about narrative pace; en route I was able to pick up some of the literary ego a young writer needs to keep going through the contradictory reactions of others to his work. If there is one reason above others for taking a writing course, it is to go through the agonizing but indispensable recognition that one’s own short story, so clear, so beautiful, so powerful, and so true, so definite in its meaning or so well balanced in its ambiguity, has become a hundred different things for the other writers present. Even the teacher does not get your buried symbols, or, worse, does not like them. Being a young writer in such a course can bruise the psyche as much as being a novice in the Golden Gloves can hurt your head. There is punishment in recognizing how much more punishment will yet have to be taken. Yet the class has its unique and ineradicable value. For you get to see the faces of those who like your work, you hear their voices, and so you gain some comprehension of the perversities of an audience’s taste (as when, for example, they like a story by a writer you despise). You can even come to recognize how a fine piece of prose can draw the attention of an audience together. If it happens to you, if you write a piece and everyone in the room listens as if there is nourishment for one ear—his own—then it will not matter afterward if you hear a dozen separate reactions, for you will have at last the certainty that you are a writer. Your work has effect: In some small way, you have begun to enter the life and intelligence of others. Then you are not likely to stay away from writing. Indeed, if you get even a glimpse of that kind of reaction from one of your paragraphs, you will discover that you must have more such paragraphs. You will want the ineffable pleasure of such attention.

  That is the best of it, but there are also perils. You can go through hell in a writing class, real, true hell. I remember in my second year at Harvard I was taking English A-1, with a very good man teaching it, Robert Gorham Davis. At a given moment, Davis said to the class, “I’d like to read to you an interesting story that’s quite good but is totally destroyed at the end by the author.”

  The story, mine to be sure, was about a young bellhop working at a summer hotel. With other bellhops, he would talk about the wives of the businessmen who were having quick affairs with the hotel staff during the week. Their husbands, after all, only came out on weekends. One weekday night, however, one lonely businessman drove up unexpectedly from New York, came into the lobby, and headed right up to his room. The bellhops knew a disaster was coming before they even heard the shots. The narrator then went up to the room. Both the bellhop, who had been in bed with the wife, and the wife were dead. The wife had had her face blown off. The husband had committed suicide. The description given by the narrator went something like this: “I couldn’t see her nose, or what was left of her mouth, and I didn’t know whether all that was spread on the carpet by now and I was stepping on it, or whether I was still breathing it in.”

  At this point, the class started to laugh. My description had the misfortune to continue for another such paragraph. I was learning a frightful lesson in a terrible hurry: A story read aloud before an audience can have little in common with its mute presence on the page.

  It became the worst single moment I ever had in a writing class. I didn’t know whether to stand up and say, “I am the one who wrote that piece and you can all go to hell,” or to remain totally silent. When you don’t know what to do, you usually do nothing. I did nothing.

  I hardly slept. Next day I had an appointment with Robert Gorham Davis. The first thing he said when I came into his office was, “Look, I owe you a serious apology. I had no idea the reaction would be so bad. I should have given you my criticisms privately. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Of course I did. We even became friends.

  But I can’t tell you how my back was scalded by the laughter. In those years, scorn was a pure product of the superiority we felt about ourselves at being Harvard men. We used to be
a force on Friday nights as we laughed at the filmic idiocies on display at the movie theatre in Harvard Square. During that stricken ten minutes in English A-1, I felt as if I had become one of those romantic dolts on the screen. In that year, 1940, we all looked upon films as being a sub-par art. Novelists were vastly more important.

  In any event, on balance, I learned more than I lost from writing courses. For one thing, you certainly get used to how wide apart are reactions, even to pieces that present no striking disturbance. You also begin to pick up a lot about how power structures form. In the class, certain writers will make up a bloc, others an enclave. You soon learn a lot about manipulation and hypocrisy—“Oh, I absolutely love your story!” while lying through your teeth. You pick up a few random notes on human nature. Whether you glean enough for the time invested is another question. Indeed, there is a kind of signature today to many writers who come out of MFA programs. They tend to give you very good sentences and they move well on the page. Sometimes they have a tropism toward matters that are bizarre and/or intense. They also tend to be not terribly ambitious. Because in a writing course, nothing makes you crash with a louder sound than a bold attempt that doesn’t come off. So, a built-in tendency develops to stay small. Nonetheless, a few very good writers do come out of the process.

  What the course can’t satisfy is the problem of experience. Young people who write well are not just reasonably sensitive; they are over-sensitive. Experience is usually painful and difficult for them. Moreover, to choose to go out and find a new subject to write about is always false to a degree. I would argue that your material becomes valuable only when it is existential, by which I mean an experience you do not control. Driving your car along a snowy road, you miscalculate a hairpin turn and are in a bad skid. For a fraction of a second, or for as much as a second and a half, you don’t know if you’re going to come out of it. You may wreck your car. Or you may be dead in the next instant. A good deal goes through your mind at a good rate of speed—that’s an existential moment. Another existential experience of wholly different character, ongoing, heavy, full of dread, common to many marriages, is where a woman is miserable with her husband but adores her child and hates the thought of divorce. Anna Karenina is one such lady.

  In any event, there is no answer to the problem of how a young writer can pick up experience. If you search for it but are able to quit the experience if it gets too hot for you—then such a controlled adventure can be good conceivably for a magazine piece, but it’s not necessarily there for bringing you to that deeper level of writing that young scriveners aspire to.

  How I aspired! In those years at Harvard, if I had heard that Ernest Hemingway was going to speak in Worcester, Mass., I might have trudged the forty miles from Cambridge. That was how we felt then about writers. It is probably how I still feel. The shock, decades later, was to realize that this view of the writer is rare by now.

  Full of the intensity of those feelings, I even wrote a long novel in the nine months between my graduation in 1943 and my induction into the Army in March 1944. What follows is the introduction to it, which I would write thirty-five years later, when the novel was brought out in an expensive limited edition.

  Samuel Goldwyn once took a walk down the aisle of the writers’ wing of his own studio and did not hear a sound. Supposedly, five writers were working behind five office doors, but Goldwyn did not pick up the clack of a single typewriter. Instead, there was a silence of the tombs. The writers were sleeping a sleep five thousand years old.

  Goldwyn came to the end of the hall, turned around in a rage, his expressive face clenched like a fist, and he shouted down the corridor, “A writer should write!”

  I never heard that story when I was young, but I had no need of it then. I wrote. It came as naturally to me as sexual excitement to an adolescent—I think from the time I was seventeen, I had no larger desire in life than to be a writer, and I wrote a great deal. Through my Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years at Harvard, and the summers between, I must have written thirty or forty short stories, a couple of plays, a novel, then a short novel, and then a long novel, which I called A Transit to Narcissus.

  That was not the worst way to work up one’s literary talent. There may be too much of a tendency among young intellectuals to think that if one can develop a consciousness, if one is able to brood sensitively and incisively on one’s own life, and on the life of others for that matter, one will be able to write when the time comes. That assumption, however, may not recognize sufficiently that the ability to put words on a page also comes through years of experience and can become a skill nearly separate from consciousness and bear more resemblance to the sophisticated instinct of fingers that have been playing scales for a decade.

  So I learned to write by writing. As I once calculated, I must have written more than half a million words before I came to The Naked and the Dead, and a large fraction of those words was in the several drafts of this novel. I no longer recall just when I began A Transit to Narcissus, although the spring of my Senior year at Harvard, March or April of 1943, seems a reasonable date, but indeed it was commenced earlier. In the summer before, between my Junior and Senior years, I had written a three-act play about a mental hospital and called it The Naked and the Dead. The play never interested anyone a great deal, most certainly not the Harvard Dramatic Society (although the title was to receive its full attention four years later, when it was transferred without a moment’s shame to the war novel I started to write in the summer of 1946). By then, the play was long buried in a carton of papers, its best passages of dialogue—there were not many—cannibalized over to a few pages of A Transit to Narcissus.

  Little enough, certainly, of those three acts are here. While I was writing the novel, a metamorphosis took place. The play, as I recollect, was stark, and its set was the screened-in porch of the violent ward of a mental hospital. In an area eight feet by forty feet, twenty or thirty actors were to mull insanely back and forth. It would have been a play of much shock, brutality, obscenity, and what they used to call untrammeled power, a crude but highly realistic work. I had, after all, spent the earlier part of the summer of 1942, one week, no more, working in the violent ward of a mental hospital for thirteen hours a day, five days a week (pay, nineteen dollars plus room and board). Then I quit. The experience was sufficient to write the play, digest a few of its faults, and embark less than a year later on that most peculiar novel we have here. Having just reread it after thirty-three years, I am all too unhappily aware that a seed of the psychotic, a whole field of the neurotic, and a crop of youthful energies obviously sprouted from a week of work in the insane asylum. If I was searching that summer for the experience to make me a better writer, most solemnly, of course, was I searching, I could hardly have recognized in advance that working in a mental hospital at the age of nineteen was equal to dropping myself precipitously into the lowest reaches of the proletariat—a charnel house of violence, a drudgery of labor, and a first coming to grips with a theme that would not so much haunt me as stalk me for the rest of my writing life: What is the relation between courage and brutality?

  Being also a good son of the middle class, I could not stay rooted in such misery for too long. A week was enough to jolt my mind for a year. Since it was also the first social experience I came across that was cruel enough and crude enough to oblige me to write about it, I was bound to go back and try a novel. While graduating from a high school in Brooklyn into Freshman year at Harvard had offered a social transition that in its own way was virtually as abrupt, I would hardly have been able to write about it then; did I even know it was there to write about? On the other hand I was ready, in wholly inadequate fashion, of course, to take on the explosive and unmanageable themes of social corruption, insanity, and violence in a mental hospital; yes, I went right into the work and in less than a year was to write and rewrite a novel something like a hundred and eighty thousand words long.

  I started on it in the last months of my Sen
ior year, then plugged along from month to month, expecting any week to get drafted (it was the summer of ’43), and unaccountably did not get drafted. The only explanation I can find for such delay is that my draft card must have fallen into the back of the file. I did not compose the novel, therefore, with any clear sense of how much time I had to work, nor even the confidence I could finish it. Rather, I worked on the book because I was out of college and my friends were at war and there was no sense in looking for a job if I would also be a soldier soon. So each month passed, and the novel proceeded. I was as lonely as I have ever been—which emotional tone is most certainly to be felt in the lugubrious weight of the style—and I was a little frightened of going to war and a great deal ashamed of not going to war and terrified of my audacity in writing so ambitious a novel—one part of me certainly knew how ignorant I was—and even more terrified I would not have time to finish, and therefore if I were soon killed in the war, nobody (except my family) would know that a young and potentially important author had lived among them: Such is the tone of the book. It is not a period I look back on with pleasure. Still, the novel got written, and I finished it in January of 1944.

  It could not have seemed so bad a novel then as it does today. The politics of A Transit to Narcissus—during those war years when you went a long distance to the Right before you found a liberal who was not moving to the Left—were fashionable politics; its portrait of a mental hospital was without comparison, literally!—I cannot think of any other American novel, good or bad, written about an insane asylum before World War II. Moreover, the horror of the descriptions was accurate. In those years, before Thorazine and other tranquilizers changed the mood of our mental wards to the mood of our cancer wards, insane asylums, at least from the point of view of the inmates, had probably not improved significantly since the days of Hogarth. The beatings came every bit as frequently as they are portrayed in this novel, nor is the lack of medical care exaggerated. (That the real situation may not be better today—that Thorazine might do even less for a madman’s soul than a brutal beating is a discussion belonging to R. D. Laing and will not be entered here.)