On Becoming a Novelist (7 page)

Nothing, let me pause to argue, could be farther from the truth than the notion that theme is all. Theme is what, at its deepest level, the story is about; it is the philosophical and emotional principle by which the writer selects and organizes his materials. Real literary artists are always conscious of their theme; but this does not assure good writing. Both theme and message (that is, subject and specific preachment) are likely to be more visible in a cheap western than in Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
. And on the other hand, in some of our most beloved fictions the theme is difficult to isolate. What, exactly, is the theme of “Jack and the Beanstalk”? Any given reader may think he knows, but he should be given pause by the fact that for Bruno Bettelheim, whom most people would consider a competent psychologist (or at least not stupid), the story is about penis envy—surely a minority opinion. Some might say that the story is about the victory of childish innocence; some might say other things. The point is that what makes us take pleasure in “Jack and the Beanstalk” is not necessarily our sense, as we read or listen, that some basic philosophical question is being dramatized and illuminated, though in other fictions theme may indeed be what chiefly moves us. In
Pilgrim’s Progress
the allegory may be the central appeal, though some might argue more or less persuasively that what we like most about that book is its style. Certainly, in Melville’s
Bartleby the Scrivener
or Mann’s
Death in Venice
, philosophical content is part of what holds us rapt. If theme is not what we chiefly love about a given story, not chiefly what makes us reread it and recommend it to our friends, then theme is not universally the most important quality of good fiction. Theme is like the floors and structural supports in a fine old mansion, indispensable but not, as a general rule, what takes the reader’s breath away. More often than not, theme, or meaning, is the statement the architecture and decor make about the inhabitants. When we think about it, it seems to me, the all but universal fascination with theme in high-school and college English courses has to do with the teacher’s need to say something intellectual and surprising. A flawlessly told story by Boccaccio, Balzac, or Borges is hard to talk about simply as a story, and since all stories “mean” things—sometimes quite odd and surprising things—the temptation to talk about the meaning rather than the story may be nearly irresistible.

For this reason the college-age student is easily persuaded to the view that great writers are primarily philosophers and teachers; they write to “show” us things. This is the message teachers and professional critics suggest in such misleading locutions as “Jean Rhys is
showing
us” or “Flaubert is
demonstrating
…” Teaching creative writing, one constantly hears students say of their work, “I am trying to show…” The error in this is obvious once it’s pointed out. Does the twenty-or twenty-five-year-old writer really have brilliant insights that the intelligent reading public (doctors, lawyers, professors, skilled machinists, businessmen) has never before heard or thought of? If the young novelist’s answer is an emphatic
yes
, he would do the world a favor by entering the ministry or the Communist party. If I belabor the point, I do so only because the effect of English literature courses is so often, for a certain kind of student, insidious.

Though it may not be universal, and though in any case it’s a matter of degree, it often seems that people in their late teens or twenties cannot help but feel that their parents and most other so-called adults are fools, sell-outs, or at the very least, disappointing. Their disdain has partly to do with the developing psyche’s struggle, the imperative Joyce treated, that the young animal assert his power and replace the elder. No doubt it is often a class trait: the child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he’s lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he’s invaded is unlikely to accept him fully. And no doubt the arrogance of the young has also to do with the age-old idealism of teachers, who forever harp, not without some justice, on how the former generation failed and the world’s salvation is up to the new generation. Whatever the cause, the young person—the young novelist—is encouraged to feel that
he
is life’s hope,
he
is the Messiah.

There’s nothing wrong with that feeling. It’s natural—part of nature—and no artist ever became great by violating his deepest feelings, however youthful, neurotic, or wrongheaded. Nonetheless, adolescent emotion cannot create real art, usually, and if the young novelist can understand his inclination he can avoid an undue misuse of his energies. One of the great temptations of young writers is to believe that all the people in the subdivision in which he grew up were fools and hypocrites in need of blasting or instruction. As he matures, the writer will come to realize, with luck, that the people he scorned had important virtues, that they had better heads and hearts than he knew. The desire to show people proper beliefs and attitudes is inimical to the noblest impulses of fiction.

In the final analysis, what counts is not the philosophy of the writer (that will reveal itself in any case) but the fortunes of the characters, how their principles of generosity or stubborn honesty or stinginess or cowardice help them or hurt them in specific situations. What counts is the characters’ story.

Just as it is easy for the student of literature to believe he, his teacher, and his classmates are better people than those unfamiliar with Ezra Pound, it is easy for him to be persuaded by his coursework that “entertainment” is a low if not despicable value in literature. Properly indoctrinated, the student may come to be convinced that certain classics he instinctively dismissed, at first, as insipid (good candidates, some would say, are Langland’s
Piers Plowman
and Richardson’s
Clarissa
) are in fact immensely interesting books, though not entertaining in the common sense, like the
Canterbury Tales
, or
Tom Jones
, or the sci-fi of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (
A Canticle for Leibowitz
). If he takes enough English literature courses, the young would-be writer can learn to block every true instinct he has. He learns to dismiss from mind the persistent mean streak in J. D. Salinger, the tough-guy whining sentimentality in Hemingway, Faulkner’s bad habit of breaking the vivid and continuous dream by pouring on the rhetoric, Joyce’s mannerisms, Nabokov’s frigidity. He can learn that writers he at first thought quite good, usually women (Margaret Mitchell, Pearl Buck, Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys), are “really” second class. With the right teacher he can learn that Homer’s
Iliad
is a poem against war, that the
Canterbury Tales
is a disguised sermon, or—if he studies with Professor Stanley Fish and his cohorts—that we have no objective grounds for saying that Shakespeare’s work is “better” than that of Mickey Spillane. If he also takes courses in creative writing, he may learn that one should always write about what one knows, that the most important thing in fiction is point of view, perhaps even that plot and character are the marks of antiquated fiction. To a wise and secure innocent all this would seem very odd, but students in a college classroom are defenseless, and the rewards offered for giving in are many, the chief one being the seductive sweetness of literary elitism.

It is the power of miseducation’s blandishments that makes stubbornness, even churlishness, a valuable quality in young writers. The good young writer, the potentially successful one, knows what he knows and will not budge—chiefly knows that the first quality of good storytelling is storytelling. A profound theme is of trifling importance if the characters knocked around by it are uninteresting, and brilliant technique is a nuisance if it pointlessly prevents us from seeing the characters and what they do.

The stubbornness that saves a writer in college will continue to serve him all his life, guarding and preserving his ego if the world refuses to notice how good he is and saving him, if necessary, from the potential suckerdom of fame. (The famous author tends to be less meticulously edited than the unknown one, tends to be asked for his opinion on subjects he knows nothing about, tends to be sought out for reviews or jacket blurbs of bad books by his friends.) And stubbornness will prove useful, in later life as in college, in protecting the writer from those who try to give him bad advice. As inept college writing teachers try to get the beginning writer to write fiction more like that of Jane Austen, or Grace Paley, or Raymond Carver, so well-meaning nincompoops later (editors, reviewers, academicians) are sure to put pressure on the writer to make him more nearly what they would be if they could write fiction. Not, of course, that the writer’s stubbornness should be absolute. Some advice turns out to be good, however distasteful at first.

If the writer understands that stories are first and foremost stories, and that the best stories set off a vivid and continuous dream, he can hardly help becoming interested in technique, since it is mainly bad technique that breaks the continuousness and checks the growth of the fictional dream. He quickly discovers that when he unfairly manipulates his fiction—pushing the characters around by making them do things they wouldn’t do if they were free of him; or laying on the symbolism (so that the strength of the fiction is diminished, too much of its energy going into mere intellect); or breaking in on the action to preach (however important the truth he’s out to preach); or pumping up his style so that it becomes more visible than even the most interesting of his characters—the writer, by these clumsy moves, impairs his fiction. To notice such faults is to begin to correct them. One reads other writers to see how they do it (how they avoid overt manipulation), or one reads books about writing—even the worst are likely to be of some use—and above all, one writes and writes and writes. Let me add, before I leave this subject, that when he reads the work of other writers, the young novelist should read not in the manner of an English major but in the manner of a novelist. The good English major studies a work to understand and appreciate its meaning, to perceive its relationship to other works of the period, and so on. The young writer should read to see how effects are achieved, how things are done, sometimes reflecting on what he would have done in the same situation and on whether his way would have been better or worse, and why. He reads the way a young architect looks at a building, or a medical student watches an operation, both devotedly, hoping to learn from a master, and critically, alert for any possible mistake.

The development of fully competent technique calls for further psychological armor. If a writer learns his craft slowly and carefully, laboriously strengthening his style, not publishing too fast, people may begin to look at the writer aslant and ask suspiciously, “And what do
you
do?” meaning: “How come you sit around all the time? How come your dog’s so thin?” Here the virtue of childishness is helpful—the writer’s refusal to be serious about life, his mischievousness, and his tendency to cry, especially when drunk, a trick that makes persecutors quit. If the pressure grows intense, the oral and anal fixations swing into action: one relieves pressure by chewing things, chattering mindlessly, or straightening and restraightening one’s clothes.

The point is a serious one, and I do not mean to trivialize it. In my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. To most people, even those who don’t read much, there is something special and vaguely magical about writing, and it is not easy for them to believe that someone they know—someone quite ordinary in many respects—can really do it. They tend to feel for the young writer a mixture of fond admiration and pity, a sense that the poor fellow is somehow maladjusted or misinformed. No human activity I know of takes more time than writing: it’s highly unusual for anyone to become a successful writer if he cannot put in several hours every day at his typewriter. (Even for a successful professional, it can take a while to get into the mood, takes hours to get a few good pages of rough draft, and many many hours to revise them until they will bear repeated readings.) Of necessity the writer is unlike those of his friends who quit work at five; if he has a wife and children, the writer cannot pay as much attention to them as his neighbors do to theirs, and if the writer is worthy of his profession, he feels some guilt over this. Because his art is such a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious law firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may be still sweating out his first novel. Even if he has published a story or two in respectable periodicals, the writer doubts himself. In my teaching years, I have again and again seen young writers with obvious talent berate themselves almost to the point of paralysis because they feel they’re not fulfilling their family and social obligations, feel—even when several stories have been accepted—that they’re deluding themselves. Each rejection letter is shattering, and a parent’s gentle prod—“Don’t you think it’s time you had children, Martha?”—can be an occasion of spiritual crisis. Only strong character, reinforced by the encouragement of a few people who believe in the writer, can get one through this period. The writer must somehow convince himself that he is in fact serious about life, so serious that he is willing to take great risks. He must find ways—mischievous humor, or whatever—of deflecting malicious or benevolent blows to his ego.

Only the writer who has come to understand how difficult it is simply to tell a first-rate story—with no cheap manipulations, no breaks in the dream, no preening or self-consciousness—is able to appreciate fully the quality of “generosity” in fiction. In the best fiction, plot is not a series of surprises but an increasingly moving series of recognitions, or moments of understanding. One of the most common mistakes among young writers (those who understand that fiction is storytelling) is the idea that a story gets its power from withheld information—that is, from the writer’s setting the reader up and then bushwhacking him. Ungenerous fiction is first and foremost fiction in which the writer is unwilling to take the reader as an equal partner.