The next time I met the editor from Tiden, he asked me if I wanted to sign the contract there and then or wait until we were closer to publication. I nearly passed out. Up until that point I had looked on this as a test, something that might lead on to something else. He wanted to publish it! Not until years later did it dawn on me that he hadn’t considered the manuscript to be even remotely good enough at that point, but that his suggestion had been all about instilling in me a sense of confidence and belief, and the feeling that a novel was something that was within my grasp. In other words, he manipulated me. It was like what a magazine editor did with Hunter S. Thompson one time. Thompson had been commissioned to make a trip and write about what he saw, but after he got home he found himself unable to muster a word, he was completely blocked. The editor called him up and asked him to jot down some notes just to give the magazine some sort of idea as to what the piece would be about. Thompson obliged, only for the editor to call him again a few weeks later, letting him know that his notes had gone to press. They were the piece. And that, I think, is often the way we get to what it’s all about. If we strive to go there, we block, for there are so many expectations, so many demands and misconceptions that it’s almost impossible to find a way. But if we don’t know, if we think we’re doing something else instead, as if in preparation for the real thing, then the real thing, which requires a form of unfetteredness, comes into being.
Another conception about writing, at least as common as that of the writer being on his own, is that writing is craft. I can’t see myself in that either, again I find it to be quite the opposite. Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time. That doesn’t mean a cabinetmaker isn’t creative, can’t work out new solutions to old problems, and I assume too that a cabinetmaker is best when he or she isn’t thinking about what they do, but simply doing it, much as a driver is best when the skills he or she has acquired, the craft of driving, are not reflected on, but simply performed. This is how it is with musicians too; the technique or craft is something so well mastered that the musician’s awareness of it is not a conscious awareness, and the music becomes art only in the flow. A soccer player who has to think about how to control the ball, who asks himself whether it’s best to swerve right or left to get past his opponent, who wonders what to do then if he does get past him, pass the ball left or right, or try a shot, will be a poor one. What the musician, the cabinetmaker, and the soccer player have in common is that they have practiced their techniques for hours and hours on end, until they belong to the body and have become like a reflex, selfless and natural. This same kind of state applies to writing too, and it is just as coveted – I once read an interview with British author Ian McEwan in which he spoke about the selfless state into which the act of writing could transport him, and how that selflessness, that occurred only very seldom, felt like the very apex of the writing process. But unlike the other activities just mentioned, there is actually nothing to practice in writing, no techniques to be endlessly repeated until learned – what would they be? A dramatic turning point approached again and again? A certain way of describing a face or personality? No, writing cannot be practiced in that sense, it can never be reduced to exercises, it can only ever be the real thing, what it is in itself, because writing is about getting to the core, something that can be done only once, in that one way, which can never be repeated, because if you repeat it then you are no longer at the core but at something false that merely resembles. So what writing is about, more than anything else, is not practicing, but failing. Failing, not succeeding, not being able to make it work, failing, failing, failing – but not in order to get to the core at some future time, that would be halfhearted, and the halfhearted is the antithesis of writing, no, failing must come from risking everything, in all earnestness, with the utmost of effort. Failing to get the ball properly under control on the football field can be annoying, but it doesn’t hurt. Failing in literature hurts, if it doesn’t then it’s an exercise and can lead nowhere. In other words, in order to write you must trick yourself, you must believe that this time I’m on to something, no matter how worthless it might turn out to be. In that process, everything is uncertain, everything is fluid, and even if that shining state of selflessness should occur, it doesn’t have to mean that what you write has any value, possesses any kind of quality – after all, those who most often vanish into the selfless state are children.
Failing on your own is fine for a while, but only up to a point, since failing in literature is no fun, failing there is failing for real, and when you are surrounded by friends and family with jobs to go to or studies to pursue it becomes increasingly hard to defend writing, to keep it up as something meaningful when the results fail to materialize, which in this case means having your work accepted by a publisher. Failing in one’s writing under those conditions is also to fail socially. Everyone knows the type, the guy who cagily says, “I write.” After ten years of that, is there anyone left who still believes in him? After twenty years? Certainly not the writer himself. By then, writing has become a shameful business, a stigma almost. If he’s to go on, he must trick himself, which will become increasingly difficult, until eventually he realizes that it’s true, he has failed.
A published writer has a different social aspect entirely. But the writing is the same. For a while it will be quite as unsuccessful. This is where the editor comes in. The job is to support the author, which in many instances means tricking the author, telling him or her that this is really good, keep going. Recently, I spoke to a Swedish editor who said this was perhaps the hardest part of the job, because the author often suspects that what he or she is doing probably isn’t that good, at the same time as he or she needs to hear how good it is. The author needs that lie and must overcome the suspicion of it being just that, a lie, must deceive himself or herself into believing it. That same Swedish editor always instructs his writers to note down what he says as they go through the manuscript. If they don’t, all they remember are the negative points. He can heap praise on a text and go into detail about how good it is in this or another passage, and even then the only thing that sticks in the mind of the author are his suggestions as to changes. And why do things have to be changed? Because they aren’t good enough, the text is a failure, a mistake.
This is where it hangs in the balance, where everything is at stake. For what is “good” exactly? In the literary world, much is about originality, finding an individual voice, uncovering what until now has been unseen – these are the ideals. Against this stands the concept of quality, the basis of all appraisal, and of any canonization. For when originality, individual voice, and the unseen come together there is nothing with which it can be compared. There is no unequivocal way of saying that something is “good.” When the book is there, with the publisher’s logo on the cover, that in itself is a stamp of quality: a large number of people with fine literary credentials, working in a well-reputed institution, have declared that this is literature, that this book is of value. To give a book that stamp of quality is a risky business. That is, if it’s similar to another book already recognized as good, then the risk is small, but if it doesn’t, if it’s something apart, then publishing the work and thereby declaring it to be a work of quality, takes guts. There’s often a lack of intrepidness in the publishing world, there being so much esteem to be lost, an editor who puts out, let’s say, five books one after another, each of which is slaughtered by the critics, each of which moreover fails to sell, will be pushed toward the safe choice, toward what is acknowledged to be the norm, and will reject that which involves risk. I’m not saying this because I think Norway is teeming with yet undiscovered literary geniuses unable to find outlets for their work, but because whether an editor is good or bad has so much to do with being intrepid. I know of books later canonized that were rejected by on
e publisher after another as manuscripts, for the simple reason that they resemble very little else, works fully in keeping with the prevailing literary ideal, but which in their fullest consequence required courage to publish. I have worked on manuscripts from first-time writers myself as an advisor and know how difficult it can be to judge quality on one’s own, without the bound book in one’s hand to testify that the criteria have been met. Is it good enough? What is good enough? And if it isn’t good enough, is there anything in it that can become good enough? And if it happens to be very good, then there is nothing to which one can turn for comparison, one is left to one’s own judgment – and is that good enough?
The novel I have invested most substantially in and taken the greatest chances with is My Struggle. I think anyone who has read it will understand that and find it rather obvious. How vital the publisher’s involvement was for that book, and how massive a risk they took on it, is less obvious. This is in the very nature of things, most of the work that goes on inside a publishing house goes on behind closed doors, invisible to the outside world. The books did well, we know that now, and with that outcome it feels like the risk was never there.
But how often does a writer publish six books in the same year? I know of writers who have suggested unorthodox publishing patterns, one for instance who wanted to put out two novels at once, but the publishers said no, we can’t, it won’t work. How come? Maybe the books were going to be hard to sell, maybe it was going to be too hard to convince the Arts Council to purchase sufficient copies for the libraries, maybe it just wasn’t their sort of thing. When I showed up at Oktober, my Norwegian publisher, with a 1200-page manuscript and asked what on earth we were going to do with it, if we should put it out as one or two books, the director, Geir Berdahl, suggested we divide it up into twelve and put out one book a month over a period of a year. What other publisher would have suggested that? It was totally unprecedented. As it turned out, it couldn’t be done, for practical reasons, but the essence of the idea was retained, we decided to put the novel out in serial form during the course of a single year, three books in the autumn, three in the spring. That meant I could divide the existing twelve hundred pages of the manuscript up into six novels each of two hundred pages. But the sheer caliber of the publisher’s idea, the bigness of the sky that suddenly opened up over the project, prompted me in a state of hubris to suggest that I split the manuscript in two and then wrote four more books that autumn and spring, putting them out as we went along. I’m certain that any other publishing house in the world would have said no, the risk is too great. What if you block and can’t write? What if you get ill? What if you haven’t got it in you? What if you can’t get it done in time?
My editor never once brought any of these issues up. His belief in my capacity seemed boundless. And only then could I do it. A novel of two or three hundred pages usually takes something like a year to write, sometimes two, sometimes three. It depends on the writer’s rhythm, character, experience, and what stage they are at in the trajectory of their writing career. I, who had spent the previous five years unable to write, had taken it upon myself to write a novel in three months, four times in succession, without a break. It would never have been an option without my editor, who appeared to think it was a matter of course. As it turned out, it was.
Another source of concern was content, I was writing about myself, my own life and all the people in it, using my own name and theirs. Had it been my first book, the first manuscript I had presented to a publisher, I’m fairly certain it would never have been accepted. Because of course it’s not just the publisher’s logo on the cover that guarantees a certain level of quality and ensures that we construe the content as “literature,” it’s also the name of the author. And if that manuscript had been the work of someone without a recognized name, the level of uncertainty surrounding that project, how assured it actually was in literary terms, for instance, would presumably have been too great. The fact that I already had two novels to my name made sure that particular uncertainty at least was not automatically an issue. It didn’t guarantee the quality of the work, only that there was a certain literary sensibility, a literary conviction, behind the novel. But even then, with a name as guarantee, it by no means went without saying that this was a novel that was going to be published. For instance, there was the issue of the law, the work was possibly in breach of the libel law or could be deemed an invasion of privacy by those who appeared in it. There was a risk it could go to court and the publishers be ordered to pay out damages. Oktober is a small publishing house, the fallout would have been significant. But they published anyway.
One more uncertainty had to do with quality. The first book was on reasonably firm ground so to speak, it had a beginning, middle, and end, and the story was as classic as could be: two brothers return to the place they grew up to bury their father. The beginning, the first ten pages, was something I had been working on more or less for some years, long before the autobiographical aspect became the book’s direction, and to me this part represented quality writing, sentences of the very highest caliber I was capable of producing. That the level sank drastically after that, the next hundred pages settling into writing that was much more prosaic and everyday, was a source of unease, but as long as the framework was in place, this was something I could cope with.
When we edited the book over two days in a conference room at the publishing house, the first thing the editor suggested was to take out the beginning, since it was so different in style, grand and complete, compared to what came after. A few years earlier I had read the beginning of a novel by Kristine Næss when it was still at the manuscript stage, she and I shared the same editor, and something about the structure of her novel resembled mine: her opening was a thing of beauty, marvelously well written, it was like something chiseled in marble, whereas the style of what followed became somewhat swallowed up in the everyday, unfledged nature of what was described, it grew rougher, uglier, more direct. When that novel came out, the exquisite, stylistically pure and consummate opening was gone. Only the more ordinary style was left. And it was much better! Few writers are able to align language and life like Kristine Næss, she is one of the very best writers of our generation, but even though I knew that, how fruitful the deletion of the “good” and the cultivation of the “ordinary” had been, and how relative the concept of quality had shown itself to be in that practical example, I couldn’t bring myself to do as my editor suggested and get rid of my own meticulously worked, high-modernist opening, I refused to let go of it, because it was what said I was a proper writer, that I could actually write and not just emote.
But the real problem was the second book. Because it was cut out of something bigger and was basically the second part of a more expansive novel, it had neither beginning, middle, nor end, no story, amounting to little more than events and thoughts in sequence, the thoughts that were expressed belonging to the moment they were thought, and intended to express just that, the way we actually think when we’re on our own with nobody else there, as opposed to the way we present a thought to others. A colleague and friend of mine read the manuscript and advised me not to put it out, it wasn’t publishable the way it was, and he especially emphasized these unconstrained passages of thought, for instance about Monika Fagerholm, the Finnish writer, about whom I say at one point that she’ll win the Nordic Council Prize because she’s a woman. It lowers the bar of what you can say in public, he said. And in a way he was right, structurally that book is weak, sometimes so weak as to almost come apart, and what can be said about that – that in this way it comes closer to life the way it actually is – is no real argument: as my teacher at the Writing Academy Ragnar Hovland once said, by all means write about boring stuff, but don’t produce boring writing about boring stuff. Which in this instance would be: write about weakness and stupidity, but don’t write weakly about weakness or stupidly about stupidity. This is a legitimate way of reading, and it was the w
ay I read the book too, and so I asked for a ruthless and meticulous editing, something my editor refused to do, or found unnecessary, precisely because unlike me he kept a firm hold on the intention behind the writing, which was to break up the narrative, break up the form, that which made literature into literature, and instead go toward where Kristine Næss had gone, which was toward life, regardless of how stupid it might be.
To be stupid is, I think, the last thing a person wants to be, and the last thing you want to project. Academia, with its tyranny of formal requirements, is a barricade against that fear, Geir Angell always says. The fear of being laughed at, is there anything stronger than that? In literature, the barricade is the shapely sentence, the clever form, the ingenious metaphor. If that was all it was for, that kind of writing wouldn’t have been nearly as difficult to let go of, but there’s more to it than that, the shapely sentence, the clever form, and the ingenious metaphor are generally construed as the very pinnacle of cultural expression, held above the individual writer, hallowed and grand. Why then turn toward what is stupid?
In all that I have written there have been passages that can best be described as childlike, and in all that I have written it has been this element my editor has most often flagged. Here, he says, this part, and jabs a finger at some description. Something else he often points out is where my perspective has become too narrow, and in these cases he asks me to step back and see what it looks like from there. These childlike passages are simple and unadorned, like some primitive stage in the writing before the formation of anything sensible and coherent, whereas the knots of the narrow perspective are the opposite, a heightening of complexity, and in these features alone there lies an aesthetic, an attitude as to what literature is, which for me has become an endeavor to reach beyond a form of constraint, and that constraint lies in the language and can be overcome only by language.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 29