The Spooky Art (16 page)

Looking back on it, I can give you a good and bad motive that I had for killing Hearn where I did. The good motive is that it was a powerful way to show what death is like in war. The shoddy motive was that I wasn’t altogether sure in my heart that I knew what to do with him or how to bring him off.

I think that I truly work on impulse in all of my writing. That’s why I don’t like to plan too far ahead. I’ve gotten into this before, but it’s worth repeating. Planning too carefully makes it almost impossible for one of your characters to go through a dramatic shift of heart, because it’s going to violate your larger
scheme. It’s better if this larger scheme unfolds at a rate that is compatible with your characters.

When it comes to entering a man or woman’s mind, a writer has to be good, even brilliant. So long as you stay outside that head, your character can retain a certain mystery. We walk around such figures with the same respect we offer strangers who come into a room with force. Part of the meaning of charisma is that we don’t know the intimate nature of the human presence we’re facing. Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions. To jump in only to offer banal material is a fatal error. It is the worst of best-sellerdom. Second-rate readers enjoying the insights of second-rate writers.

I’d say try not to think of your characters as victims. That sort of classification narrows them. In reality, very few victims ever see themselves exclusively as victims, and when they do, their spirit turns stale. There is a certain sort of self-pitying victim one wishes to walk away from, and they can be even worse in a book. Unless one is Dickens. (Scrooge, Scrooge, Scrooge.)

Hemingway suffered from the honorable need to be the equal of his male characters, particularly since he used the first person so much. It is not easy to write in the first person about a man who’s stronger or braver than yourself. It’s too close to self-serving. All the same, you have to be able to do it. Because if every one of your characters is kept down to your own level, you do not take on large subjects. You need people more heroic than yourself, more enterprising, less timid, sexier, more romantic, more tragic. You’ve got to be able to create people greater than yourself and not be ashamed of the damnable fact that the “I” who is being promoted is offering a false picture of himself to all those readers, who will predictably assume that the author is the man they are now encountering in the first person.

I’ve been asked when the idea of using a hornet’s nest to thwart the climbers in
The Naked and the Dead
came to me. In truth, the
idea was there before I wrote the first sentence of the book. The incident happened to my reconnaissance platoon on the most ambitious patrol we ever took. They sent out thirty of us to locate and destroy one hundred Japanese marines, but we did get stuck climbing one hell of an enormous hill with a mean, slimy trail, and when we were almost up to the ridge, somebody kicked over a hornet’s nest. Half of us went tearing up the hill, but the machine-gun squad was behind us and went flying down to the valley. We never did find each other again that day. We just slunk back to our bivouac.

There are some who feel it was not a satisfactory device, but I think I’d do it the same way again. War is disproportions, and the hornet’s nest seemed a perfect one to me. We were ready to lose our lives that day, but we weren’t up to getting stung by a hornet.

If a novelist can take people who are legendary figures and invent episodes for them that seem believable, then he has done something fine. There’s that meeting between J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford in E. L. Doctorow’s
Ragtime
—I think it’s one of the best short chapters in American literature. It told me an awful lot about Morgan and an awful lot about Henry Ford, and the fact that it obviously never took place made it more delicious.

The characters you create in a novel become as real in your mind as movie stars. That is no small equation. To a lot of people, Humphrey Bogart might, for example, be the psychic equivalent of an influential uncle, given the presence he exerts on those who love his work.

I
am not sure it is possible to describe how it feels to write a novel. It may be that it is not an experience. It may be more like a continuing relation between a man and his wife. You can’t necessarily speak of that as an experience, since it may consist of several experiences braided together; or of many experiences all more or less similar; or indeed it may consist of two kinds of experiences that are antagonistic to one another.

In large part, writing may be an instinctive process, but it’s not always clear what the instinct is saying. Sometimes you feel no more than a dull pressure to go in a certain direction for the oncoming chapter. You have to be able to hear the faint voice which prods you toward an honest continuation of the work. That can be hard to hear. A writer is also open to the temptation to take the immediate advantage, even if it doesn’t feel quite right. And we all do that in various ways. And pay for it with falsities that burrow directly into our intent.

One example I always give to a writing class: A very young writer sits on a park bench with his girl. He kisses her. He’s seventeen. He’s never had such a kiss before. Later that night, he tries to capture the event. He writes:

I think Capote’s book and mine are formally similar, but vastly different. Obviously, I’ll be the first to state that if he hadn’t done
In Cold Blood
, it’s conceivable that I wouldn’t have thought of taking on
The Executioner’s Song.
Nonetheless, it’s also possible that something about
The Executioner’s Song
called for doing it in the way I chose. In any event, its flavor is different from
In Cold Blood.
Truman retained his style. Not the pure style—he simplified it—but it was still very much a book written by Truman Capote. You felt it every step of the way. The difference is that he tweaked it more, where I was determined to keep the factual narrative. I wanted my book to read like a novel, and it does, but I didn’t want to sacrifice what literally happened in a scene for what I would like to see happen. Of course, I could afford to feel that way. I had advantages Truman didn’t. His killers were not the most interesting guys in the world, so it took Truman’s exquisite skills to make his work a classic. I was in the more promising position of dealing with a man who was quintessentially American yet worthy of Dostoyevsky. If this were not enough, he was also in love with a girl who—I’ll go so far as to say—is a bona fide American heroine. I didn’t want, therefore, to improve anything. Dedicated accuracy is not usually the first claim a novelist wishes to make, but here it became a matter of literary value. What I had was gold, if I had enough sense not to gild it.

If you find some theme that keeps you working, don’t question it. Let that theme be sufficient to fuel your work. If you start using the value judgments of others, you’re never going to get much done. If I find something is stimulating to me and arousing my energy, that’s fine; I’ll trust it. If you’re a serious young writer and find that you’re writing a lot, then don’t listen to what anyone else says—do your book. There is probably a deeper truth than you’ll ever know in the fact that you’re able to work so well. Of course, you could be writing in absolutely the wrong direction. You could be doing a dreadful book.

No matter what you find yourself writing about, if it’s giving you enough energy to continue, then the work bears a profound relationship to you at that point and you don’t question it.

Let me take this further. You can write a book with a powerful sense of inner conviction and a year or two later say, “How could I have so deluded myself? This is awful.” Your instinct can betray you, but you still have to go with it. Very often the instinct sees some light at the end of the tunnel, but that’s because you’ve been trapped in a situation where your creative energies can’t get together. Now, at last, you’ve found a way to work. You may be writing out some very bad tendencies in yourself, but this can be good, too. You might be feeling happy because soon you’re going to be done with that malfunctioning side of yourself. That’s what your enthusiasm can be about.

Only rarely is one’s instinct analogous to a fast highway, but that’s exactly when things get hairy. The slow twists and turns of one’s creative impulse can be a form of protecting oneself from the driving force, which sometimes is manic.

The influence of Henry Adams on
The Armies of the Night
is peculiar. I had never read much Adams. In my Freshman year at Harvard, we were assigned one long chapter of
The Education of Henry Adams
, and I remember thinking at the time what an odd thing to write about yourself in the third person. Who is this fellow, Henry Adams, talking about himself as Henry Adams? I remember being annoyed in that mildly irritable way Freshmen have of passing over extraordinary works of literature. To my conscious recollection, I hardly ever thought about him again. Yet, start reading
The Armies of the Night
, and immediately you say—even I said—“My God, this is pure Henry Adams.” It’s as if I were the great-grandson. Contemplate, therefore, how peculiar is influence: Adams must have remained in my mind as a possibility, the way a painter might look at a particular Picasso or Cézanne and say to himself, “That’s the way to do it.” Yet the influence might not pop forth for twenty or thirty years. When it does, the painter could say, “Oh yes, that was a Picasso I saw at MoMA twenty-five years ago, and I’ve always wanted to try such a palette, and now I have.” In effect, that’s what happened with Henry Adams.

Literary influence remains endlessly curious. I happened to pick up
Moby-Dick.
I hadn’t thought about Melville ten times in the last thirty years, but as soon as I read the first page, I realized my later style was formed by Melville, shaped by his love of
long, rolling sentences full of inversions and reverses and paradoxes and ironies and exclamation points and dashes. Of course, to be as good as Melville—that’s another matter.

It’s disturbing to read a novelist with a good style when you’re in the middle of putting your work together. It’s much like taking your car apart and having all the pieces on the floor just as somebody rides by in a Ferrari. Now, you may hear a note in the Ferrari that isn’t good and say, “His motor needs a little tuning.” But nonetheless the car and its roar are still there in your ear while your parts remain on the floor. So while I’m working on a book I rarely read more than
The New York Times
—which could have the long-term effect of flattening my style. I’d rather blame the
Times
than old age.