The Spooky Art (2 page)
Still, some of you may refuse to treat this as a consecutive work of printed pages so much as an unexpected and possibly dubious gift of chocolates into which they can dip and move on, pleasure alternating with displeasure. I cannot pretend to say this is wrong. I have tried to put some separate elements together with as much order as is possible under these curious circumstances—close to fifty years of reflecting, meditating, musing, and declaring my thoughts on a profession I practiced and could not always feel I understood—but to those readers for whom order in style is one of the cardinal literary virtues (and I am one of them), there may be no other way to treat this volume than as a gift of occasionally exceptional sweetmeats and disappointments. (Nor will every title and subtitle deliver its promise.)
Now, for the apology. By now, at least as many women as men
are novelists, but the old habit of speaking of a writer as
he
persists. So, I’ve employed the masculine pronoun most of the time when making general remarks about writers. I do not know if the women who read this book will be all that inclined to forgive me, but the alternative was to edit many old remarks over into a style I cannot bear—the rhetorically hygienic politically correct.
All this said, I still have a few hopes that the order imposed on these fifty years of opinions and conclusions will be read by some from the first page to the last, and that a few readers will find
The Spooky Art
to be an intimate handbook they can return to over the decades of their careers.
Here then is a collection of literary gleanings, aperçus, fulminations,
pensées
, gripes, insights, regrets and affirmations, a few excuses, several insults, and a number of essays more or less intact. May the critics feel bound to debate some of these notions in time to come.
It is interesting that my ceremonial sense intensifies as I grow older, and so I have looked to assemble this book in time for it to come out on January 31, 2003. I will be exactly eighty years old on that occasion. I would hope I am not looking for unwarranted easy treatment by this last remark. Can I possibly be speaking the truth?
I
am tempted to call this section Economics, for it concerns the loss and gain (economically, psychically, physically) of living as a writer. Let’s settle, however, for a term that may be closer to the everyday reality: Lit Biz. Spend your working life as a writer and depend on it—your income, your spirit, and your liver are all on close terms with Lit Biz.
In 1963, Steve Marcus did an interview with me for
The Paris Review
, and I have taken the liberty of separating his careful and elegantly structured questions into several parts in order to give a quick shape to my first years as a writer. For those who are more interested in what I have to say about writing in general than about myself in particular, you are invited to skip over these autobiographical details and move on to a few comments on my first two books,
The Naked and the Dead
and
Barbary Shore.
Or, if you are in search of directly useful nitty-gritty, move even further, to “The Last Draft of
The Deer Park.”
STEVEN MARCUS:
Do you need any particular environment in which to write?
NORMAN MAILER:
I like a room with a view, preferably a long view. I like looking at the sea, or ships, or anything which has a vista to it. Oddly enough, I’ve never worked in the mountains.
SM:
When did you first think of becoming a writer?
NM:
That’s hard to answer. I did a lot of writing when I was young.
SM:
How young?
NM:
Seven.
SM:
A real novel?
NM:
Well, it was a science fiction novel about people on Earth taking a rocket ship to Mars. The hero had a name which sounded like Buck Rogers. His assistant was called Dr. Hoor.
SM:
Doctor …?
NM:
Dr. Hoor.
Whore
, pronounced
H-O-O-R.
That’s the way we used to pronounce whore in Brooklyn. He was patterned directly after Dr. Huer in Buck Rogers, who was then appearing on radio. This novel filled two and a half paper notebooks. You know the type, about seven inches by ten. They had soft, shiny blue covers and they were, oh, only ten cents in those days, or a nickel. They ran to about a hundred pages each and I used to write on both sides. My writing was remarkable for the way I hyphenated words. I loved hyphenating, and so I would hyphenate “the” and make it “th-e” if it came at the end of the line. Or “they” would become “the-y.” Then I didn’t write again for a long time. I didn’t even try out for the high school literary magazine. I had friends who wrote short stories, and their short stories were far better than the ones I would write for assignments in high school English and I felt no desire to write. When I got to college, I started again. The jump from Boys’ High School in Brooklyn to Harvard came as a shock. I started reading some decent novels for the first time.
SM:
You mentioned in
Advertisements for Myself
that reading
Studs Lonigan
made you want to be a writer.
NM:
Yes. It was the first truly literary experience I had, because the background of Studs was similar to mine. I grew up in Brooklyn, not Chicago, but the atmosphere had the same flatness of affect. Until then I had never considered my life or the life of the people around me as even remotely worthy of—well, I didn’t believe they could be treated as subjects for fiction. It never occurred to me. Suddenly I realized you could write about your own life.
SM:
When did you feel that you were started as a writer?
NM:
When I first began to write again at Harvard. I wasn’t very
good. I was doing short stories all the time, but I wasn’t good. If there were fifty people in the class, let’s say I was somewhere in the top ten. My teachers thought I was fair, but I don’t believe they ever thought for a moment I was really talented. Then in the middle of my Sophomore year I started getting better. I got on
The Harvard Advocate
and that gave me confidence, and about this time I did a couple of fairly good short stories for English A-1, one of which won
Story
magazine’s college contest for that year.
SM
: Was that the story about Al Groot?
NM
: Yes. And when I found out it had won—which was at the beginning of the summer after my Sophomore year [1941]—well, that fortified me, and I sat down and wrote a novel. It was a very bad novel. I wrote it in two months. It was called
No Percentage.
It was just terrible. But I never questioned any longer whether I was started as a writer.
SM
: What do you think were some of the early influences in your life? What reading, as a boy, do you recall as important?
NM
:
The Amateur Gentleman
and
The Broad Highway
were glorious works. So was
Captain Blood.
I think I read every one of Jeffrey Farnol’s books, and there must have been twenty of them. And every one of Rafael Sabatini’s.
SM
: Did you ever read any of them again?
NM
: No, now I have no real idea of their merit. But I never enjoyed a novel more than
Captain Blood.
Nor a movie. Do you remember Errol Flynn as Captain Blood? Some years ago I was asked by a magazine what were the ten most important books in my development. The book I listed first was
Captain Blood.
Then came
Das Kapital.
Then
The Amateur Gentleman.
SM
: You wouldn’t say that
Das Kapital
was boyhood reading?
NM
: Oh no, I read that many years later. But it had its mild influence.
SM
: It’s been said often that novelists are largely nostalgic for their boyhood, and in fact most novelists draw on their youthful experiences a great deal. In your novels, however, the evocation of scenes from boyhood is rare or almost absent.
NM
: It’s difficult to write about childhood. I never felt I understood it in any novel way. I never felt other authors did either. Not particularly. I think the portrait of childhood which is given by most writers is rarely true to anything more than the logic of their novel. Childhood is so protean.
SM
: What about Twain, or Hemingway—who drew on their boyhoods successfully?
NM
: I must admit they created some of the psychological reality of my own childhood. I wanted, for instance, to be like Tom Sawyer.
SM
: Not Huck Finn?
NM
: The magic of Huck Finn seems to have passed me by,
I don’t know quite why.
Tom Sawyer
was the book of Twain’s I always preferred. I remember when I got to college I was startled to find that
Huckleberry Finn
was the classic. Of course, I haven’t looked at either novel in thirty years.
I
don’t know if it still is true, but in the years I went to Harvard (so long ago as 1939 to 1943) they used to give a good writing course. In fact, it was not one good course but six. English A was compulsory for any Freshman who did not get a very good mark on the English College Entrance Boards, and five electives followed: English A-1, English A-2, up to English A-5, a vertiginous meeting place for a few select talents, whose guide was no less than Professor Robert Hillyer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. By Senior year, I was taking English A-5. In fact, I must have been one of the few students in Harvard history who took all but one of the writing courses (A-4 was missed) and must even be one of the few living testimonials to the efficacy of a half-dozen classes in composition and the art of the short story. I entered college as a raw if somewhat generous-hearted adolescent from Brooklyn who did not know the first thing about a good English sentence and left four years later as a half-affected and much imperfect Harvard man who had nonetheless had the great good fortune to find the passion of his life before he was twenty. I wanted to be a writer. And had the further good luck to conceive this passion in Freshman year in a
compulsory
course in elementary composition. That much will be granted to the forces of oppression.