Entrapment and Other Writings (36 page)

Well
, Life
feels that America’s virtues haven’t been extolled loudly enough
.

That’s right, but hallowing institutions is not the writer’s job. There are professional hallowers, like Norman Vincent Peale. Writers like
Herman Wouk and Sloan Wilson are cutting into his territory. They are the spokesmen for the whole gadget-infested middle class.

What is the writer’s job?

To accuse, to play the wasp. Zola is a perfect example, by the way. For the novelist’s place has traditionally been on the side of the loser. I can see no purpose in writing about people who seem to have won everything. There’s no story there … nothing happens as far as I’m concerned. Most writers of the new school, and Wouk is the prize example, seem to be on the side of the winners. Nobody seems to want to defend the accused, the underprivileged. Why write about happiness, anyway? There’s nothing there … no conflict, no catalyst for discovering anything about humanity.

What do you think is the relation of the church to the people you write about—the accused, the underprivileged?

I’d say the church does gently what the police do roughly.

Some people, I think, feel that you take the side of the loser too readily, too completely. You’ve been criticized for wallowing in garbage, for making heroes of your vagrants and rumdums
.

I think the critics have exaggerated the whole thing. I certainly did not set out to make “heroes” of these people. I do feel, however, that a thinker who wants to think justly must keep in touch with those who never think at all. There is no better way of recording the American saga than to study it from
behind
its billboards and comic strips, which tend to dwell more upon the American dream than upon the American reality.

Who are these people “who never think at all”?

They may be the people in Sandburg’s
The People, Yes
. Or the girl in court I saw once who told the judge, “I know right from wrong but I
can’t get my feet on the ground either way.” Or the boy who said of his life, “I just lean and dream and take a shot, and just lean and dream.” Or the nineteen-year-old punk sentenced to the electric chair who said: “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.” These people are a little less lucky than most of us, but they’re just as human. One thing for sure, they’ll never wind up in a Herman Wouk novel.

I don’t suppose you thought much of
Marjorie Morningstar.

My first feeling was, “Who cares?” And it’s such
sterile
writing.

In what way?

For instance, sex is a dirty word in the world of
Marjorie Morningstar
and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. I can’t see that, I can’t see it at all. Sex is a natural thing, a good thing, and sometimes it becomes really humorous. After all, nothing is funnier than sex running wild.

Some critics feel you’re too outspoken about the subject
.

It’s never wise to take critics too seriously.

Why?

You see, critics have patterns. I guess it helps them think better, having these patterns. When you write a book that doesn’t fit into one of these patterns you hear shrieks, howls, all sorts of carryings-on. And, you know, critics are the hardest people in the world to please. All they want from an author is the cutting wit of an Evelyn Waugh, satire like Sinclair Lewis’s, the cosmopolitan tone of a Henry James, the scope and stamina of a Tolstoy, and local color like Mark Twain could do—and yet one mustn’t get too provincial either. They get you both ways. First they tell you to write about what you know. Then they say, “Is that all you can tell us about—your own home street?”

You sound a little bitter
.

No, I’m really not. I used to be … when I still had illusions to lose. I remember when I got out of college; they gave me a little graduate’s card that said I could be whatever I wanted to be. I had tremendous faith in that card, carried it around everywhere, trying to get a job. The times were bad; I never got much of a job at all. After a while, I got to looking as tattered as the card had become.

Do you think your journalism courses at the University of Illinois helped you in your writing?

As far as technique is concerned, yes. That’s all you can get from schools—technique. They can make a reporter out of you. But with fiction you have to be more than just a reporter. I never had much faith in going down to West Madison Street with a notebook to put down ideas for a novel. A writer’s got to live the situation out as much as possible, not just sit around watching, taking notes on everybody. But I got a kick out of journalism. I was on the school paper
—The Daily Illini
—on the city staff, and I always used to go down to the city jails and wait around for something to happen. It was a good time in my life.

How long was it before you began doing fiction?

Well, right about that time, during the Depression. I had a job on a newspaper, but it only lasted three weeks, then I started drifting around the South, the Southwest. Wrote my first short story down there, in a gas station. I was broke at the time.

A lot of people, I suppose, would be shocked to know a writer doesn’t always have to do a lot of research to get material for a book
.

They would, wouldn’t they? Yep, I guess I did a lot of “research” in my time, except at the time I was doing it, I didn’t know it was research. Maybe if the cops who have picked me up in my time for vagrancy and such had told me I was doing research I wouldn’t have felt so bad about it.