The Spooky Art (15 page)

T
he CIA, in its actual workings, is the antithesis of the average spy novel, which, best-seller-oriented, tends to present a perfect clock that ticks to its conclusion. In
Harlot’s Ghost
, one of my characters remarks that she came into
the CIA because she loved spy novels. Now, her complaint was that she could never—precisely because she was inside—experience the full run of a scenario. On occasion, her work put her into the equivalent of a spy novel, but only, let us say, for Chapters Five and Six. She hadn’t been there at the beginning, and was soon shifted to another assignment. Often, one did not learn how it all turned out. That struck me as being about what life is like: The gun over the mantelpiece does not often get fired. We live in and out of ongoing plots every day of our lives, but they are discontinuous. Nothing can be more difficult to encounter than a life story that accompanies us through a beginning, middle, and end. There is only our own that is not missing most of the pages, yet how discontinuous it seems all the same! One could make the case that our love of plot—until it gets very cheap indeed—comes out of our need to find the chain of cause and effect that so often is missing in our own existence.

The decisions you make while writing fiction can leave you uneasy. If your characters come alive, that’s fine; they will carry you a part of the way. But finally, your people have to make what might be termed career decisions. Does your protagonist want to go abroad in the foreign service, or does he decide to stay in New York with the amazing young model he has just met? Needless to say, such choices are non-operative for writers who have the story complete in their mind before they begin. So I repeat: I look to find my book as I go along. Plot comes last. I want a conception of my characters that’s deep enough so that they will get me to places where I, as the author, have to live by my wits. That means my characters must keep developing. So long as they stay alive, the plot will take care of itself. Working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.

Working on
The Executioner’s Song
, I came to the realization that God is a better novelist than the novelists. The story was not only incredible, but it most certainly had happened. If I had conceived it, the work would have been more dramatic but less true. I learned all over again that the way things come about in life is not the way they work in novels. (Unless you are Theodore Dreiser!) It would have seemed wasteful to me to have a novel with two really fascinating characters who didn’t get together for a scene. Whereas, what I discovered in
The Executioner’s Song
was that the characters I was most interested in didn’t always meet, and when they did, the results were often disappointing.

It took some time to learn that this did not necessarily diminish the drama. It could increase it. Most of our lives are spent getting ready for dramatic moments that don’t take place. Or if they do, are less than we expected. About the time we say, “Well, nothing really big ever happens to me,” you can get knocked down with something larger by far than you expected. All the frustrations of all the little narratives in your life that never had a real climax can be present in the rare denouement that life also offers once in a great while.

I no longer work up a master plan before I begin a novel. When I was younger I used to sit down and write out such plans, but I
never finished such projects. Even with
The Executioner’s Song
, where, after all, I knew the end of the story, I was careful not to be too versed in too many details ahead. I preferred to do my research up to no more than a hundred pages ahead of where I was. I wanted to keep the feeling that I didn’t know how it was all going to turn out. I needed something like the illusion that I was inventing each detail. Obviously, I prefer doing a book that is not too carefully prepared. Some of my best ideas come because I haven’t fixed my novel’s future in concrete. Once you know your end, it’s disastrous to get a new idea. That can only take you away from your prearranged conclusion. Yet the new idea that you didn’t follow may be worth more than the denouement you planned in advance.

For that matter, the moment I think of a good plot, I find that the book becomes almost impossible to write, because I know I won’t believe it. Life may consist of people plotting all the time, but the plots rarely develop. We decide: I’ll make this move in my life, and that should result in the following—then life confounds us. So I prefer a story that develops out of the writing. I don’t like one that moves ahead of my characters, because then my people won’t live. Tie your characters to a prearranged plot, and you are doing to them what we would do to our children if we carefully selected their colleges, their spouses, and their jobs without ever consulting them. The same unspoken despondency weighs on characters who are treated that way in a novel: They never get to fulfill their own perverse (that is, surprising to the novelist) capabilities; they never come alive. Bill Buckley is wonderful at plots—his mind may work that way—but nobody lives and breathes in his novels with any more three dimensionality than some passing movie star who can’t act.

Many young novelists tend to draw for their material on family or the near world of friends. How, goes the question, do you manage that without making these near and dear people too recognizable? Can you treat the familiar in such a way as not to incur the rage and tears of those who are close to you?

It is next to impossible. You cannot write about people you care about and not hurt them or, to the contrary, even worse, allow too little to be wrong with them. They then come through as boring. That is the first mark of bottom-level amateur writing.

I’ve always stayed away from such close material, have never
written directly about my parents or my sister. Those experiences are so basic that I encircle them with a favorite word: I characterize these fundamental and primary experiences as
crystals.
The crystals can be simple or extraordinarily developed. But provided you don’t use them directly, you can sometimes send a ray of your imagination through the latticework in one direction or another and find altogether different scenarios. If you’ve got a relative in mind who’s, let’s say, a pretty tough kid, you can, if you don’t write about him head-on, make the boy a bullfighter or put him in Special Forces, even turn him into a bank robber or an honest cop. So long as you don’t use the core of your experience, you will be in command of many possibilities. But if you are determined to get it all accurately on paper, then at a given moment you will have to face the fact that you are going to hurt people who are close to you.

When a surgeon operates on a young girl, he isn’t saying, “I’m going to make an incision on this young lady’s stomach that is not only going to scar her but will affect her future sex life to some degree for the next thirty years.” He just says, “Scalpel, nurse,” and does it. The surgeon is focused on the act, not its reverberations.

Novelists are engaged in something analogous. If they start thinking of all the damage they are going to do, they can’t write the book—not if they’re reasonably decent.

The point is that one is facing a true problem. Either you produce a work that doesn’t approach what really interests you or, if you go to the root with all you’ve got, there is no way you won’t injure your family, friends, and innocent bystanders.

Some of my characters do come from real people. One might emerge out of five individuals, another from one person, greatly altered. Still another is imagined. No matter by which route, there’s pleasure when a character becomes, in a sense, independent of yourself.

Graham Greene once said that there were certain characters who took care of themselves. He never had to bother about them in the writing. Others, he had to go to great pains with. He would work very hard on them. Later, when he’d read a review and it would mention one of his resistant characters as “well drawn,” he used to think, Well dragged.

Up to now, I’ve not liked writing about people who are close to me, because their actual presence interferes with the reality one is trying to create. They become alive not as creatures in your imagination but as actors in your life. And so they seem real while you write, but you’re not developing their novelistic reality into more and more. For example, it’s not a good idea to try to put your wife into your novel. Not your latest wife, anyway. In practice, I prefer to draw a character from someone I hardly know, who excites my novelist’s instinct. I sense that I will be able to add a great deal to the portrait by what I’ve learned from other people.

The question remains: How do you turn a real person into a fictional one? If I have an answer, it is that I try to put the model in situations which have very little to do with his or her real situations in life. Very quickly, the original disappears. The private reality can’t hold up. For instance, I might take somebody who is a professional football player, a man whom I know slightly, let’s say, and turn him into a movie star. In a transposition of this sort, everything that relates particularly to the professional football player quickly disappears, and what is left, curiously, is what is
exportable
in his character. But this process, while interesting in the early stages, is not as exciting as the more creative act of allowing your characters to grow once you’ve separated them from the model. It’s when they become as complex as real people that the fine excitement begins. Because now they’re not really characters any longer—they’re
beings
, which is a distinction I like to make. A character is someone you can grasp as a whole—you can have a clear idea of him—but a being is someone whose nature keeps shifting. In
The Deer Park
, Lulu Meyers is a being rather than a character. If you study her closely, you will see that she is a different person in every scene. Just a little different. I don’t know whether initially I did this by accident or purposefully, but at a certain point I made the conscious decision not to try to straighten her out; she seemed right in her changeableness.

I’ve spoken of characters
emerging.
Quite often they don’t emerge; they fail to. And one is left with the dull compromise that derives from two kinds of experience warring with each
other within oneself. A character who should have been brilliant is dull. Or even if a character does prove to be first-rate, it’s possible you could have done twice as much. A novel has its own laws. After a while, it becomes a creature. One can feel a bit like a rider who’s got a fine horse. Very often, I’ll suffer shame for what I’ve done with a novel. I won’t say it’s the novel that’s bad; I’ll say it’s I who was bad, as if the novel were a child raised by me, but improperly. I know what’s potentially beautiful in my novel, you see. Very often after I’m done, I realize that the beauty I recognize in it is not going to be perceived by the reader. I didn’t succeed in bringing it out. It’s very odd—it’s as though I had let the novel down, owed it a duty which I didn’t fulfill.

Hearn’s death in
The Naked and the Dead
was supposed to be shocking. I haven’t thought of Hearn’s death in years. I stole the way of doing it directly from E. M. Forster. In
The Longest Journey
, he created a character who was most alive for the reader, then destroyed him on the next page. As I recall the line, it went: “Gerald died next day. He was kicked to death in a football game.” You get an idea what a rifle shot is like at that point. In my book, it may have been too big a price to pay, because the denouement of the novel was sacrificed. I don’t think I was aware of the size of the problem. Today I’d be much more alert to that. If I were to do the book now, I might keep Hearn alive until the very end, and it would probably be a phonier book as a result. One of the things you always have trouble with when you talk about “true” or “not true” is, of course, the relative truth of the novel. In a way, if you get a fairly good novel going, then you have a small universe functioning, and this universe lives or does not live in relation to its own scheme of cause and effect.