After those stories which we once employed to hold the ears of children came those calculated to suspend — not just you or me, but everyone — our souls like white rags in a line of wash; and these were written to manipulate a kind of universal mechanism in our psyches: the Gothic romance played upon passivity, just as nursie stories put girls in their place, while the hard-eyed private eye became a hard and fancy phallus. In my adolescence I forsook Malory to pursue simpleminded empathies. I read of G—8 and his Battle Aces, about Doc Savage and the Shadow. Threats, entanglements, and bloody extrications followed one another with increasing amplitude and gratifying rapidity. Plots lay over my life like a treasure hunter’s map. The solace they contained was as immense as it was deceitful, since there was always a way out. I now wonder whether this glut of blood and mindless action didn’t stamp all story for me as trivial, childish, and cheap. Later I painfully advanced on Thomas Wolfe and like him made the world a Whitman Sampler and a list of sweets. I also ranted against that mysterious enemy, the other sex, because I wasn’t whatever I thought women wanted my own sexuality to be.
If Gertrude Stein understood first principles, and borrowed much of her magical hypnotic beat from children’s tales (everything but woods and witches), Kafka grasped the second ones with an unholy hand. He simply did not specialize in extrications.
He had come from the ship at dawn, eager to see the sights of the city — he had heard there were so many — and perhaps, one never knew, to turn a penny of the honest kind through wine and conversation. Hardly had he crossed the docks and entered one of the narrow streets that lead from the waterfront when nine sergeants of police, running out of doorways, caught him in a plastic net, bobbing their silver epaulets and swaying their silver cords across their chests with the exertion; and he was carried head down over the right shoulder of the largest, a man terribly strong, so that all he saw around him as he bounced against the fellow’s buttocks were nine pairs of superb trousers and the eighteen shining shoes that darted out of them, their silver laces shaking, while on the road he saw patches of brilliantly iridescent oil. He was slung so steeply that his head several times struck the pavement until he cruelly bent his neck. Once he remembered to cry out but a jounce made him bite his tongue and he choked upon saliva. Blood collected above his eyes, making him sick and afraid to speak. In this condition he was brought before a magistrate who questioned him at once.
He tried to answer but the magistrate only stared, his head wagging constantly so that powder drifted from his wig. The questions continued, receiving the same answers as before. But the blood in your cheeks, cried the magistrate, bring me a basin! All he could do was plead. The magistrate rose angrily and hurled his wig at him, clouds of powder rising, forcing him to sneeze. The magistrate produced a portfolio of photographs which he shook one after the other so the images seemed to blur. There! What do you say to that, sir? what do you say to these? At last in terrible vexation he shouted back: you are crazy, crazy, a creature in my nightmare; and one of the sergeants thereupon entered to strike him on the hands and about the face with a watch strap while the magistrate repeated peevishly: he has no dignity, this one, look at his nose.
Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and William Faulkner, André Gide and Joseph Conrad: what could a poor beginner do? And from whose grip was it easier to escape — the graceless hack’s or the artful great’s?
In any case, break loose. Begin. And I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache. To entertain a toothache there has to be lots of incident, some excitement, much menace. When I decided to write the story down, I called it ‘And Slowly Comes the Spring,’ because that fragmentary phrase seemed somehow appropriate and poetic (it wasn’t); but it was some weeks before I began to erase the plot to make a fiction of it, since one can’t count on the ear of an everlasting toothache. I titled it, then, ‘The Pedersen Kid,’ and because I believed it was good for me (it turned out, it was), I tried to formulate a set of requirements for the story as clear and rigorous as those of the sonnet. From the outset, however, I was far too concerned with theme. I hadn’t discovered yet what I would later find was an iron law of composition for me: the exasperatingly slow search among the words I had already written for the words which were to come, and the necessity for continuous revision, so that each work would seem simply the first paragraph rewritten, swollen with sometimes years of scrutiny around that initial verbal wound, one of the sort you hope, as François Mauriac has so beautifully written, ‘the members of a particular race of mortals can never cease to bleed.’
But what do beginners know? too much. It is what they think they know that makes them beginners. Anyway, here are some of the instructions I drew up (or laid down) for myself during that January of its commencement nearly twenty-five — no — nearly thirty years ago.
The problem is to present evil as a visitation — sudden, mysterious, violent, inexplicable. All should be subordinated to that end. The physical representation must be spare and staccato; the mental representation must be flowing and a bit repetitious; the dialogue realistic but musical. A ritual effect is needed. It falls, I think, into three parts, each part dividing itself into three. The first part is composed of the discovery of the boy, the discovery of what the boy has seen, the discovery (worst of all) that they will have to do something. The second part is composed of efforts — the effort made to reach the farm; the effort needed to build a tunnel; the effort made to gain the house from the barn. The point here is that the trio, who have come this far only through the social pressure of each other, and in shaky bravado, must go on, knowing that they are ignorant of causes — of the force itself — (‘He ain’t there’). But the shooting leaves Jorge alone in the house. The pressure which had moved him this far is removed, and the pressure of fear — the threat of death — substituted. The third part contains Jorge’s attempt to escape and his unwilling stalk through the house, his wait through the blizzard and the night, and his rescue in the morning. The force has gone as it came. The Pedersens are missing and the great moral effort of the Jorgensens, compelled at every step as it was, is wasted and for nothing.
Though I dropped the rescue, I did not so much depart from this conception as complicate it, covering the moral layer with a frost of epistemological doubt. In any case, during the actual writing, the management of monosyllables, the alternation of short and long sentences, the emotional integrity of the paragraph, the elevation of the most ordinary diction into some semblance of poetry, became my fanatical concern.
Working through the summer, I finished the story in September, and it was seven or eight years after that — and you can imagine how many editorial rejections (it seemed like hundreds; I can still hear the flat slap of the ms. on the front step, the sting of shame in my cheeks, my humiliation, doubts, confusion; I heard the laughter of thousands); and you can imagine how many well-meant sympathies, mailed like cards at Christmas, how many broken chairs and bitter bottles and household quarrels, black thoughts and stubborn resolutions, intervened — before John Gardner generously published it in his magazine, MSS.
One must begin, but one must know how to end. It is a knowledge I have altogether lost. ‘The Pedersen Kid’ had an end I could aim at. Like death, I knew it would come. Like death, I did not know how I would face it. That the rest of these stories are short; that Omensetter’s Luck is long and The Tunnel, as it is turning out, under endless excavation: these are things I had no inkling of when I began. I realize, too, that each one was written with full knowledge of the public failure of the others; hence written with worsening nerves. I explored this, tried that, but like an ignorant and careless gardener, I never knew what sort of seed I had sown, so I was surprised by the height of its growth, the character of its bloom.