Mind of an Outlaw (75 page)

Would he be ready to listen to a reply from someone else who was no good and could prove it? The words would go like this: “If you screw around a lot, it may do a great many things for you
(increase your experience, expand your ego, and/or reduce your chances of getting cancer). It will certainly make you more knowing in the art of seducing the electorate, but in most cases, you cannot pretend that it is particularly good for the kids.”

If Clinton beat Dole—and he certainly would, provided creatures from the president’s past did not rise up out of the black lagoon—the credit could go to the last forty years of television. For a majority of TV-watching Americans, it was likely that Clinton was by now the most fascinating character to come along since J.R. That large share of America’s viewers would not wish the Clintons to go off the air. For this is a TV entertainment with the potential to rise above all the video heights of the past, and even the Simpson case could pale before the future adventures of Bill and Hillary.

I MAY NOT TELL YOU WHY
I write—it could be too complicated for my mind—but I can tell you about my dear friend, my oldest friend, Jean Malaquais, and why he writes.

I remember how it was with him forty years ago when he was in his mid-forties and was working on a novel,
The Joker
. He would spend fourteen hours a day at his desk. Since he was punctilious about literary virtue to the point of vice, he would, what with deletions, corrections, and revisions, manage to advance his narrative two or three hundred words. One page a day for fourteen hours of horrendous labor. Since his powers of concentration were intense, it was, indeed, a labor for which no other adjective applied. Fourteen hours. Horrendous. I, a more self-indulgent writer, used to complain that a thousand words in three or four hours was hardly a fair bargain for me.

I asked him once, “Why do you insist on remaining a writer? With your intelligence, with your culture, you could be successful at so many things. Writing may not be a normal activity for you.”

He happened to agree. “You are absolutely right,” he said. “I
am not a natural writer. There are even times when I detest this torture. I achieve so little of my aims.”

His aims, needless to say, were immense. They were exactly at the center of the problem. “All right,” I said, “why not do something else?”

“Never,” he said.

“Never? Tell me why.”

“The only time I know the truth is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen.”

I have been thinking of Jean Malaquais’s answer for forty years. I could go on at length about how I write to convey my anger at all that I think is wrong in this world, or I could speak of the mystery of the novelist’s aesthetic—ah, to be able to create a world that exists on the terms one has given it!—or I could even, unlike Jean Malaquais, be able to say, “When it’s a matter of making a living, you can’t beat the hours.” But finally, I subscribe to his reply. For me, it has the advantage of being incontestably true. The only time, right or wrong, that I feel a quintessential religious emotion—that the power of the truth is in me—comes on occasion when I write, no, even better: the only time I know the truth is at the point of my pen.

2000s

ONE OF THE CRUELEST
remarks in the language is: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. The parallel must be: Those who meet experience, learn to live; those who don’t, write.

The second remark has as much truth as the first—which is to say, some truth. Of course, many a young man has put himself in danger in order to pick up material for his writing, but as a matter to make one wistful, not one major American athlete, CEO, politician, engineer, trade union official, surgeon, airline pilot, chess master, call girl, sea captain, teacher, bureaucrat, Mafioso, pimp, recidivist, physicist, rabbi, movie star, clergyman, or priest or nun has also emerged as a major novelist since the Second World War.

What with ghostwriters, collaborators, and editors hand-cranking the tongues of the famous long enough to get their memoirs into tape recorders, it could be said that some dim reflection can be found in literature of the long aisles and huge machines of that social mill which is the world of endeavor—yes, just about as much as comes back to us from a photograph insufficiently exposed in the picture taking, a ghost image substituted for the original lights and deep shadows of the object. So, for
every good novel about a trade union that has been written from the inside, we have ten thousand better novels to read about authors and the social activities of their friends. Writers tend to live with writers just as automotive engineers congregate in the same country clubs of the same suburbs around Detroit.

But even as we pay for the social insularity of Detroit engineers by having to look at the repetitive hump of their design until finally what is most amazing about the automobile is how little it has been improved in the last fifty years, so literature suffers from its own endemic hollow: we are overfamiliar with the sensitivity of the sensitive and relatively ignorant of the cunning of the strong and the stupid, one—it may be fatal—step removed from good and intimate perception of the inside procedures of the corporate, financial, governmental, Mafia, and working-class establishments. Investigative journalism has taken us into the guts of the machine, only not really, not enough. We still do not have much idea of the soul of any inside operator; we do not, for instance, yet have a clue to what makes a quarterback ready for a good day or a bad one. In addition, the best investigative reporting of new journalism tends to rest on too narrow an ideological base—the rational, ironic, fact-oriented world of the media liberal. So we have a situation, call it a cultural malady, of the most basic sort: a failure of sufficient information (that is, good
literary
information) to put into those centers of our mind we use for assessment. No matter how much we read, we tend to know too little of how the world works. The men who do the real work offer us no real writing, and the writers who explore the minds of such men approach from an intellectual stance that distorts their vision. You would not necessarily want a saint to try to write about a computer engineer, but you certainly would not search for the reverse. All too many saints, monsters, maniacs, mystics, and rock performers are being written about these days, however, by practitioners of journalism whose inner vision is usually graphed by routine parameters. Our continuing inability to comprehend the world is likely to continue.

Being a novelist, I want to know every world. I would never close myself off to a subject unless it’s truly repulsive to me. While one can never take one’s imperviousness to corruption for granted, it is still important to have some idea of how the world works. What ruins most writers of talent is that they don’t get enough experience, so their novels tend to develop a certain paranoid perfection. That is almost never as good as the rough edge of reality. (Franz Kafka immaculately excepted!)

For example, how much of the history that’s made around us is conspiracy, how much is simple fuckups? You have to know the world to get some idea of that.

It’s not advisable for a novelist, once he is successful!, to live in an upper-class social milieu for too long. Since it is a world of rigid rules, you cannot be yourself. There’s a marvelous built-in reflex in such society. It goes: if you are completely one of us, then you are not very interesting. (Unless you have prodigious amounts of money or impeccable family.) If you have any entrée, it’s because that world is always fascinated with mavericks, at least until the point where they become bored with you. Then you are out. On the other hand, while in, even as a maverick, there are certain rules you have to obey, and the first is to be amusing. (Capote and Jerzy Kosinski come to mind.) If you start accepting those rules past the point where you enjoy going along as part of the game, then you are injuring yourself. Capote played consigliere to New York society until he could bear it no longer and then he commenced his self-destruction with
Answered Prayers
. Kosinski, who may have been the most amusing guest of them all in New York, committed suicide during an ongoing illness.

I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn’t I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and
so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose.

Now, the things I’ve stood for have been roundly defeated. Literature, after all, has been ground down in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s a gloomy remark, but consider that literature was one of the forces that helped to shape the latter part of the nineteenth century—naturalism, for example. One can fear that in another hundred years the serious novel will bear the same relation to serious people that the five-act verse play does today. The profound novel will be a curiosity, a long cry away from what great writing once offered. Where indeed would England be now without Shakespeare? Or Ireland without James Joyce or Yeats? If you ask who has had that kind of influence today in America, I’d say Madonna. Some years ago, the average young girl was completely influenced by her. She affected the way girls dressed, acted, behaved. So far, she’s had more to do with women’s liberation than Women’s Liberation. I mean, for every girl who was affected by feminist ideology, there must have been five who tried to live and dress the way they thought Madonna did. They had their own private revolution without ever hearing about
Ms
. magazine.

Sometimes you write a novel because it comes out of elements in yourself that—no better word—are deep. The subject appeals to some root in your psyche, and you set out on a vertiginous venture. But there are other times when you may get into an altogether different situation. You just damn well have to write a book for no better reason than that your economic problems are pressing.