The Spooky Art (9 page)

The proper end to this account is the advertisement I took in
The Village Voice.
It was bought in November 1955, a month after publication, it was put together by me and paid for by me, and it was my way I now suppose of saying good-bye to the pleasure of a quick triumph, of making my apologies for the bad flaws in the bravest effort I had yet pulled out of myself, and certainly for declaring to the world (in a small way, mean pity) that I no longer gave a sick dog’s drop for the wisdom, the reliability, and the authority of the public’s literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

Besides, I had the tender notion—believe it if you will—that the ad might after all do its work and excite some people to buy the book.

N
ow that this once-outsized lust in me for large sales has settled into more reasonable expectations, I may as well offer some later thoughts on the subject.

Writing a best-seller with conscious intent to do so is, after all, a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover that the absence of love is more onerous than anticipated. When a putative and modest writer of best-sellers finally becomes professional enough to write a winner, he or she thinks that a great feat has been brought off, even as a man void of love (and money) will see a wealthy marriage as a splendid union.

The ideal, and as you get older you do try to get closer to the ideal, is to write only what interests you. It will prove of interest to others or it won’t, but if you try to steer your way into success, you shouldn’t be a serious writer. Rather, you will do well to study the tricks of consistent best-seller authors while being certain to stay away from anything that’s
well written.
Reading good books could poison your satisfaction at having pulled off a bestseller. I don’t think Jackie Susann went to bed with Rainer Maria Rilke on her night table.

Today, large literary canvases are usually left to best-selling novelists. They will have a cast of forty or fifty characters, and stories that traverse fifty to a hundred years. They’ll have several world wars, plus startling changes in the lives of several families. They do all that to keep their book moving. What usually characterizes these novels is that nothing is in them that you haven’t come across before. Most good writers tend these days to work on smaller canvases. Then, at least, you have the confidence that what you’re doing has some fictional truth. That’s reasonable. At least you’re contributing to knowledge rather than adding to the sludge of the culture. Of course, that can make it more difficult to take on a large topic. At the moment the only great writer who can handle forty or fifty characters and three or four decades is García Márquez.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is an amazing work. He succeeds in doing it, but how, I don’t know. In my Egyptian novel, it took me ten pages to go around a bend in the Nile.

It’s counterproductive to think, I’m going to put this in because it will sell copies. Usually, that doesn’t work. There is an integrity to best-sellerdom—it is the best book that the author is capable of writing at that time. He or she believes in the book. That’s one reason it’s a best-seller. Stephen King was a desperately clumsy and repetitive writer when he started, but best-seller book readers responded to his sincerity. That was present on every badly written page. The popularity of bad writing is analogous to the enjoyment of fast food.

I must say King has improved in style since he started. Hopefully, his readers also have, but that is not as certain.

A best-seller strategy is to keep cooking up new ingredients for the story. But beware! Plot is equal to a drug. It can stimulate a novelist into hordes of narrative energy, and will certainly keep a reader on the page, but sooner or later, plot presents its bill, and dire exigencies come down upon the writer. The author who is over-burdened with plot is sometimes obliged to enter the character’s mind in order to keep things clear.

Right here is where it all bogs down. A reader’s confidence in what he is reading will be subtly betrayed or even squandered should a novelist choose to enter the mind of a character but fail to bequeath the indispensable gift that the reader can now
know more about the character than before. The internal monologues are usually routine and insist on telling us what we know already. There is almost no signature quality of mind.

Of course, the damage is limited, since the internal ruminations of the characters in most mega-best-sellers are about what you would expect. Mega-best-seller readers want to be able to read and read and read—they do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations. Reality might lie out there, but that is not why they are reading.

Editing tends to make best-sellers read more like each other. As one instance, few best-sellers don’t suffer from a spate of adjectives. For when a writer can’t find the nuance of an experience, he usually loads up with adjectives. That tells the reader what to think. This goes along with a tendency in publishing houses to get the emphasis on entertainment at all costs. Of course, a pervasive weariness could come into us because of the rate at which we are being entertained.

My literary generation was under the umbrella of Maxwell Perkins—anyone who became an editor wanted to be like him. Young editors felt a loyalty toward their writers. There were spiritual marriages, if you will. It’s still true to a degree, but the odds against sustaining such loyalty are now much higher. Today’s publishing dictates that an editor has to bring in books which make money. This near-absolute has to enter the interstices of a young editor’s thinking. (And his or her intestines.) I imagine it would be hard for most young editors not to start pushing their authors just a bit in the direction of trying to be more popular. That, of course, strains the bond.

Right now the smart money would bet against the serious novel. The publishing houses are getting depressed about the future of good fiction, and the publishers are obviously the ones who most determine that future. Survival probably comes down to the young editors. When a serious novel by an unknown gets published these days, it’s usually because some young editor has made an issue of it. The publisher generally goes along. In effect, it’s the charitable side of publishing, and it will continue so long as publishers keep a little faith in their young editors, who, in turn, manage to hold on to their nerve.

Bookstore managers may ask, “Why don’t you write a short book?” They don’t have to state their motive. We both know. Short books are thin books, and so take up less space on shelves. Ergo, the shelves can bring in more income per foot. But short novels? Unfortunately, I was co-opted at an early age by Thomas Mann, who said that only the exhaustive is truly interesting. Trust Mann to make one a closet elitist.

I
treat bad reviews in the manner that a politician running for office treats a loss of support. A couple of friends called up after a very bad review of
Ancient Evenings
appeared in
The New York Times Book Review
and asked, “Are you all right?” I’d seen it a week before, so my unhappiness was now digested. I told them that it was like realizing the county chairman in Schenectady had decided against your candidacy. But to lose a primary in Schenectady doesn’t mean you stop running for governor. It isn’t my ego that’s hurt, it’s my damn pocketbook. Getting a bad review these days in the Sunday
Times
affects my wallet. My ego, however, remains relatively intact. Whereas, when I was younger, I used to consider a bad review a personal insult. The guy who wrote it was evil. In fact, however, I have never actually punched out a reviewer, which I say with a certain wistfulness. I did sit next to Philip Rahv after he had written an atrocious review of
An American Dream.
Rahv had his virtues, bless him, but physical courage was not one of them. So I made a point of installing myself beside him on a couch at a party, and while I smiled at him, I kept my body firmly pressed into his, leaning into him all the while that we had a long thirty-minute conversation about something else altogether. I was perfectly pleasant the entire time and
everything seemed all right, except we were both tilted alarmingly from my leaning into him. He was in an absolute panic, waiting for me to strike. It must have seemed an odd sight from across the room: He was a heavy man, and the two of us probably looked like two doughnuts crushed together at one end of the box.