The Spooky Art Read Free Page A

comprehension of the perversities of an audience’s taste (as when, for example, they like a story by a writer you despise). You can even come to recognize how a fine piece of prose can draw the attention of an audience together. If it happens to you, if you write a piece and everyone in the room listens as if there is nourishment for one ear—his own—then it will not matter afterward if you hear a dozen separate reactions, for you will have at last the certainty that you are a writer. Your work has effect: In some small way, you have begun to enter the life and intelligence of others.Then you are not likely to stay away from writing. Indeed, if you get even a glimpse of that kind of reaction from one of your paragraphs, you will discover that you must have more such paragraphs. You will want the ineffable pleasure of such attention.
    That is the best of it, but there are also perils. You can go through hell in a writing class, real, true hell. I remember in my second year at Harvard I was taking English A-1, with a very good man teaching it, Robert Gorham Davis. At a given moment, Davis said to the class, “I’d like to read to you an interesting story that’s quite good but is totally destroyed at the end by the author.”
    The story, mine to be sure, was about a young bellhop working at a summer hotel. With other bellhops, he would talk about the wives of the businessmen who were having quick affairs with the hotel staff during the week. Their husbands, after all, only came out on weekends. One weekday night, however, one lonely businessman drove up unexpectedly from New York, came into the lobby, and headed right up to his room. The bellhops knew a disaster was coming before they even heard the shots. The narrator then went up to the room. Both the bellhop, who had been in bed with the wife, and the wife were dead. The wife had had her face blown off. The husband had committed suicide. The description given by the narrator went something like this: “I couldn’t see her nose, or what was left of her mouth, and I didn’t know whether all that was spread on the carpet by now and I was stepping on it, or whether I was still breathing it in.”
    At this point, the class started to laugh. My description had the misfortune to continue for another such paragraph. I was learning a frightful lesson in a terrible hurry: A story read aloud before an audience can have little in common with its mute presence on the page.
    It became the worst single moment I ever had in a writing class. I didn’t know whether to stand up and say, “I am the one who wrote that piece and you can all go to hell,” or to remain totally silent. When you don’t know what to do, you usually do nothing. I did nothing.
    I hardly slept. Next day I had an appointment with Robert Gorham Davis. The first thing he said when I came into his office was, “Look, I owe you a serious apology. I had no idea thereaction would be so bad. I should have given you my criticisms privately. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
    Of course I did. We even became friends.
    But I can’t tell you how my back was scalded by the laughter. In those years, scorn was a pure product of the superiority we felt about ourselves at being Harvard men. We used to be a force on Friday nights as we laughed at the filmic idiocies on display at the movie theatre in Harvard Square. During that stricken ten minutes in English A-1, I felt as if I had become one of those romantic dolts on the screen. In that year, 1940, we all looked upon films as being a sub-par art. Novelists were vastly more important.
    In any event, on balance, I learned more than I lost from writing courses. For one thing, you certainly get used to how wide apart are reactions, even to pieces that present no striking disturbance. You also begin to pick up a lot about how power structures form. In the class, certain writers will make up a bloc, others an enclave. You soon learn a lot about manipulation and hypocrisy—“Oh,