The Spooky Art Read Free Page B

I absolutely love your story!” while lying through your teeth. You pick up a few random notes on human nature. Whether you glean enough for the time invested is another question. Indeed, there is a kind of signature today to many writers who come out of MFA programs. They tend to give you very good sentences and they move well on the page. Sometimes they have a tropism toward matters that are bizarre and/or intense. They also tend to be not terribly ambitious. Because in a writing course, nothing makes you crash with a louder sound than a bold attempt that doesn’t come off. So, a built-in tendency develops to stay small. Nonetheless, a few very good writers do come out of the process.
    What the course can’t satisfy is the problem of experience. Young people who write well are not just reasonably sensitive; they are over-sensitive. Experience is usually painful and difficult for them. Moreover, to choose to go out and find a new subject to write about is always false to a degree. I would argue that your material becomes valuable only when it is existential, by which I mean an experience you do not control. Driving your car along a snowy road, you miscalculate a hairpin turn and are in a bad skid. For a fraction of a second, or for as much as a second and a half, you don’t know if you’re going to come out of it.You may wreck your car. Or you may be dead in the next instant. A good deal goes through your mind at a good rate of speed—that’s an existential moment. Another existential experience of wholly different character, ongoing, heavy, full of dread, common to many marriages, is where a woman is miserable with her husband but adores her child and hates the thought of divorce. Anna Karenina is one such lady.
    In any event, there is no answer to the problem of how a young writer can pick up experience. If you search for it but are able to quit the experience if it gets too hot for you—then such a controlled adventure can be good conceivably for a magazine piece, but it’s not necessarily there for bringing you to that deeper level of writing that young scriveners aspire to.
    How I aspired! In those years at Harvard, if I had heard that Ernest Hemingway was going to speak in Worcester, Mass., I might have trudged the forty miles from Cambridge. That was how we felt then about writers. It is probably how I still feel. The shock, decades later, was to realize that this view of the writer is rare by now.
    Full of the intensity of those feelings, I even wrote a long novel in the nine months between my graduation in 1943 and my induction into the Army in March 1944. What follows is the introduction to it, which I would write thirty-five years later, when the novel was brought out in an expensive limited edition.
    Samuel Goldwyn once took a walk down the aisle of the writers’ wing of his own studio and did not hear a sound. Supposedly, five writers were working behind five office doors, but Goldwyn did not pick up the clack of a single typewriter. Instead, there was a silence of the tombs. The writers were sleeping a sleep five thousand years old.
    Goldwyn came to the end of the hall, turned around in a rage, his expressive face clenched like a fist, and he shouted down the corridor, “A writer should write!”
    I never heard that story when I was young, but I had no need of it then. I wrote. It came as naturally to me as sexual excitement to an adolescent—I think from the time I was seventeen, I had no larger desire in life than to be a writer, and I wrote a great deal. Through my Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years at Harvard, and the summers between, I must have written thirtyor forty short stories, a couple of plays, a novel, then a short novel, and then a long novel, which I called
A Transit to Narcissus.
    That was not the worst way to work up one’s literary talent. There may be too much of a tendency among young intellectuals to think that if one can develop a consciousness, if one is able to brood