Into this same middle category go the contradictory recommendations of Joseph Heller and E. L. Doctorow regarding dramaturgical advance planning. Heller declared to our seminar that he always wrote his novels’ closing chapters first: How would he know how to get there, he asked rhetorically, if he didn’t know where he was going? Mind you, he went on, these first-draft last chapters were proposals, not binding contracts; by the time he re-reached them, small or large changes might well be in order. But he could no more begin a novel without knowing how he meant to end it than he could launch into a joke without knowing its punch line. Doctorow, on the contrary (not in my seminar, but in one of his at Sarah Lawrence College decades ago, whence one of his students later came to us and retold the tale when I retold Heller’s) is alleged to have said that a novelist “needn’t see beyond [his] headlights”—which I take to mean that knowing the direction of the next plot-turn is navigational data enough; that bridges farther down the road may be crossed when one arrives at them. All very well, perhaps, I warned my seminarians, for a veteran professional like Doctorow with doubtless well-established work habits and seasoned intuitions, but dangerous advice indeed for apprentice novelists, a fair number of whom I’ve seen write themselves into all but inextricable cul-de-sacs. Something between Doctorow’s improvisatory insouciance and Heller’s to-me-unimaginably-detailed advance planning is probably soundest for most of us yarn-spinners: The aforecriticized John Gardner — by all reports a first-rate coach despite his wrongheadedness, by my lights, in certain areas — wisely observes (in his treatise On Becoming a Novelist) that most novels culminate in some sort of all-hands-on-deck Big Scene, and that it were well for the author to have at least some advance notion of that scene’s lineaments. Something may be said for putting off the crossing of bridges until one reaches them, but it helps to know ahead of time that there’s a bridge or two to be crossed, and whether it looks to be a footbridge or the Golden Gate.
I’VE SAVED FOR last that first category of authorial obiter dicta: observations about writing made by visiting authors that I find myself quoting without need of comment. With a sigh I recall a reluctant, taciturn, and very weary-looking John Dos Passos in Hopkins’s Gilman Hall back in the early 1950s (he lived nearby then, a widower saddened further by the indignation of many liberals at what they saw as his turncoat right-wingery during the McCarthy era) warning us starry-eyed aspirants that writing was “a bad job.” More cheering was Norman Mailer’s reply when I reported to him, two decades later, Dos Passos’s gloomy remark: “Granted, the pay’s not so hot — but you can’t beat the hours.” Mailer, by the way, when he visited us at Buffalo just after publishing Why Are We in Vietnam?, preferred not to be introduced at alclass="underline" At his request, we sparred or shadow-boxed or something for a few seconds in the lobby of the auditorium — my first and only experience of that alarming exercise — and then he sprang to the podium and introduced himself.
I like to repeat too Larry McMurtry’s declaration (back at Hopkins again) that the reason he got along well during his Hollywood scriptwriting period was that he didn’t give a damn whether his screenplays were finally produced or not, as long as he got paid; the main purpose of screenplays anyhow, he declared, is to give the producer some idea of how many locations are involved, for budget-and-logistical purposes. Stanley Elkin, too, after a stint in LaLa-Land, waxed eloquent on the inferior status of words in film as opposed to prose fiction: We writer-types, he said, are in the habit of thinking that stories are told with lines like Proust’s “For a long time I went to bed early,” or Joyce’s “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. . ” Movies, on the other hand, said Elkin, tell stories this way — and he launched into hilarious extended wordless sound-effects: car screeching to a halt, doors slamming, footsteps approaching, other obscure but portentous noises…. Not easy for a wordsmith to adjust to.
Then there’s William H. Gass’s memorable response to a student who asked him whether a writer’s first concern ought to be the reader’s pleasure or the author’s. Neither, Gass replied: To put the reader’s pleasure first is pandering; to put the author’s pleasure first is self-indulgence. A writer’s first concern, he declared, ought to be for the verbal artifact that’s trying, with the writer’s collaboration, to get itself said. The author as midwife: I like that.
Ditto the so-prolific John Updike’s response to my student who asked him. . I don’t recall exactly what; perhaps whether he had ever abandoned a project-in-the-works, for Updike’s reply was to the effect that now and then he would set aside a fiction-in-progress because he didn’t recognize its author as (quoting Updike) “nimble old me.” Nimble, yes: That’s him, for sure, a self-assessment as modest as it is exact. Likewise James Michener’s response to the student who asked him what he regarded as his major strength and his most serious weakness as a novelist. The former, Michener replied unhesitatingly, was information: Whether writing about Iberia, Texas, Poland, or Outer Space, he prided himself on doing his homework. And his major weakness? “Human psychology,” confessed our visitor with a smile and a shrug: “Don’t know the first thing about it.”
And that sort of authorial self-recognition informs — most touchingly, by my lights — the final item in this little anthology of en pas-sants. In the only conversation I ever had with Robert Frost, who visited us at Penn State on a wintry spring day some 40 years ago, the old poet invited us to ask him anything we cared to: He was too deaf to hear our questions anyhow, he said, but he would answer something. I don’t recall what my question was, but I remember clearly Frost’s reply: that every spring for as long as he could remember, he would notice that the oak trees up his way still had a few forlorn brown leaves hanging on from the previous autumn. The sight of those weatherbeaten remnants, he declared, never failed to suggest to him the tatters of a blown-out sail on a ship limping into harbor after storms, and his professional intuition never failed to tell him that there was in that simile not merely a poem, but a Robert Frost poem — a Robert Frost poem that, alas, the poet of that name had yet to figure out. Nor did he ever, to my knowledge, although there is passing mention of oak leaves in several of his verses.
As might be expected, one supposes — given that all trees are oak trees (except pine trees).
The Inkstained Thumb
From Rules of Thumb (subtitled 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction-Writing Fixations), compiled by Michael Martone and Susan Neville.1
THUMB-RULE #1 FOR aspiring writers, it goes without saying, is Be Wary of Writers’ Rules of Thumb. Anton Chekhov liked the smell of rotting apples in his writing desk. Edna Ferber advised nothing more interesting on that desk’s far side than a blank wall. Ernest Hemingway and Scheherazade, for different reasons, inclined to close their day’s (or night’s) output in mid-story, even in mid-sentence. I myself advise no more than that you merely perpend such advisements and predilections, including mine to follow, en route to discovering by hunch, feel, trial, and error what best floats your particular boat. Too many rules of thumb can make a chap all thumbs.