Authors: Norman Mailer
I would like to speak at length of the hazards of writing, the cruelties it extorts out of mind and flesh, and then, if we are not too depressed by all these bleak prospects revealed, we can slip over to the last of the three lands, which is comparable to a kingdom beneath the sea, for it resides in no less a place than the mysterious dimension of our unconscious, the source of our aesthetic flights—and no human, no matter how professional, can speak with authority of what goes on there. We will be able only to wander at the edges of such a magnificent region and will have to be satisfied with the quickest glimpses of its wonders. No one can explore the mysteries of novel writing to their deepest source.
Let me commence with the hazards. I know something of them, and I ought to. My first published story came out forty-seven years ago, and the first novel I wrote that saw print is going to be forty-two this spring. Obviously, I have been accustomed to thinking of myself as a writer for so long that others even see me that way. I consequently hear one lament, over and over, from strangers: “Oh, I too would have liked to be an author.” One can almost hear them musing aloud about the freedom of the life. How felicitous to have no boss and face no morning rush to work, how exciting to know the intoxications of celebrity. If those are superficial motives, people also long to satisfy the voice within which keeps repeating: “What a pity that no one will know how unusual my life has been! There are all those secrets I cannot tell!” Years ago I wrote, “Experience, when it cannot be communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.” I often ponder the remark.
Once in a while your hand will write out a sentence that seems true, and yet you do not know where it came from. Ten or twenty words seem able to live in balance with your experience. It may be one’s nicest reward as a writer. You feel you’ve come near the truth. When that happens you can look at the page years later and meditate again on the meaning. So I think I understand why people want to write. All the same, I am also a professional, and there is another part of me, I confess, that is less charitable when strangers voice literary aspirations to me. I say to myself, “They can write an interesting letter, so they assume they are ready to tell the stories of their lives. They do not understand how much work it will take to pick up even the rudiments of narrative.” If the person who has spoken to me in this fashion is serious, however, I warn them gently. “Well,” I say, “it probably takes as long to learn to write as to play the piano.” One shouldn’t encourage people to write for too little. It’s a splendid life when you think of its emoluments, but it is death to the soul if you are not good at it.
Let me keep my promise, then, and explore a little into the gloomier regions of my vocation. To skip at one bound over all those fascinating years when one is an apprentice writer and
learning every day (at least on good days), there is in contrast an abominable pressure on the life of a mature novelist. For as soon as you finish each hard-earned book, the reviews come in—and the reviews can be murderous. Contrast an author’s reception to an actor’s. With the notable exception of John Simon, theater critics do not often try to kill performers. I believe there is an unspoken agreement that thespians deserve to be protected against the perils of first nights. After all, the actor is daring a rejection that can prove as fearful as a major wound. For human beings so sensitive as actors, a hole in the ego can be worse than a hole in the heart. Such moderation does not carry over, however, into literary criticism.
Meretricious, dishonest, labored, loathsome, pedestrian, hopeless, disgusting, disappointing, raunchy, ill-wrought, boring
—these are not uncommon words for a typical bad review. I remember, and it is thirty-eight years ago, that my second novel,
Barbary Shore
, was characterized by the massive authority of the reviewer at
Time
magazine as “paceless, tasteless, graceless.” I am still looking forward to the day when I meet him. You would be hard-put to find another professional field where criticism is equally savage. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers, perhaps even physicists, do not often speak publicly of one another in this manner.
Yet the unhappiest thing to say is that our critical practice may even be fair—harsh, but fair. After all, one prepares a book in the safety of the study. Nothing short of your self-esteem, your bills, your editor, or your ego is forcing you to show the stuff. You put your book out, if you can afford to take the time, only when it is ready. If economic necessity forces you to write somewhat faster than is good for you, well, everyone has their sad story. As a practical matter, not that much has to be written into the teeth of a gale, and few notes need be taken on the side of a cliff. An author usually does the stint at his desk, feeling not too hungry and suffering no pains greater than the view of the empty pad of paper. Of course, that white sheet can look as blank as a television screen when the station is off the air, but that is not a danger, merely an empty presence. The writer, unlike more active creative artists, labors in no immediate peril. Why, then, should
open season not begin so soon as the work comes out? If talented authors were to have it better than other professionals and artists in all ways, there would be a tendency for talented authors to multiply, so the critics keep our numbers down.
In fact, not too many good writers do remain productive through the decades. There are too many other hazards as well. We are poked and jerked by the media to come in and out of fashion; each drop from popularity can feel like a termination to one’s career. Such insecurity is no help to morale, since even in their best periods, all writers know one recurring terror.
Does it stop tomorrow? Does it all stop tomorrow?
Writing is spooky. There is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the white page each morning, and you do not know where your words are coming from, those divine words. So your professionalism at best is fragile. You cannot always tell yourself that fashions pass and history will smile at you again. In the literary world it is not easy to acquire the stoicism to endure, especially if you have begun as an oversensitive adolescent. It is not even automatic to pray for luck if it has been pessimism itself which gave force to your early themes. Maybe it is no more than blind will, but some authors stay at it. Over and over they keep writing a new book and do it in the knowledge that upon publication they will probably be savaged and unable to fight back. An occasional critic can be singled out for counterattack, or one can always write a letter to the editor of the book section, but such efforts at self-defense are like rifle fire against fighter planes. All-powerful is the writer when he sits at his desk, but on the public stage he may feel as if his rights are puny. His courage, if he has any, must learn to live with comments on his work. The spiritual skin may go slack or harden to leather, but the effort to live down bad reviews and write again has to be analogous to the unspoken, unremarked courage of people who dwell beneath the iron hand of a long illness and somehow resolve enough of their inmost contradictions to be able to get better. I suppose this is equal to saying you cannot become a professional writer and keep active for three or four decades unless you learn to live with the most immediate professional condition of your existence, which is that superficial
book reviewing is irresponsible, and serious literary criticism can be close to merciless. The conviction that this condition is, on balance, fair has to grow roots deep enough to bear comparison to the life-view of a peasant who farms a mountain slope and takes it for granted that he was meant to toil through the years with one foot standing higher than the other.
Every good author who has managed to forge a long career must be able, therefore, to build a character that will not be unhinged by a bad reception. That takes a rugged disposition. Few writers are rugged when young. In general, the girls seldom look like potential beauty contest winners, and the boys show small promise of becoming future All-Americans. They are most likely to be found on the sidelines, commencing to cook up that warped, passionate, sardonic view of life which will bring them later to the attention of the American public. But only later. Young writers usually start as loners. They are obliged to live with the recognition that the world had better be wrong or they are wrong. On no less depends one’s evaluation of one’s right to survive. Thanks to greed, plastics, mass media, and various abominations of technology—lo, the paranoid aim of a cockeyed young writer has as much opportunity to center on the ultimate target as the beauty queen’s wide-eyed lack of paranoia. So occasionally young writers end up winning a place for a little while. Their vision has projected them forward—but rarely for long. Sooner or later, the wretched, lonely act of writing will force them back. Composition arouses too much commotion in the psyche to allow any writer to rest happily.
It is not easy to explain such disturbance to people who do not work at literature. Someone who has never tried fiction will hardly be quick to understand that in the study a writer often does feel godlike. There one sits, ensconced in judgment on other people. Yet contemplate the person in the chair: he or she could be hung over and full of the small shames of what was done yesterday, or what was done ten years ago. Old fiascos wait like ghosts in the huge house of the empty middle-aged self. Consciously or unconsciously, writers must fashion a new peace with the past every day they attempt to write. They must rise above despising themselves.
If they cannot, they will probably lose the sanction to feel like a god long enough to render judgment on others.
Yet the writer at work must not tolerate too much good news either. At the desk it is best if one does not come to like oneself too much. Wonderfully agreeable memories may arrive on certain mornings, but if they have nothing to do with the work they must be banished or they will leave the writer too cheerful, too energetic, too forgiving, too horny. It is in the calm depression of a good judge that one’s scribblings move best over the page. Indeed, just as a decent judge will feel that society is injured if he or she gives an unfair verdict, so does an author have to ask constantly if he or she is being fair to the characters in a book. For if the author does violate the life of a character—that is, in the ongoing panic of trying to keep a book amusing, proceeds to distort the created people into more comic, more corrupt, or more evil forms than the writer secretly believes they deserve—well, then the writer is injuring the reader. It may be subtle injury, but it is still a moral crime. Few writers are innocent of such a practice; on the other hand, not so many artists can be found who are not guilty of softening their portraits. Some authors don’t want to destroy the sympathy that readers may feel for an appealing heroine by the admission she shrieks at her children; sales might fly out the window. It takes as much literary integrity to be tough, therefore, as it does to be compassionate. The trail is narrow. It is difficult to keep up one’s literary standards through the long, slogging reaches in the middle of a book. The early pleasures of conception no longer sustain the writer, who plods along with the lead feet of habit, the dry breath of discipline, and the knowledge that on the other side of the hill the critics—who also have their talent to express—are waiting. Sooner or later you come to the conclusion that if you are going to survive, you had better, where it concerns your own work, become the best critic of them all. An author who would find the resources to keep writing from one generation to the next does well to climb above the ego high enough to see every flaw in his or her own work. Otherwise, he or she will never be able to decide what are its merits.
Let yourself live, however, with an awareness of your book’s lacks and shortcuts, its gloss where courage might have produced a real gleam, and you can bear the bad reviews. You can even tell when the critic is not exposing your psyche so much as turning his own dirty pockets out. It proves amazing how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. There is even hope that if the book is better than its reception, one’s favorite readers will eventually come to care for it more. The prescription, therefore, is simple: one must not put out a job with any serious taint of the meretricious. At least the prescription ought to be simple—but then, how few of us ever do work of which we are not in fact a bit ashamed? It comes down to a matter of degree. There is that remark of Engels to Marx, “Quantity changes quality.” A single potato is there for us to eat, but ten thousand potatoes are a commodity and have to be put in bins or boxes. A profit must be made from them or a loss will certainly be taken. By analogy, a little corruption in a book is as forgivable as the author’s style, but a sizable literary delinquency is a diseased organ, or so it will feel if the critics begin to bang on it and happen to be right for once. That will be the hour when one’s creditors do not go away. I wonder if we have not touched the fear that is back of the writing in many a good novelist’s heart, the hazard beneath all others.
This much said, we might quit with an agreeable moral reinforcement: one must do one’s best to be honest. Unfortunately, there is more to be taken into account. Writing is like love. One never comes to understand it altogether. The act is a mystery, and the more you labor at it, the more you become aware that it is not answers which are being offered after a life of such activity so much as a greater appreciation of the scope of our literary mysteries. The ultimate pleasure in spending one’s days as a writer is the resonance you can bring afterward to your personal experience. The mystery of the profession—where do those words come from, and how account for their alchemy on the
page?—can not only arouse terror at the thought of powers disappearing but may also inspire the happiness that one is in contact with the source of literature itself. Now, of course, we cannot find direct answers to such prodigious questions. It is enough to amuse ourselves by one or another approach to the problem. In my college years, students used to have one certainty. It was that environment gave the whole answer; one was the product of one’s milieu, one’s parents, one’s food, one’s conversations, one’s dearest and/or most odious human relations. One was the sum of one’s own history as it was cradled in the larger history of one’s time. One was a product. If one wrote novels, they were merely a product of the product. With this working philosophy I did one book—it happened to be
The Naked and the Dead
—which was wholly comfortable. I would not have known what an author was suggesting by speaking of any of his or her works as uncomfortable.
The Naked and the Dead
seemed a sure result of all I had learned up to the age of twenty-five, all I had experienced and all I had read—the recognizable end of a long, active assembly line. I felt able to account for each part of it.