The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (17 page)

Let us turn now to three faults far graver than mere clumsiness—not faults of technique but faults of soul: sentimentality, frigidity, and mannerism. Faults of soul, I’ve said; but I don’t mean those words as a Calvinist would. Faults of soul, like faults of technique, can be corrected. In fact the main work a writing teacher does, and the main work the writer must do for himself, is bring about change in the writer’s basic character, helping to make him that “true Poet,” as Milton said, without whom there can be no true Poem.

Sentimentality, in all its forms, is the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause. (I take it for granted that the reader understands the difference between
sentiment
in fiction, that is, emotion or feeling, and
sentimentality
, emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration. Without sentiment, fiction is worthless. Sentimentality, on the other hand, can make mush of the finest characters, actions, and ideas.) The theory of fiction as a vivid, uninterrupted dream in the reader’s mind logically requires an assertion that legitimate cause in fiction can be of only one kind: drama; that is, character in action. Once it is dramatically established that a character is worthy of our sympathy and love, the story-teller has every right (even the obligation, some would say) to give sharp focus to our grief at the misfortunes of that character by means of powerful, appropriate rhetoric. (If
the emotional moment has been well established, plain statements may be just as effective. Think of Chekhov.) The result is strong sentiment, not sentimentality. But if the story-teller tries to make us burst into tears at the misfortunes of some character we hardly know; if the story-teller appeals to stock response (our love of God or country, our pity for the downtrodden, the presumed warm feelings all decent people have for children and small animals); if he tries to make us cry by cheap melodrama, telling us the victim that we hardly know is all innocence and goodness and the oppressor all vile black-heartedness; or if he tries to win us over not by the detailed and authenticated virtues of the unfortunate but by rhetorical clichés, by breathless sentences, or by superdramatic one-sentence paragraphs (“Then she saw the gun”)—sentences of the kind favored by porno and thriller writers, and increasingly of late by supposedly serious writers—then the effect is sentimentality, and no reader who’s experienced the power of real fiction will be pleased by it.

In great fiction we are moved by what happens, not by the whimpering or bawling of the writer’s presentation of what happens. That is, in great fiction, we are moved by characters and events, not by the emotion of the person who happens to be telling the story. Sometimes, as in the fiction of Tolstoy or Chekhov—and one might mention many others—the narrative voice is deliberately kept calm and dispassionate, so that the emotion arising from the fictional events comes through almost wholly untinged by presentation; but restraint of that kind is not an aesthetic necessity. A flamboyant style like that of Faulkner at his best can be equally successful. The trick is simply that the style must work in the service of the material, not in advertisement of the writer. When the ideas, characters, and actions are firmly grounded, Thomas Wolfe’s or William Faulkner’s style can give fitting expression to a story’s emotional content. Like the formal laments of a Greek chorus, great rolling waves of rhetoric can raise our joy or grief to a keen intensity that
transcends the mundane and takes on the richness and universality of ritual. What begins in the real, in other words, can be uplifted by style to something we recognize, even as we read, as at once the real and the real transmuted. So the passage on the death of Joe Christmas, in
Light in August
, strikes the reader as at once reality and artifice, fact and hymn. The prose poetry, in all its majestic self-consciousness, its unabashed leap above the language ordinary people really speak, causes us to feel the resonance of the death and all it means. But it’s because the necessary drama has been presented—the lifelike causes laid out in the story—that the rhetoric works. When Wolfe or Faulkner works less carefully, as both sometimes do, trying to make incantation substitute for character-in-action, the reader squirms. We may squirm in the same way, it has often been remarked, when we encounter the other extreme of manneristic sentimentality, the whine we sometimes catch in Hemingway, wherein understatement becomes a kind of self-pity.

The fault Longinus identified as “frigidity” occurs in fiction whenever the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding intrusion that he is less concerned about his characters than he ought to be—less concerned, that is, than any decent human being observing the situation would naturally be. Suppose the writer is telling of a bloody fistfight between an old man and his son, and suppose that earlier in the story he has shown that the old man dearly loves his son, though he can never find an adequate way to show it, so that the son, now middle-aged, still suffers from his belief that his father dislikes him, and wishes he could somehow turn the old man’s dislike to love. Suppose, further, that the writer has established this story of misunderstandings with sufficient power that when the fistfight begins—the old man’s blow to the side of his son’s head, the son’s astonished raising of his arms for protection, the old man’s second blow, this time to the nose, so that the son in pain and fury hits the old man on the ear—our reaction as we read is horror and grief. We bend toward the book in fascination and alarm, and the
writer continues: “The old man was crying like a baby now and swinging wildly—harmlessly, now that he’d been hurt—swinging and crying, red-faced, like a baby with his diapers full.” “Yuk!” we say, and throw the book into the fire. What has happened, of course, is that the writer has forgotten that his characters’ situation is serious; he’s responded to his own imagined scene with insufficient warmth, has allowed himself to get carried away by the baby image, and, momentarily forgetting or failing to notice the scene’s
real
interest—the fact that a pathetic misunderstanding can have led to this—the writer snatches at (or settles for) a detail of, at best, trivial interest, dirty diapers. The writer lacks the kind of passion all true artists possess. He lacks the nobility of spirit that enables a real writer to enter deeply into the feelings of imaginary characters (as he enters deeply into the feelings of real people). In a word, the writer is frigid.

Strictly speaking, frigidity characterizes the writer who presents serious material, then fails to carry through—fails to treat it with the attention and seriousness it deserves. I would extend the term to mean a further cold-heartedness as well, the given writer’s inability to recognize the seriousness of things in the first place, the writer who turns away from real feeling, or sees only the superficialities in a conflict of wills, or knows no more about love, beauty, or sorrow than one might learn from a Hallmark card. With the meaning thus extended, frigidity seems one of the salient faults in contemporary literature and art. It is sometimes frigidity that leads writers to tinker, more and more obsessively, with form; frigidity that leads critics to schools of criticism that take less and less interest in character, action, and the explicit ideas of the story. It may even be frigidity that steers the writer toward sentimentality, the faking of emotions the writer does not honestly feel. Frigidity is, in short, one of the worst faults possible in literature, and often the basis of other faults. When the amateur writer lets a bad sentence stand in his final draft, though he knows it’s bad, the sin is frigidity:
He has not yet learned the importance of his art, the only art or science in the world that deals in precise detail with the causes, nature, and effects of ordinary and extraordinary human feeling. When a skillful writer writes a shallow, cynical, merely amusing book about extramarital affairs, he has wandered—with far more harmful effect—into the same unsavory bog.

Mannered writing seems at times a species of frigidity (Hemingway at his worst), at other times a species of sentimentality (Faulkner at his worst), but is best treated as a separate fault, since the mannered writer may be neither frigid nor sentimental but simply mannered. Mannered writing is writing that continually distracts us from the fictional dream by stylistic tics that we cannot help associating, as we read, with the author’s wish to intrude himself, prove himself different from all other authors. The tics of mannered writing are not to be confused with stylistic devices that can be explained as clearly in the service of subject matter (character and action) or designed to express some new way of seeing (the special effects of some difficult but clearly justifiable style we must learn to tune in on, as we do to the styles of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, or, more recently, Peter Matthiessen in
Far Tortuga
). Neither should the tics of mannered writing be confused with those oddities we associate with inherent stiffness or nervousness, comparable to that of an amateur speaker who forms his sentences carefully and somewhat clumsily, as in the painstaking, sometimes clunky style of Sherwood Anderson. Look, for example, at the first two paragraphs of his “Death in the Woods.”

It’s hard to believe that Anderson thinks country people talk this way, and the idea that he is imitating an illiterate man’s way of writing is too discouraging to pursue. Yet, reading Anderson’s carefully stiff work, we never get the sense that he writes as he does to call attention to himself. Either he
cannot
write more smoothly (but some of his fiction belies this) or else he writes in this farmerish way because the style expresses his fiction’s purpose: It discourages us from looking for superficial beauty, the polish of entertainment, and encourages us to read him sober-mindedly, with the sort of country earnestness that suits the plain, thoughtful narrator and his story. The style shows us not the writer’s cleverness, much less his ego, but the tone and intention of his writing.

The tics of mannered writing, on the other hand, are those from which we gather, by the prickling of our thumbs, some ulterior purpose on the writer’s part, a purpose perhaps not fully conscious but nevertheless suspect, putting us on our guard. Think of John Dos Passos at his most self-important, or George Bernard Shaw when he pontificates. Whereas the frigid writer lacks strong feeling, and the sentimental writer applies feeling indiscriminately, the mannered writer feels more strongly about his own personality and ideas—his ego, which he therefore
keeps before us by means of style—than he feels about any of his characters—in effect, all the rest of humanity.

Mannered writing, then—like sentimentality and frigidity—arises out of flawed character. In critical circles it is considered bad form to make connections between literary faults and bad character, but for the writing teacher such connections are impossible to miss, hence impossible to ignore. If a male student writer attacks all womanhood, producing a piece of fiction that embarrasses the class, the teacher does less than his job requires if he limits his criticism to comments on the writer’s excessive use of “gothic detail,” the sentimentalizing tendency of his sentence rhythms, or the distracting effect of his heavily scatological diction. The best such timorous criticism can achieve is a revised piece of fiction that is free of all technical faults but no less embarrassing. To help the writer, since that is his job, the teacher must enable the writer to see—partly by showing him how the fiction betrays his distorted vision (as fiction, closely scrutinized, always will)—that his personal character is wanting.

Some writing teachers feel reluctant to do this kind of thing, and people who are not artists—people with no burning convictions about writing or the value of getting down to bedrock truth—are inclined to be sympathetic. Nobody’s perfect, they generously observe. But the true artist is impatient with such talk. Circus knife-throwers know that it is indeed possible to be perfect, and one had better be. Perfection means hitting exactly what you are aiming at and not touching by a hair what you are not. It serves no useful purpose for the writer to remind himself that “even Homer sometimes nods.” Homer doesn’t, except in the most trivial ways; for instance, in his many long battle scenes, carelessly killing off the same soldier twice. Chaucer, in all his finest poems, achieves something very near perfection. Racine in
Phaedra.
Shakespeare in
Macbeth.
Serious critics sometimes argue that the standards in art are always relative, but all artistic masterpieces give them the lie. In the greatest
works of art—think of the last works of Cézanne or Beethoven—there are no real mistakes. For this very reason (not snobbery or malice) it is important to keep track of the faults of writers not quite of the first rank, especially those writers close to our own time, whose genius half-persuades us that their faults must somehow be virtues.

When we look at writers of the last generation—to say nothing of the best-known writers now among us—no fault stands out more visibly than mannered style. William Faulkner, though one of the best of men and often a brilliant writer, was highly mannered. One more “apotheosis,” the reader feels, and he’ll be driven to blow up some church. In the late works, the reader feels again and again that Faulkner is trying to recapture lost successes by cranking up the rhetoric, originally invented to convey ideas and emotions already present, but now mere steam and roar and rattle, a freight train empty of its freight. Hemingway was as bad, though his mannered prose is antithetical to Faulkner’s. (Should anyone doubt that the Hemingway style is excessively mannered, not just beautifully chiseled, as it is in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and all his best short stories, let him try reading through ten, fifteen stories in a row.) James Joyce was another outrageous offender, as he knew himself. His lyrical repetitions of key symbolic phrases, especially in
Ulysses
, can never be explained fully by aesthetic function; they always carry with them a hint of Joyce’s dandyism, his middle-period unwillingness to stand back from the work of art—as he himself told the world it should do—his unwillingness as an artist to imitate God, sitting “outside, indifferent, paring his nails.” Late in life, Joyce was enormously pained and frustrated by the wrong turn he believed his career had taken after
Dubliners
and
Portrait.
The finest short story ever written, he claimed, was Tolstoy’s late, simple little fable, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” That opinion, like other of Joyce’s last opinions, is generally taken not too seriously. Joyce was ill, alcoholic, full of self-hatred; he had recently created—and was still working over—
one of the towering works of the human mind and spirit,
Finnegans Wake.