Entrapment and Other Writings (8 page)

As examples, among novelists, l think of Steinbeck, Wright, Farrell,
and Dreiser. Men with something to say who have said it, each in his own fashion, without fear of public censure; and have been more fully compensated thereby than had they been timid or venal or abject.

Not to say, of course, that the great rewards do not commonly go to the most abject. It is only to say that it is not necessary to crawl in order to be rewarded. Their books—and we see them on the best seller lists every day—are artful dodges,
tours de force
which say nothing gracefully, or nothing lyrically, or nothing wistfully, or nothing hopefully, or nothing nostalgically, or—best of all—nothing mystically. But still: nothing. Like eating cotton candy—a mouthful of the stuff and
wisp
—nothing left but a sweetish taste and a clinging coat on the tongue.

And the penalty for saying something with nothing to say? I suppose part of the penalty is in being forgotten three months after the last white lily, placed in your palm by your severest critic, has wilted. Not that it is necessary to dedicate oneself fiercely to posterity. But only, in all sincerity, to write in the hope of being remembered a while. Because that is the use of the printed word: to stand up against time when our tongues are stopped; to represent those aspects of the human spirit which stand up against time, since those are the only things that do stand up. lf one is not to say, at least occasionally, something memorable, then why not just tell it to the milkman and forget it?

The answer to that, of course, is that the milkman won’t leave any grade A to hear you say it; but he may buy a book if you write it. You can write seriously, of memorable things, and still have the milkman buy. It remains possible, despite the temptations of the big rewards of hack serialization and of the How-Did-He-Get-Rid-of-the-Corpse market, to write honestly, for honest men; for the milkman, for the janitor, for the street-car conductor, and the mailman, and still have the satisfaction of getting a contract renewed.

It’s not the easy way, because neither the milkman nor the street-car conductor are likely to wait for payment until the rewards of doing it the hard way come in. But willingness to do the thing the
hard way is part of the serious writer’s equipment. He plans, forever, even when disappointed, to go to Niagara Falls for a larger purpose than simply to spit in the cataract from the Canadian side.

For the American press is, truly, a great cataract, an endlessly moving tide which catches up most writers almost as soon as they can spell. It is well, for those who believe in the necessity of writing with conviction of both feeling and thought, to regard this tide with a degree of scepticism, knowing that the biggest bubble in the torrent will burst any moment, that the only things which remain intact upon it, even after they go over the falls themselves, are those things which the writer has himself learned and felt and absorbed, in his very brain and tissue, and by his own most intimate experience. For ultimately, not only the worldly rewards go to those willing to do it the hard way, but also the reward of being remembered, of gaining the satisfaction of having said a thing of one’s own in one’s own fashion.

So it isn’t strictly essential, in order to live by writing, to write only of the safest, most-sure-to-sell subjects. That market, to speak frankly, is overcrowded. And although we hear every day of the cautiousness of publishers who steer wide of anything dealing with people who don’t live in comfort, who go only to Junior League occasions and never say offensive words even secretly, the happy truth of the matter is that there isn’t a solid publisher going who won’t take a book dealing with any strata of any society so long as it is a true book; so long as the writer is not contriving his realism out of his head instead of out of reality; so long as he speaks with a degree of clarity and a degree of force; so long as he is writing with his eyes on his subject and not on his reader; so long as he isn’t trying to pull a Sweetness-and-Light in reverse. That is to say, so long as he isn’t aiming deliberately at a shocker with the identical venality employed by those who write to comfort the reader at all costs.

For publishers are in business, and the American public, war or no war, still buys books that speak convincingly of reality. The average American reader is a knowing sort of cuss, and he knows when a book is false or true. Publishers aren’t afraid of the American
reader. If the writer will speak boldly, he will find that the best publishers are bold enough to publish him, that the average American is bold enough to buy.

There was, in pre-revolutionary Russia, a novelist who wrote of Russian prostitution. When asked why he had turned to such a subject, while his more successful contemporaries wrote of people in more pleasant circumstances, he explained himself:

“With us, you see, they write about detectives, about lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones—and really, by God, altogether well—cleverly, with finesse and talent. But after all, these people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture … tinsel … gingerbread.…”

What happens here in America, where there are a hundred gifted writers to every one of old Russia? Where the levelling processes of Democracy have given us, from all classes and all callings and all colors, legions of brilliant writers: writers of verse, of short stories, of biographies, of mysteries, of jingles and ghost stories and fairy tales, endlessly stylized novels of endlessly stylized clothes-horses. They, too, write with talent and finesse. Without conviction of feeling or thought, of a world that does not exist.

How then does the serious writer go about putting down the world of reality? I fancy it is basically a matter of living and reacting. The chief thing should be to share, as fully as one is able, in the common experiences of common humanity. The incidental thing would be the recording on the typewriter of reactions obtained in this sharing process. For, to the creative writer, all experiences, whether noble or mean or sordid or simply pathetic, are the seeds from which his writing must grow. Which means that they must not only be planted, but that their growth must be unforced. That no studied effort at invention of literary images can ever replace the simplest sound of experienced reality.

To write without haste, as the story grows within, regardless of
all social and moral ideas, regardless of whom your report may please or offend, regardless of whether the critics stand up and cheer for a month or take hammer and tongs after you, or simply ignore you—regardless of all forms, of all institutions, of all set ways of conduct and thought. Regardless, chiefly, of what the writer himself prefers to believe, know, hear, think or feel.

And that aspect—the ability to
feel
your way into a story rather than to regard it from the sidelines by some formal outline—is the most encouraging aspect of this business of defying the grocer in order to write seriously. For practically everyone can
feel
. If you can’t do that, of course, you’re gone. You can’t go out and get a new set of emotions. But if it’s simply a matter of not knowing anything, that’s not so serious; because most writers don’t. But they do develop an ability to listen. To listen to people talk. And in the talk of people, especially of those on the streets, lies an endless wealth of story-stuff.

Nor is it necessary to go about haunting street corners with a notebook in your pocket and an amplifier in your ear. It is necessary only that you do not stop your ears with smugness or indifference or indolence. Going about your workaday rounds, assuming you’re neither in solitary confinement nor a hermit, you’ll hear all the words of which people’s lives are constituted. And, if you listen long enough, the commonest speech will begin to ring like poetry.

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded, in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn’t tell you, though he try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop.

I recall being caught recently by the language of a girl in an all-night hamburger joint. I didn’t have to eavesdrop. I was there for coffee, and there she was, an unprepossessing little thing in some small trouble all her own, confiding some of it to the counter-jumper:

“I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come so bad,” she was telling him, “I just don’t seem so good as other people any more. Sometimes I’m that disgusted of myself I think: ‘Just one more dope, that’s
you.’ I won’t set up there in that room another Spring alone, thinkin’ stuff like that. It just starts goin’ through my head as soon as I come in that door. Like someone who lives there I can’t see, somebody who knows better, tellin’ me: ‘Just one more dope, that’s you.’ I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come. So bad.”

lf that isn’t poetry, Saroyan is a dentist.
*

Poetry it is, the best and the truest: the poetry of the ball-park and the dance hall, of the drugstore at noon, of the pool room and the corner newsstand, of the Montgomery-Ward salesgirls reminiscing on the nearest streetcar or bus.

And it is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can’t give you the first syllable of reality, at any cost, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can’t help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. There never was a time, a place, and a country like our own in which the opportunity to write truly of common men and women was so accessible—to those bold enough to seize the chance.

Whitman himself never had the chance to write of Democracy as we have today, when a hundred nations, as one nation, pass before us every day. And Whitman could never take a camera along either.

Which can be an asset even to writers not planning a picture book with captions. The simple selective process of snapping relevant aspects of the life of our streets assists the writer visually as fully as does listening to street talk. It doesn’t matter that the pictures turn out poorly—the business of going about looking and discriminating is the main idea.

Then set your pictures, whether from the film or from your mind, on the typewriter, in your own good time, in your own way—the way it felt and looked when you snapped it. Then you’ll feel you’re writing something you
know
.

You may find, in time, that doing it the hard way is the easiest way of all.

Hank Lord was a man that wanted everything on wheels and moving about long before he owned an automobile factory. When he was still in his didies, he yelped till his poor old dad had to rollerskate the floor with him instead of walking to and fro like it’s always proper for dads to do.

He fetched his lunch to the little red school house in a little red wagon and tried to make the cows learn to ride a bicycle so’s they’d make better time from the pasture when he called them up for milking. He traveled that fast he wore goggles around the barnyard before anybody ever heard of an automobile, and was called Speedrow in five states and twenty counties when the Indianapolis racing track was still a hayfield, a frogpuddle, and a couple of turnip patches. He was speed on wheels; he knew good and well that wheels make the world go round and get the job done and done right and for keeps while you would be scratching your head and thinking of it any other way.

When he started his automobile factory, a man could have roamed it from front to back and from ceiling to floor without seeing more than a few trucks and barrows and such like on wheels. In them days a bunch of men got around in a ring and pretty soon here come one with a part of the frame and laid it down on the floor and another one soon follows suit until they got enough to start out on. Then they started reaming and trueing and whamming and bamming
and sledging and boring and bolting until it looked like a thing that might take a snifter of gasoline and go skedaddling down the pike to a faretheewell.

I tell you, boys, when you put in a wheel here and a roller there and a belt in the other place, it ain’t long till you got to be hell on wheels and no brakes, and it was goodbye crapping a smoke or drinking a rest. If you had to hold up two fingers like a kid being excused in school, you’d meet yourself coming back or they’d know the reason why. You had to pick ’em up and lay ’em down right there at your post and make believe you liked it or ask them to pull your card. You would just walk outside talking to yourself if you couldn’t stand the gaff.

Hank decided that iron was too high and lasted too long so he got to scouring the back alleys for every tin can he could lay his hands on and made flivvers out of them. As long as they held together long enough to get off the belt and outside the gates he never worried his mind but hollered: “More tin! More wheels! Roll ’em, boys, roll ’em!”

I told ’em what would come to pass, and it will yet. It will yet as sure as God made little apples. Two men will run the whole shooting-match. Number one will just politely dump a load of cans on a great big steel block, and—bing! flash! bing! bang! squeak! just like that, down’ll come a million-ton die and when it raises they’ll be a new black flivver ready to be driven away by number two or maybe even a radio, for chrissakes. Maybe one man would do the whole job and mow the old man’s lawn when he’s got nothing to do but just fool around and keep busy.

This will come to pass, good peoples, as sure as you’re born, and plenty of men already without a hair on their heads or a tooth in it will live to see that day. It’s been inching along ever since Hank found his first wheel and put it on a wagon and when he found out that anything round will roll and speed up work and take the beans and bacon right out of a man’s jaws because he ain’t needed no more.