The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

by Norman Mailer

  Writers aren’t taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven’t written the books that should have been written. We’ve spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven’t done the imaginative work that could have helped define America, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding. We just expand all over the place, and this spread is about as attractive as collapsed and flabby dough on a stainless steel table.

  If I could give one maxim to a young writer, I’d say live with your cowardice. Live with it every day. Hate it or defend it, but don’t try to slough it off. Cowardice is a prime cause; literary apathy or overt writer’s block is all too often the effect.

  BEING AND

  NOTHINGNESS

  The reader will be aware by now that I have some obsession with how God exists. Is He an essential or an existential God? Is He all-powerful or is He, like us, an embattled existential presence who may succeed or fail in His vision? I think this obsession began to show itself while I was doing the last draft of The Deer Park. Then it continued to grow as a private theme during all the years I was smoking marijuana. One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being. One becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption. One becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness of others.

  I’m not speaking now of violence or the active conflict between one being and another. That still belongs to drama. But the war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. I’d hardly read anything by Sartre at this time and nothing by Heidegger. I’ve read a bit since and I have to admire their formidable powers, but I suspect they are no closer to the buried continent of existentialism than were medieval cartographers near to a useful map of the world. The new continent that shows on our psychic maps as intimations of eternity is still to be discovered.

  I’ve never felt close to Beckett and haven’t read his novels. Friends tell me the best of his literary substance is there. I am, however, familiar with Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Endgame, and I’ve always been fascinated by how he has done something that no writer ever did before. When it comes to the presence of being and nothingness, Beckett said in effect, “Nothing is half of life and it is the half I know about. I am going to dwell on that.” The trouble, however, is that we have to live with the words in English, where the reverberation on the ear is not as agreeable as être or néant can be to the ear in French.

  Nothingness is, after all, anathema to most writers. We take it for granted that we will have to spend a good part of our lives accepting nothing as the price to pay in order to feel a resonant opposite: being. On days when one’s mind is not alive, one goes through hours where boredom itself can be close to dread. It is, after all, a state that offers no sensual affect and so feels vaguely sinister in ways you cannot name. It’s as if in boredom you come to the wrong kind of rest, a pause that does not restore. Nothingness invariably suggests endless nothingness.

  Yet here we have Beckett, lively and witty as he travels into these subtly fetid caves of virtual non-existence. I always saw such states as the price you pay in order to command a grasp of existence, of being. So in advance, my initial reaction to Beckett was disapproval. I was bothered in those years—the late Fifties—at how people were so ready to welcome the art of the absurd.

  I detest this art. When, for instance, I see a college play (and, given the number of my children, I’ve seen my share), invariably the drama department has opted for a play that celebrates the art of the absurd. Their reason is clear: You cannot judge the merit of the production too closely. Professors of drama at these schools do not rush to be measured. It’s unfailing how often they choose García Lorca, Ionesco, Artaud—name twenty difficult and talented playwrights of the absurd and then set college kids to try to do something with it. They can’t win and they can’t lose, because the actors are going to get laughs. Whenever an audience is not able to follow a non sequitur, an automatic laugh comes up. Especially from parents, roommates, relatives, and friends. If you have an actor say, “The situation is getting kind of boborigymous,” the audience will not only roar at the fecal cacophony of the sounds but will look to cover over their ignorance of the exact meaning. A horde of fail-safes is always available in plays when they are dedicated to the absurd.

  About the time Beckett arrived on Broadway, therefore, I was certain, given the advance publicity, that he would be the worst of all. Seeing Godot, I had to recognize that something profound was going on, but I couldn’t like it. I felt all too familiar with such states of existence. Marriage, after all, is filled with comparable situations—the rigamarole of marriage, the routine, the dreadful repetitions—nothingness pitted against nothingness—except that Beckett added to it an acute sense of despair. Godot had dimension, resonance, vibrancy. Beckett’s despair was sinister and joyful at once, as if he were saying, “Once you feel this kind of woe, nothing will ever be that bad again.” Never as bad again.

  There was, inarguably, this remarkably quality in Beckett. Nonetheless, he was putting the emphasis upon nothingness. My outrage became sententiousness: What if being is in trouble? We don’t have a clue any longer to what it might be—there is such misuse of being. For a daily example, every time you become interested in a narrative on television, a commercial comes on and you are jacked over abruptly from pleasure to nothingness. The impact is there even though the commercial may be lively, noisy, even on occasion amusing. But your concentration has been broken at an instant when you weren’t prepared for that.

  Philosophically, Beckett seemed to be saying, “Nothingness is at least one half of existence, so let’s study it, let’s attempt to enjoy it.” The assumption that it could be enjoyed was the irritant. If fiction depends on how life moves from being to nothingness and back again, Beckett chooses to stay in nothingness. He’s Mozartian, however, in the variations he can play on the theme. He is one of the very few writers in the second half of the twentieth century who prompts you to speak of his genius. He took a deserted road and went far with it. But he never entered the dialectic between nothingness and being. Let me try to exemplify what I am saying.

  I have always felt that The Old Man and the Sea was one of Hemingway’s failures. He wanted to bring off a short novel about a fine man who worked with his hands, a fisherman. Looking to write a novel of affirmation about just such a man, Hemingway had him row out to sea in his dinghy again and again. But after many days of poor fishing, the old man finally hooks into the biggest fish he’s ever had. He hangs on, and the contest goes for hour after hour after hour—the fish tows him for miles—yet the old man succeeds in wearing the beast out, and gaffs him. Since the catch is too heavy to bring on board, he lashes it to the side of his dinghy and starts to row back to shore. Then the sharks come and devour his prize. He’s left with nothing. The critics all agreed this was Hemingway’s view of the literary world—sharks out to destroy a beautiful work.

  The critics, however, decided near unanimously (and Hemingway went along) that he had written a novel of human affirmation because the protagonist never gave up. But then there is never a moment in the telling when the man said to himself, “I’m suffering too severely. I’m going to cut the rope.” Because if the old fisherman had weakened, then Hemingway would have had to have a serious affirmation. Which is: Why doesn’t the fisherman cut the fish loose? What remains in him to war with that temptation? Instead, the old Cuban was never tempted. So Hemingway never had to find a reason for the fisherman to say, “I’ll hold on.” Not enough of a character had been created to answer such a question.

  I think the same fault in considerably
more elaborated form is present with Beckett. He never enters a situation where any of his people might try to break out of whatever trap they are in. They can be ensconced in garbage cans or talking to a tape recorder, which, speaking of traps, is no mean example. But there is never an arduous attempt to escape whatever trap they are in. Of course, one can argue that Beckett dared to try something no one else had ever attempted and so was reaffirming being. Daring is, after all, a vital element in being. But we are not able to enjoy this daring nearly so much as we are obliged to feel the ongoing possibilities of more nothingness, and so the final impact of his plays is obsessive rather than haunting.

  In parallel, the essence of all that hubris in corporate advertising may be its well-founded fear of nothingness. For good cause. The corporates are always pouring their presentations into our minds. To which I would reply that filling such essentially empty forms as commercials is a direct species of nothingness. Whenever you do not fill the aesthetic you set yourself, you are purveying just that. By now, many if not most television commercials, no matter how spiked with clash and color, give, nonetheless, little attention to the item they are there to sell. The intent of the advertisers comes down to the premise that if you entertain your audience, if you pay them, in effect, for the interruption by getting them to laugh during the commercial, it’s not inconceivable that a fraction of these viewers may even remember the name of the product—that’s all the advertiser needs. Far better than to have someone speak directly of the sterling virtues of the brand. Who would believe them? No, advertisers work to overcome the onus of nothingness that the TV commercial inserts into our nervous system.

  MISCELLANY:

  PORNOGRAPHY, PICASSO,

  AND APHORISMS

  I can see some reasonably deep moral questions about whether people should be free to create hard-core pornography. I’d vote yes, but let’s not assume no damage is taking place. For some, it would be a curse; to others, a perverse blessing. But you could be playing with your soul. Let’s say the moral shadings are not without their parallel to men doing their best to take each other out in the ring while other men and women cheer them on. Note that I put it this way even though boxing is my favorite sport to watch.

  You can tell a lot about every stage of sex—before, during, and after—by odor. One is often aware of one’s own spiritual condition through one’s scent. Just so, as one enters a house, one knows the happiness or the misery of its people by the smell one encounters. This faculty, therefore, can become unendurable at times. You walk in on old friends and realize that something’s going to go bust with them—not yet, maybe, but it’s there, maybe a month or two away, a year or two away. The odor speaks unmistakably of stale miseries that will yet exact their payment. Or, at least, all this was true in the years when I still had a vivid sense of smell.

  One can say that if Picasso had been braver at certain points in his life, he might have been a more generous artist. Some of the cruelty might have gone out of his work. Something grand might have come in. He had enormous talent; he was, arguably, the greatest painter since Michelangelo. With generosity, maybe Picasso would have been nobler, but the odds are that he would have been less. Because the selfishness of the artist is often there to protect the part that is generous. To the degree that artists give of themselves to all people, they don’t want to give anything at all in other ways. There’s an economy to generosity. And very often, the people who are the most generous are not the most talented. I think the inner sanction that artists give themselves is that they’ve got to be selfish—absolutely!—or nothing will get done.

  Such thoughts are not happy, but the evidence—if the biographies of artists and writers are at all reliable—does support the notion that it is best to revere painters, poets, and novelists for their talent rather than their character.

  A great many artists are narcissists—certainly writers. In Picasso’s case, narcissism is too small a word. I think he saw himself as an intermediary between humankind and the forces that created the world and kept it in upheaval. I think he saw himself as a demiurge. That is, a demiurge with half of himself. The other half was a modest man who spoke French badly and was five feet three inches tall.

  I’ve always felt that there was a good deal of compatibility between La Rochefoucauld and Gore Vidal. I say this critically. One of the largest arguments I have with Vidal and his mind and his work is that they represent the end of an intellectual tradition that began with La Rochefoucauld. Many of Vidal’s remarks stand up, I think, in comparison. He can put his finger on many a boil. For example: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” No one can accuse Gore of not being able to step forth with a good line. What I would argue, however, is that his particular tradition has become inadequate to our needs. The world is growing so genuinely complex (and perplexed) that it’s limiting to enclose it with aphorisms, no matter how brilliant. One has to qualify them.

  For example: Not everything wilts in me when another novelist succeeds. There is also admiration—unwanted, it is true, but then whoever insisted that we are absolutely without treachery to ourselves?

  Which opens a useful exercise for novelists: It is to take on a few of the better maxims, adages, insights, and sayings of the celebrated, and see if you can work them further. There is that whole remark of Tolstoy’s: “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” Agreed. At the least, a temporary, if successful, collaboration between good and evil may well be going on—which could be why Tolstoy distrusted it so, and why we react with fear, wonder, avidity, and, yes, distrust when we encounter a beautiful woman.

  But now that I have commenced this, I cannot stop:

  Voltaire once said: “Common sense is not so common.” He could have gone on to remark that the greatest abuse of common sense is generally perpetrated by those people who are forever proclaiming the value of that virtue in themselves.

  Abraham Lincoln: “Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.” Sometimes, one doesn’t decide to be happy, because the likelihood is that upcoming events will be dire. Which suggests that the fall will come from a greater height.

  “Merit envies success and success takes itself for merit.”—Jean Rostand Success is so confident that it is possessed of merit that merit, to its horror, comes to respect success more than its own merit.

  One good reason for indulging this exercise is to remind young writers never to hitch their minds to a wise saying. A wiser one can usually be built upon it, or, at least, one ought to make the attempt.

  Example:

  “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

  —Bertrand Russell

  This is because stupidity is not a liability but an asset if all you care about is getting your way. Before obstinate fools, we are all weak.

  “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”—Eric Hoffer

  Half-true, no more. Rudeness can lead to a fight the rude man would be wise not to get into. Usually, however, the instigator of any harsh discourtesy has sensed already who is weaker at the moment than himself. Like many another foul art, rudeness has gifted practitioners.

  PART II

  GENRE

  GENRE

  Genre, as used here, is an excursion into a few of the art forms available to the novelist other than non-fiction or literary criticism. Where the average good novelist is content to stick to his or her last—certainly that is tricky enough—still, it is hard by now to be good at our trade without feeling attracted to such other venues as journalism, television, studies of the occult, and, for a few of us, forays into art criticism.

  Certain human relations are comparable to literary forms. For instance, the one-night stand is like a poem, good or bad. The affair that does not go on forever is equal to a short story. By this logic, marriage is a novel. In a short story, we’re interested in the point that’s
made. In a novel, we usually follow the way people move from drama to boredom back to drama again, and, of course, marriage is the paradigm for that. Our interest is not so much in the understanding that is arrived at on a given night but in the way the new sensibility is confirmed or eroded over the weeks or months that follow. The narrative line of wedlock is, in that sense, good days and bad ones. And most people seem to prefer to live in this form—just as there are people who prefer to live in the space of the short story. Psychopaths, in their turn, have lives that consist of poems, mostly bummers.

  Journalism is another matter. For that, we will need other metaphors.

  Centuries from now, the moral intelligence of another time may look in horror on the history implanted into twentieth-century people by way of newsprint. A deadening of the collective brain has been one consequence. Another is the active warping of consciousness in any leader whose actions are consistently in the papers, for he has been obliged to learn how to speak only in quotable and self-protective remarks. He has also had to learn not to be too interesting, since his ideas would then be garbled and his manner criticized. Some men never could learn, Eugene McCarthy for one, and so their careers did not prosper in proportion to their courage and their wit. Of course, those stalwarts who learned how to respect the limitations of the reporter may never have had a serious thought again. In order to communicate with the communicators, they gave up any hint of private philosophy.