On Becoming a Novelist (9 page)

Before we leave our newspaperman story we should admit, reminded by Kafka’s practice, that it does have one chance of success. All aesthetic rules give way for comedy. Let us say our newspaperman is a true dolt—but an interesting one. He believes fervently everything his father has ever said; his father’s words are the law of his life. He also fervently loves his father. Obviously we are involved not in drama but in clown drama, the drama of lovable moron heroes like the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy. The newspaperman (Laurel), his father (Hardy), and everybody else who blunders into the story must be, in effect, clowns whose comment on the human condition is not that of realistic fiction or even of, say, the gothic tale, with its systematically altered realism, but something quite different, a special kind of loving satire. The story can now work, at least theoretically, because, though the clash of ideas is not in itself interesting, the characters involved may be interesting and appealing, in a cartoonish way, and they’re stupid enough to be interested in what we see through at once. Though the characters are patently inferior to us, their agonies, perplexities, and triumphs clowningly parallel our own. No one will claim that the story has been made intellectually significant, but it is at least no longer an expression of authorial weak-mindedness. As for the emotional significance of the piece, the only way we can judge such things, in the case of comedy, is by giving the story to readers and seeing if they laugh.

If the young writer is to achieve intellectual and emotional significance in his fiction, he must have the common sense to tell foolish ideas from interesting ones and important emotions from trivial ones. These abilities can be guided a little, for instance by the teacher’s pointing out, as I’ve done above, that stories beginning in character and conflict are bound to be more interesting than stories that do not—a principle applicable even to thrillers, sodbusters, and horror stories. And the writer’s sense of what questions are really interesting and what ones aren’t worth bothering with may be heightened a little by wide reading, by conversation with intelligent people, and by the conscious attempt to, as James said, “be someone on whom nothing is lost.”

On the whole, the capacity for recognizing the significant is a gift. It helps not to be a dupe, to be, instead, a person of independent mind, not carried away by fads; and it may help to be a slow, deep thinker rather than a brilliant, facile one. If the young writer is by nature a foolish person, his chances are bad, though perhaps, to tell the truth, not all
that
bad. Every teacher of middle age or more can count up instances of highly successful former students who, as freshmen or sophomores, even juniors or seniors, seemed silly beyond all hope of reclamation. People change, sometimes because of outside forces—sickness, a failed marriage, a shattering family death, sometimes love or success—sometimes from a gradual process of maturing and reconsideration.

As for the quality of strangeness, it is hard to know what can be said. There can be no great art, according to the poet Coleridge, without a certain strangeness. Most readers will recognize at once that he’s right. There come moments in every great novel when we are startled by some development that is at once perfectly fitting and completely unexpected—for instance, the late, surprising entrance of Svidrigailov in
Crime and Punishment
, Mr. Rochester’s disguise in
Jane Eyre
, the rooftop scene in
Nicholas Nickleby
, Tommy’s stumbling upon the funeral in
Seize the Day
, the recognition moment in
Emma
, or those moments we experience in many novels when the ordinary and the extraordinary briefly interpenetrate, or things common suddenly show, if only for an instant, a different face. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then to the deep craziness of life itself—as when in
Anna Karenina
Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.

If I could explain exactly what I mean here, I could probably do what I think no one has ever done successfully: reveal the very roots of the creative process. The mystery is that even when one has experienced these moments, one finds, as mystics so often do, that after one has come out of them, one cannot say, or even clearly remember, what happened. In some apparently inexplicable way the mind opens up; one steps out of the world. One knows one was away because of the words one finds on the page when one comes back, a scene or a few lines more vivid and curious than anything one is capable of writing—though there they stand. (That experience, I suspect, is the motivating impulse behind the many stories of unearthly experiences confirmed in the final paragraph by some ring or coin or pink ribbon left behind by the otherworldly intruder.) All writing requires at least some measure of trancelike state: the writer must summon out of nonexistence some character, some scene, and he must focus that imaginary scene in his mind until he sees it as vividly as, in another state, he would see the typewriter and cluttered desk in front of him, or the last year’s calendar on his wall. But at times—for most of us, all too occasionally—something happens, a demon takes over, or nightmare swings in, and the imaginary
becomes the real
.

I remember that once, writing the last chapter of
Grendel
, this altered sense of things came over me with great force. It was not at the time a new or surprising experience; the one respect in which it was odd was that after I came out of it I seemed to remember vividly what had happened. Grendel has just had his arm torn off and recognizes that he will die. He has stubbornly insisted throughout the novel that we have no free will, that all life is brute mechanics, all poetic vision a cynical falsehood, and he clings even now to those opinions, partly for fear that optimism is cowardice, partly from stubborn self-love: even though Beowulf has banged Grendel’s head against a wall, bullying him into making up a poem about walls, Grendel is hanging on for dear life to his convictions, in terror of being swallowed by the universe and convinced that his opinions and his identity are one and the same. The “inspired” passage (I am of course not talking about its aesthetic value) begins approximately here:

No one follows me now. I stumble again and with my one weak arm I cling to the huge twisted roots of an oak. I look down past stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it’s impossible. “Accident,” I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can’t win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death.

Throughout the novel I’d made occasional allusions to the poetry and prose of William Blake, a major influence on my ideas about the imagination (its power to transform and redeem). Here, when I was simply following Grendel in my imagination, trying to feel in myself what it might be like to flee through deep woods, bleeding to death, I suddenly fell, without having planned it, into what I can only describe as a powerful dream of a Blakean landscape: the huge twisted roots of the oak, then a dizzying reversal of up and down (I had the sense of Grendel as fallen onto his back, looking up past the tree but imagining he was looking down, an image that recalls my childhood fear that if the planet is indeed round, I might one day fall off). Though the oak tree is from Blake, it was tinged in my mind with other associations. In Chaucer’s poetry, with which I was then deeply involved, the oak is associated with Christ’s cross and with sorrow in general; by another line it is associated with druids and human sacrifice, notions darkened for me by my childhood reaction to songs like “The Old Rugged Cross” (stained with blood so divine), grizzly and sickening reminders of beheaded chickens, butchered cows, child thoughts of death with undertones of guilt and the ultimate moral ugliness of God.

I did not, in my writing trance, separate these ideas out. I
saw
Blake’s tree, exactly the same tree I saw when I read Chaucer’s
The Book of the Duchess
, and its force was that of the cross I imagined in childhood, messy with blood and gobbets of flesh (an unorthodox image, I realize). I think, though I’m not sure, that it was this sense of the tree as tied to my childhood vision that made me react to it with a sense of déjà vu. Imitating (in fact feeling) Grendel’s terror, I react in Grendel’s way, clinging to my (his) opinion: “Accident!”—that is, Beowulf’s victory has no moral meaning; all life is chance. But the fear that it may not all be accident strikes back instantly, prodded a little by childhood notions of the cross—blood, guilt, one’s desperate wish to be a good boy, be loved both by one’s parents and by that terrifying superfather whose otherness cannot be more frighteningly expressed than by the fact that he lives beyond the stars. So for all his conscious belief that it’s all accident, Grendel
chooses
death, morally aligning himself with God (hence trying to save himself); that is, against his will he notices that he seems to “desire the fall.” Abruptly the nightmare landscape shifts, from looking “down” past the tree into the abyss of night to another source of vertigo, looking down from the edge of a cliff. I did not consciously make this shift because of the nightmare I’d had in my sleep the night before I wrote this page; rather, I noticed as I made the shift that in fact what I was writing was a nightmare that I’d had and until that instant had forgotten.

A day or two before, my family and I had been watching Olympic ski jumpers practice—a terrifying business, to me at least, frightened as I am by heights. In a dream, the night before the writing of this passage, I’d found myself moving very slowly—but inexorably—toward the edge of the ski jump, the snow below me unspeakably far away. I’d felt in my nightmare, for whatever reason, exactly this same sense that I was willing the fall, in spite of myself. (I think there is some strange pun in the word “fall”; at any rate, it’s a word I’ve often used elsewhere in its Edenic sense: so that the fear I felt as I was writing this passage—or enduring this entrancement—may have to do with moral paradox of the kind the unconscious takes wicked delight in: willing his death, Grendel is unconsciously trying to please God so that God will not slaughter him; willing “the Fall,” he is defying the God he hates and fears.) Grendel feels the movement in himself to be in some way the movement of the universe. He is like “an ocean current,” such a current as brought Beowulf to kill him; he feels that something inside him (his heart, his
id
) is at one with that current; and since earlier in the novel it was Grendel himself who lived “inside” (a cave), he is, since he houses the
id
monster, the mountain whose steeps he fears; he is some fabled mystery (“deep sea wonder”); and if the whole night sky is conceived as God’s cave, then Grendel, “dread night monarch astir in his cave,” is God. At the time I wrote the passage, I made all these connections (ocean current, monster, sea wonder, etc.) without consciously thinking: the mystical oneness, the calmly accepted paradox, were inherent in the entrancement.

The only point I mean to make out of this long and possibly self-indulgent analysis is this: All I myself know for sure, when I come out of one of these trance moments, is that I seem to have been taken over by some muse. Insofar as I’m able to remember what happened, it seems to me that it was this: for a moment the real process of our dreams has been harnessed. The magic key goes in, all the tumblers fall at once and the door swings open. Or: mental processes that are usually discrete for some reason act together. I was of course conscious, throughout my writing of
Grendel
, that what I was trying to talk about (or dramatize, or seek to get clear) was an annoying, sometimes painful disharmony in my own mental experience, a conflict between a wish for certainty, a sort of timid and legalistic rationality, on the one hand, and, on the other, an inclination toward childish optimism, what I might now describe as an occasional, flickering affirmation of all that was best in my early experience of Christianity. Surrounded by university people who had, as we say, “outgrown religion,” and feeling uneasy about joining their party because to do so might be a cowardly surrender and a betrayal of my background, though refusing to do so might also be cowardice, and a betrayal of myself, I had gloomed through writers like Jean-Paul Sartre who seemed confident that they knew what they were talking about (I was not convinced); I’d joined churches and, finding them distasteful, had left; and I’d become, more or less by accident, a specialist in medieval Christian poetry, including of course
Beowulf
, source of, among other things, the quasi-mystical macrocosm/microcosm equations at the end of the passage I’ve been discussing. All the elements to be fused in the trance moment were in place, like the assembled components of the Frankenstein monster’s body before the lightning strikes. What I can’t really explain is the lightning. It may have to do with entering as fully as possible into the imaginary experience of the character, getting “outside” oneself (a paradox, since the character to be entered is a projection of the writer’s self). It may have to do with the sense of mental strain one experiences at such moments: the whole mind seems tightened like a muscle, fierce with concentration. Anyway, if one is lucky the lightning strikes, and the madness at the core of the fictional idea for a moment glows on the page.

After verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, and a measure of the special intelligence of the storyteller, what the writer probably needs most is an almost daemonic compulsiveness. No novelist is hurt (at least as an artist) by a natural inclination to go to extremes, driving himself too hard, dissatisfied with himself and the world around him and driven to improve on both if he can.