The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

by Norman Mailer

  For example, how much of the history that’s made around us is conspiracy, how much is simple fuckups? You have to know the world to get some idea of that.

  It’s not advisable for a novelist, once he is successful!, to live in an upper-class social milieu for too long. Since it is a world of rigid rules, you cannot be yourself. There’s a marvelous built-in reflex in such society. It goes: If you are completely one of us, then you are not very interesting. (Unless you have prodigious amounts of money or impeccable family.) If you have any entrée, it’s because that world is always fascinated with mavericks, at least until the point where they become bored with you. Then you are out. On the other hand, while in, even as a maverick, there are certain rules you have to obey, and the first is to be amusing. (Capote and Jerzy Kosinski come to mind.) If you start accepting those rules past the point where you enjoy going along as part of the game, then you are injuring yourself. Capote played consigliere to New York society until he could bear it no longer and then he commenced his self-destruction with Answered Prayers. Kosinski, who may have been the most amusing guest of them all in New York, committed suicide during an ongoing illness.

  I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn’t I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose.

  Now, the things I’ve stood for have been roundly defeated. Literature, after all, has been ground down in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s a gloomy remark, but consider that literature was one of the forces that helped to shape the latter part of the nineteenth century—naturalism, for example. One can fear that in another hundred years the serious novel will bear the same relation to serious people that the five-act verse play does today. The profound novel will be a curiosity, a long cry away from what great writing once offered. Where indeed would England be now without Shakespeare? Or Ireland without James Joyce or Yeats? If you ask who has had that kind of influence today in America, I’d say Madonna. Some years ago, the average young girl was completely influenced by her. She affected the way girls dressed, acted, behaved. So far, she’s had more to do with women’s liberation than Women’s Liberation. I mean, for every girl who was affected by feminist ideology, there must have been five who tried to live and dress the way they thought Madonna did. They had their own private revolution without ever hearing about Ms. magazine.

  Sometimes you write a novel because it comes out of elements in yourself that—no better word—are deep. The subject appeals to some root in your psyche, and you set out on a vertiginous venture. But there are other times when you may get into an altogether different situation. You just damn well have to write a book for no better reason than that your economic problems are pressing.

  Tough Guys Don’t Dance comes under that rubric. After I finished Ancient Evenings, I was exhausted. I also felt spoiled. So I did no writing for ten months. Unfortunately, my then-publisher Little, Brown and I were parting company. (They weren’t mad about authors who took eleven years on a massive tome like Ancient Evenings.) However, there was one more book owed to them. And my feeling was, Well, they won’t want the book right away even if they have been paying me good money every month to write it and I haven’t been doing the job. Reality had not tapped on any of my windows for all those months. If it sounds silly that a grown man could be that naïve, well, we are all, you know, somewhat less than our sophistication.

  So, on month ten, they said to me in effect, “Are you going to give us a novel or will you repay us the money?” Now, I had to recognize that if I ended up owing them a year of sizable monthly stipends, I would never catch up with the IRS.

  The only thing was to come up with a book in sixty days! I couldn’t possibly give them non-fiction. The research would take too long—no, I had to do a novel that would be quick and comfortable. First thing, therefore, was to make a decision on whether to do it in first person or third. First person is always more hospitable in the beginning. You can give a sense of the immediate almost at once. It would be first person, then.

  But where would it take place? New York is too complicated to write about quickly. Besides, given the constrictions of time, I had to know the place well. All right, it would have to be a book about Provincetown. At that time, in the early Eighties, I had been going there off and on for forty years. For practical purposes, it was all the small town I would ever have.

  What should it be about? Well, I could take my cue from An American Dream, make it a story of murder and suspense. But who would the narrator be? An easy decision: Let him be a writer. In first person, a writer is the single most cooperative character to deal with. Let him be between thirty-five and forty, frustrated, never published, bitter, quite bright, but not as bright as myself. After all, I had to be able to write this book in a hurry. Then, having subscribed to these quick guidelines, I thought if I had one pious bone in my body, just one, I would now get down and pray. Because I was still in trouble. Sixty days to produce a novel!

  I set out. It’s one of the few times I’ve felt blessed as a writer. I knew there was a limit to how good the book could be, but the style came through, and that is always half of a novel. You can write a very bad book, but if the style is first-rate, then you’ve got something that will live—not forever, but for a decent time. The shining example might be G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. It has an undeniably silly plot unless you invest a great deal into it. A worshipful right-wing critic can do a blitheringly wonderful thesis on the symbolic leaps and acrobatics of The Man Who Was Thursday, but actually, it’s about as silly as a Jules Verne novel. Yet the writing itself is fabulous. The style is extraordinary. The aperçus are marvelous. The Man Who Was Thursday proves the point: Style is half of a novel.

  And for some good reason, unknown to me, the style came through in Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The writing was probably, for the most part, as good as I can muster. The plot, however, was just as close to silly. That was the price to pay for the speed of composition. The irony is that the book did not end up at Little, Brown. I was able to pay off my debt because Random House wanted me, and I have been with them ever since.

  I expect we are now ready to talk about the writer’s daily work.

  *Here are the ten lines:

  Tentatively, she reached out a hand to caress his hair, and at that moment Herman Teppis opened his legs and let Bobby slip to the floor. At the expression of surprise on her face, he began to laugh. “Just like this, sweetie,” he said, and down he looked at that frightened female mouth, facsimile of all those smiling lips he had seen so ready to be nourished at the fount of power and with a shudder he started to talk. “That’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie,” he said in a mild lost little voice, “you’re just an angel darling, and I like you, and you understand, you’re my darling darling, oh that’s the ticket,” said Teppis.

  *Here are the ten lines as changed:

  Tentatively, she reached out a hand to finger his hair, and at that moment Herman Teppis opened his legs and let Bobby fall to the floor. At the expression of surprise on her face, he began to laugh. “Don’t you worry, sweetie,” he said, and down he looked at that frightened female mouth, facsimile of all those smiling lips he had seen so ready to serve at the thumb of power, and with a cough, he started to talk. “That’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie,” he said in a mild little voice, “you’re an angel darling, and I like you, you’re my darling darling, oh that’s the ticket,” said Teppis.

  CRAFT

  HAZARDS

  Before we can talk about lore, skill, or practice, it may prove of use to discuss the most common occupational hazard of the writer—a bad mood. The indispensable element in craft is learning to live with the problems and perils of the profession. They do weigh on one in a special
fashion.

  The piece that follows may be a touch too hortatory, but then, it was delivered as a speech at the University of Michigan Hopwood Awards in 1984. Originally called “The Hazards and Sources of Writing,” I have broken it into several sections. Stories about Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Rauschenberg, and Willem de Kooning appear in other portions of this book, and the last few pages (Sources) have been moved over to “The Occult,” where I try to talk about the mysterious origin of some novelistic choices.

  This portion, however, is complete in itself, and does deal with the difficulties of writing a novel when the winds of one’s creative spirit threaten oncoming squalls or, worse, long periods of no wind—becalmed by writer’s block.

  I am going to speak of the working state of the novelist once he has passed his apprenticeship—and to avoid saying his or her on every occasion, let me repeat that I will often use the possessive pronoun his to indicate all of humankind. The apprenticeship of a writer is, of course, subject to all the later hazards of the profession, those perils of writer’s block and failing energy, alcoholism, drugs, and desertion. For many a writer deserts writing to go into a collateral profession in advertising or academia, trade journals, publishing—the list is long. What is not routine is to become a young writer with a firmly established name. Luck as well as talent can take one across the first border. Some do surpass the trials of acquiring technique and commence to make a living at our bizarre profession. It is then, however, that less-charted perils begin. I would like to speak at length of the hazards of writing, the cruelties it extorts out of mind and flesh. I know something of these hazards and I ought to. My first story was published, after all, more than forty years ago and the first novel I wrote that saw print is going to be thirty-six years old in a month. Obviously, for a long time I have been accustomed to thinking of myself as a writer, even as others see me that way. So I hear one lament over and over from strangers: “Oh, I too would have liked to be an author.” You can almost hear them musing aloud about the freedom of the life. How felicitous to have no boss and to face no morning rush to work, to know all the intoxications of celebrity—how they long to satisfy the voice within that keeps saying, “What a pity no one will know how unusual my life has been! There are all those secrets I cannot tell!” Years ago, I wrote, “Experience, when it cannot be communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.” I often ponder the remark. Once in a while your hand will write out a sentence that seems true and yet you do not know where it came from. Ten or twenty words seem able to live in balance with your experience. It may be one’s nicest reward as a writer. You feel you have come near the truth. When that happens, you can look at the page years later and meditate again on the meaning, for it goes deep. So how can I not understand why people want to write? All the same, I am also a professional and so there is another part of me that is ready to laugh when strangers tell me of their aspirations. I am not free of the scorn of a veteran prizefighter who hears someone say, “I’d like to flatten that bully.” The speaker does not know how many years of discipline and dull punishment must be given over to the ability to throw a good punch at will. I say to myself, “They can write an interesting letter so they assume they are ready to tell the story of their lives. They do not understand how much it will take to pick up even the rudiments of narrative.” If I believe that the person who has spoken to me in that fashion is serious, I warn them as gently as I can. I say, “Well, it’s probably as hard to learn to write as to play the piano.” Then if their only reason for wanting to be a writer is to pull in some quick success, they feel deflated and that’s okay with me. One shouldn’t encourage people to write for too little. It’s a splendid life when you think of its emoluments, but it can be death to the soul if you are not good at it.

  Let me keep my promise, then, and go on a little about the negative part of being a writer. To skip at one bound over all those fascinating and relatively happy years when one is an apprentice writer and learning every day, at least on good days, there is in contrast the more or less constant pressure on the life of the professional novelist. For soon after you finish each hard-earned book, the reviews come in and the reviews are murderous. Contrast an author’s reception to an actor’s. With the notable exception of John Simon, theater critics do not often try to kill performers. I believe there is an unspoken agreement that thespians deserve to be protected against the perils of first nights. After all, the actor is daring a rejection that can prove as fearful as a major wound. For sensitive human beings like actors, a hole in the ego can be worse than a hole in the heart. Such moderation does not carry over, however, into literary criticism. Meretricious, dishonest, labored, loathsome, pedestrian, hopeless, disgusting, disappointing, raunchy, ill-wrought, boring—these are not uncommon words for a bad review. You would be hard put to find another professional field where criticism is equally savage. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, and doctors do not often speak publicly in this manner.

  Yet the unhappiest thing to say is that our critical practice may even be fair, harsh but fair. After all, one prepares a book in the safety of the study and nothing short of your self-esteem, your bills, or your editor is forcing you to show your stuff. You put your book out, if you can afford to take the time, only when it is ready. If economic necessity forces you to write somewhat faster than is good for you—well, everybody has his sad story. As a practical matter, not that much has to be written into the teeth of a gale and few notes need be taken on the face of a cliff. An author usually does his stint at the desk, feeling not too hungry and suffering no pains greater than the view of his empty pad of paper. Now, granted, that white sheet can look as blank as a television screen when the program is off the air, but that is not a danger, merely a deadening presence. The writer, unlike more active creative artists, works in no immediate peril. Why should not the open season begin so soon as the work comes out? If talented authors were to have it better than actors in all ways, there would be a tendency for actors to disappear and talented authors to multiply, so the critics keep our numbers down.

  In fact, not too many good writers remain productive through the decades. There are too many other hazards as well. We are jerked by the media in and out of fashion, and each drop from popularity can feel like a termination to your career. Such insecurity is no help to morale, for even in the best periods every writer always knows one little terror: Does it stop tomorrow? Does it all stop tomorrow? Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words. So your professionalism at best is fragile. You cannot always tell yourself that fashions pass and history will smile at you again. In the literary world, it is not easy to acquire the stoicism to endure, especially if you’ve begun as a vulnerable adolescent. It is not even automatic to pray for luck if it has been pessimism itself which gave force to your early themes. Maybe it is no more than blind will, but some authors stay at it. Over and over they keep writing a new book and do it in the knowledge that upon its publication they will probably be savaged and will not be able to fight back. An occasional critic can be singled out for counterattack, or one can always write a letter to the editor of the book section, but such efforts at self-defense are like rifle fire against fighter planes. All-powerful is the writer when he sits at his desk, but on the public stage he may feel as if his rights are puny. His courage, if he has any, must learn to live with the bruises left by comments on his work. The spiritual skin may go slack or harden to leather, but the honor of the effort to live down bad reviews and write again has to be analogous to the unspoken, unremarked courage of people who dwell under the pressure of a long illness and somehow resolve enough of their inmost contradictions to be able to get better. I suppose this is equal to saying that you cannot become a professional writer and keep active for three or four decades unless you learn to live with the most difficult condition of your existence, which is that superficial book rev
iewing is irresponsible and serious literary criticism can be close to merciless. The conviction that such a condition is fair has to take root deep enough to bear analogy to the psychology of a peasant who farms a mountain slope and takes it for granted that he or she was meant to toil through the years with one foot standing higher than the other.

  Every good author who manages to forge a long career must be able, therefore, to build a character that will not be unhinged by a bad reception. That takes art. Few writers have rugged personalities when they are young. In general, the girls seldom look like potential beauty contest winners and the boys show small promise of becoming future All-Americans. They are most likely to be found on the sidelines, commencing to cook up that warped, passionate, bitter, transcendent view of life which will bring them later to the attention of the American public. But only later! The young writer usually starts as a loser and so is obliged to live with the conviction that the world he knows had better be wrong or he or she is wrong. On the answer depends one’s evaluation of one’s right to survive. Thanks to greed, plastics, mass media, and various abominations of technology—lo, the world is wrong. The paranoid aim of a cockeyed young writer has as much opportunity to hit the target as the beauty queen’s wide-eyed lack of paranoia. So occasionally this loser of a young writer ends up a winner, for a while. His vision has projected him forward; he is just enough ahead of his time. But dependably, that wretched, lonely act of writing will force him back. Writing arouses too much commotion in one’s psyche to allow the author to rest happily.

  It is not easy to explain such disturbances to people unless they do write. Someone who has never tried fiction will hardly be quick to understand that in the study, a writer often does feel God-like. There one sits, ensconced in judgment on other people’s lives. Yet contemplate the person in the chair: He or she could be hungover and full of the small shames of what was done yesterday or ten years ago. Those flashes of old fiascoes wait like ghosts in the huge house of the empty middle-aged self. Sometimes the ghosts even appear and ask to be laid to rest. Consciously or unconsciously, writers must fashion a new peace with the past every day they attempt to write. They must rise above despising themselves. If they cannot, they will probably lose the sanction to render judgment on others.