Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  I came to loathe the stories, as did my family, my friends, and fiction editors from coast to coast. Nevertheless, by diving into literature I had baptized myself as a writer. I have since come to look upon this as a religious experience; not because of its holiness, for as a profession it is more profane than sacred, but because of its enmeshment with the Catholic Church’s supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity—as I had learned them.

  Charity, of course, is what the writer supports himself with while he is finishing his novel.

  Hope is the virtue by which he firmly trusts that someday, somewhere, somebody will publish his novel.

  But it is in the virtue of faith that the writer grounds himself (or herself) in the true religious experience of literature; and faith was defined early on for me as a firm belief in the revealed truths—truths of God as religion would have it; truths of the writing life, as I would have it.

  “How may we sin against faith?” the catechism used to ask itself, and then it provided four answers:

  Sin number 1: “By rashly accepting as truths of faith what are not really such.” I take this to mean that the writer should learn how to tell the difference between literary gold and dross. Michelangelo said a work of sculpture is created by cutting away the unnecessary part of a block of marble. Georges Simenon removed all words from his work that were there just to make an effect. “You know,” he said, “you have a beautiful sentence—cut it.” But it was Hemingway who forever codified this issue when he said: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”

  Sin number 2: “By neglecting to learn the truths which we are bound to know.” This is a large order. It means you should read the entire canon of literature that precedes you, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review; and if you have any time left over, you should go out and accumulate an intimate knowledge of politics, history, language, love, philosophy, psychology, sex, madness, the underworld, soap opera, your cholesterol level, and whether the Beatles will ever have a reunion.

  Sin number 3: “By not performing those acts of faith, which we are commanded to perform.” This means you should write even on Christmas and your birthday, and forswear forever the excuse that you never have enough time.

  Sin number 4: “By heresy and apostasy.” This means writing for the movies.

  You see here before you a heretic and an apostate. My life after the army was a tissue of muddle, a pilgrimage through ignorance, anxiety, and innocence, but a pilgrimage with some discernible milestones. Five years after leaving the army I would get married, write my first play and my twenty-fifth short story, then quit journalism to write a novel. I would write the novel and it would be awful. Seven years after the army I would become managing editor of a daily newspaper. After nine years I would quit journalism again to finish another novel. I would be showing improvement in novel writing, but not much. After fifteen years of work as a half-time journalist, half-time fictionist, I would become a movie critic. After seventeen years I would publish my first novel. After nineteen years I would become a book critic. After twenty-two years I would become a teacher. And then, after thirty-one years, I would write my first movie script, may God have mercy on his soul.

  I was not always a heretic. For a time I was a true believer in journalism, lived it passionately, gained entry to worlds I had no right to enter, learned how to write reasonably well and rapidly, was never bored by what I was doing, found it an enduring source of stimulation, met thousands of the crazy people who inhabit it and learned madness from most of them. I loved the tension, the unexpected element of the news, the illusion of being at the center of things when you were really at what approximated the inner lining of the orange peel.

  Also I learned who I was, in certain small but significant ways. I became, as I mentioned, a managing editor, a position to which I had been obliquely gravitating since the beginning; for in wanting to learn all there was to learn about writing, I also wanted to learn all there was about what you did with writing after you wrote it. I became an escalating figure in the editorial room: from lowly slug in the sports department, to army columnist, to inquiring reporter and rewrite man. I harangued myself onto the police beat, became Saturday city editor, feature writer, substitute night city editor, general reporter; city editor when the reigning figure went to lunch and never came back; acting managing editor when the boss infarcted myocardially. And then, at long last, managing editor.

  When this happened to me—over the objection of my second self, which had always wanted to be a daily columnist until the seductive muse of fiction deflowered my pencil—I contemplated the new condition and wrote to a contemporary of mine who had also become a managing editor. He’d been a youth-page writer for a local daily when I was still in college, and I always envied him that head start. Now here we were in perfect equanimity, managing editors both, he in Albany, I in Puerto Rico, and I apprised him of this, also reminding him of what Mencken had once written: “All managing editors are vermin.”

  I remained verminous for two years, for we had started this newspaper from scratch and it was a challenge unlike any other I’d known. I never worked harder, never found more pleasure in the work, yet always longed to be out of it, for the job had interrupted my novel in progress, and I yearned to return and see how it would turn out. It took me those two years to accumulate the courage and wisdom to quit a lucrative, fascinating job, live off my savings and a weekend editing job, and work five full days on fiction. What I had finally come to realize was that I’d learned all I wanted to learn about newspapering, and that I could never learn enough about how to write fiction; for the more I learned, the more difficult writing became; and that is still so today. I don’t mean to be simplistic about journalism, which is mired in the complexity of randomness. It was a great training ground for a writer; but I’d reached my limit with it and knew in my soul that I was a committed novelist, whose work is grounded in the complexity of unconscious logic.

  The problem then became the quest for the elusive Kennedy voice. I had ceased to be consciously emulative of anyone in my work, but what I was left with was what I now think of as the voice of literary objectivity, a journalistic virus, an odious microbe that paralyzes the imagination and cripples the language. “Cut, cut, cut,” counsels Simenon; but what is left after all the cuts? Is there something new on the page? Something original? Is there energy in the sentence, power in the scene? In the interest of curbing excess, has the heart been cut out of the story? In the relentless quest for realistic action and surface, has the intellectual dimension been excised, or avoided?

  In recent years a number of very good young writers have been, and are still being, castigated, even vilified, because of the brevity of their styles and content. This is the critical assault on so-called minimalism, that word a critic’s invention that is not a new subject for assaulting purposes. Forty years ago the critic Philip Rahv looked around and found the novelists of that day excluding the intellect in favor of depicting life on its physical levels (which is the journalistic way, of course). Rahv accused the American writer of “a disinclination to thought and … an intense predilection for the real,” and found also that less gifted writers following Hemingway’s method were producing “work so limited to the recording of the unmistakably real that it could be said of them that their art ended exactly where it should properly begin.”

  The transition from journalism to fiction is always a precarious trip, for journalism foists dangerous illusions on the incipient fiction writer. The daily journalist is trained, for instance, to forget about yesterday and focus on today. There is also a car parked downstairs, ready to carry him off into tomorrow, and so every new day becomes, for him, a tabula rasa. This is deadly. The fiction writer who puts little or no value on yesterday, or the even more distant past, might just as well have Alzheimer’s disease; for serious fiction, especially novelistic
work, has time as its essence and memory as its principal tool.

  The journalist is also under pressure to believe that merely his presence at the great moments—whether he be first on the scene after a murder of passion, or witness to the fall of an empire—gives him the stuff of fiction. This is true to a point, but the stuff in question is merely raw material. The writer who believes he has a ready-made work of fiction spread out before him in his notes, needful only of a bit of sprucing and spicing, is deluded. He is a victim of the cult of experience, the impulse that sends writers, who can find no value in the quotidian, off to wars and revolutions to find something to write about. More than experience is called for.

  In recent months in this country we have witnessed a rather tub-thumping, hog-stomping, name-calling literary argument on this subject, begun by our contemporary Tom Wolfe, a notable tub-thumper and baroque hog-stomper of high journalistic achievement and repute, who moved into the realm of fiction with an extraordinarily successful first novel, Bonfire of the Vanities. Having succeeded, he now would like others to succeed also by writing novels like his. The debate over this has flourished in the pages of Harper’s magazine and the New York Times Book Review, among other places, and Mr. Wolfe has had his say twice on the subject. Also, his argument has been deconstructed by some notable figures in contemporary literature, Philip Roth, Mary Gordon, John Hawkes, and Robert Towers among others, and its parts have been handed back to Mr. Wolfe, somewhat the worse for wear. Even so, there is merit in his point of view. I mentioned to him last month that I’d followed the exchange with great interest and had heard several arguments on both sides of the issue. That surprised him. “If there’s anybody on my side,” he said, “I haven’t heard from them.”

  The essence of Mr. Wolfe’s side of the argument is that American literature in the last half of this century has gone down the tube of privacy, inversion, neo-fabulism, magical realism, absurdism, and so on, and that the only way to rescue it is through a return to realism of a nineteenth-century order, writing akin to that of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Zola, and Balzac. The means of achieving this movement back to the future of the novel, says Mr. Wolfe, is reporting.

  He writes: “I doubt there is a writer over forty who does not realize in his heart of hearts that literary genius, in prose, consists of proportions more on the order of 65 percent material, and 35 percent talent in the sacred crucible.”

  Mr. Wolfe also believes that, because of the way fiction has been written in the past twenty-five years, “Any literary person … will admit that in at least four years out of five the best nonfiction books have been better literature than the most highly praised books of fiction.”

  This latter notion has at least two memorable antecedents, one an essay by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, written some thirty-odd years ago. As Mr. Wolfe does today, Mr. Podhoretz back then found fiction wanting in imagination, in disciplined intelligence, and also lacking a “restless interest in the life of the times.”

  Discursive writing, argued Mr. Podhoretz, had taken over the province that the novel had voluntarily surrendered—that province being the criticism of morals and manners. In short, the novel had no contemporary social relevance, he said, and the real art form of the age was the magazine article.

  Similarly, the critic Leslie Fiedler, the great doomsayer of our era, all but exulted back in the early 1960s that the novel as a form was just about dead, that the public for novels had become subliterate, that the artistic faith that had sustained writers was dead, and, what’s more, America never had an unequivocal avant-gardist among novelists of the first rank anyway.

  In a subliterate era, he wrote, who needs fiction? For, what documentary realism once promised to give people in novel form, nonfiction was providing more efficiently, more painlessly. As to the myths the subliterates always look for—boy gets girl, good guy kills bad guy, etc.—television and film were providing them more vividly than the novel, and at less intellectual cost.

  Some truth there, alas, in Mr. Fiedler’s argument. Even so, it’s very troublesome being a novelist when critics with a license to kill keep saying you’re dead. Such complaints also cheer up serious people who do not find their own predilections and prejudices reflected in the novels they read. They see instead a hostile fiction that supports dangerous ideas and does not strike sufficiently critical attitudes toward the social forces and institutions that oppress certain multitudes, or certain elites. They see the literature of the age being written by the disengaged, the alienated, the untalented, the Philistines, the dropouts, the solipsists, the anarchists; and who will save us from drowning in all this irrelevance? these serious people wonder.

  I could join Tom Wolfe’s argument happily and point out my own black beasts of contemporary literature; but I am more inclined to defend this literature and its creators for several reasons.

  What is fundamental to the counterargument is the number of great books that have been written that did not directly concern their own time, but have prevailed as classic works nevertheless.

  Consider only three of these books written out of their own age: Benito Cereno by Melville, written in 1856 of an event from 1797, but emblematic of the racial conflict that prevailed throughout the long era of slavery, and relevant even today; The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, written thirty years after the Civil War had ended, but a masterpiece of that war that speaks to all soldiers of any war; Hawthorne’s first novel, The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850, probing the conflict between the Puritan culture of the seventeenth century and the privacy of love, but a cautionary tale of secrecy and shame whose meaning has endured, will endure.

  Should we have told these writers that their choice of time was out of joint? Clearly their books are relevant not only to their own time, they are relevant to all time. I don’t believe it matters whether a writer crisscrosses continents in search of today’s material. I believe that what Alfred Kazin wrote is the truth: “… every writer criticizes life and society with every word he writes. The better the writer, the more this criticism and his imagination will fuse as one.”

  Or consider Tolstoy on the same subject:

  An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told I might write a book in which I should demonstrate beyond any doubt the correctness of my opinions on every social problem, I should not waste two hours at it; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by people who are children today, and that they would weep and laugh over my book and love life more because of it, then I should devote all my life and strength to such a work.

  How can anyone have the audacity to tell a writer what and how to write? The writer, of necessity, is the sole judge of that, for the making of these decisions is evolutionary, a process of trial and rejection, of finally choosing among infinite possibilities the method, and story, and characters that allow the work to be written at all. I could never fault any writer for not writing about the age, for in my own experience it has been extremely difficult; and I offer only one example.

  My time in the army represented two years of my life, and not merely life lived, but life reported on through a newsman’s eye—reporting on the army, on Germany, on the cold war getting hot, on an innocent abroad, on fraternization with frauleins, on the black market, on army skulduggery, on leftover Nazism, and much more. I had, and still have, some of that world at my fingertips; and also I’ve gone back twice to Germany to rekindle my memory.

  Why? Well I wanted to write about it all, and did write about it—in short stories over a decade; and all those stories died. I also wrote about two hundred pages of a novel about it, and that too died. Why do my stories die when clearly I have at least 65 percent of them living right there in the file cabinet? Obviously, in my case, because it is not the material that makes a work of fiction come to life. It is, in fact, almost impossibl
e to say what it is that does that. Material can begin a piece of work, emotion and ideas can keep it going, but in order for the work not to self-destruct along the way, something else must happen. The writer must find himself in a strange place full of unknowns, populated by characters who are not quite strangers but about whom little is certain, everything is to be discovered. There must be a transformation of the material, of the characters, of the age, into something that is intriguingly new to the writer. “Art,” wrote Boris Pasternak, “is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.”

  The writer, when he is functioning as an artist, understands when this power is at hand, and he knows that it does not rise up from his notepad but up from the deepest part of his unconscious, which knows everything everywhere and always: that secret archive stored in the soul at birth, enhanced by every waking moment of life, and which is the source of the power and the vision that allow the writer to create something never before heard or seen on earth.

  This creation of the new is what a good reader seeks and will recognize. Listen to Seamus Heaney, for instance, on what he expects from good poetry: “You want it to touch you at the melting point below the breastbone and the beginning of the solar plexus. You want something sweetening and at the same time something unexpected, something that has come through constraint into felicity.”