READING NOVELS SEEMS to me such a normal activity, while writing them is such an odd thing to do—at least so I think until I remind myself how firmly the two are related. (No armored generalities here. Just a few remarks.)
First, because to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you’ve written, and see if it’s OK and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it—once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. You are your own first, maybe severest, reader. “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself,” Ibsen inscribed on the flyleaf of one of his books. Hard to imagine writing without rereading.
But is what you’ve written straight off never all right? Yes, sure: sometimes even better than all right. And that only suggests, to this writer at any rate, that with a closer look, or voicing aloud—that is, another reading—it might be better still. I’m not saying that the novelist has to fret and sweat to produce something good. “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure,” said Dr. Johnson, and the maxim seems as remote from contemporary taste as its author. Surely, much that is written without effort gives a great deal of pleasure. No, the question is not the judgment of readers—who may well prefer a writer’s more spontaneous, less elaborated work—but a sentiment of writers, those professionals of dissatisfaction. You think, If I
can get it to this point the first go-around, without too much struggle, couldn’t it be better still?
And though this, the rewriting—and the rereading—sounds like effort, it is actually the most pleasurable part of writing. Sometimes the only pleasurable part. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of “literature” in your head, is formidable, intimidating. A plunge in an icy lake. Then comes the warm part, when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit.
Let’s say it’s a mess. But you have a chance to fix it. You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eloquent. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind. As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head. You try to liberate it. You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be—what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be. You read the sentences over and over. Is this the book I’m writing? Is this all?
Or let’s say it’s going well, for it does go well, some of the time (if it didn’t, you’d go crazy). There you are, and even if you are the slowest of scribes and the worst of touch typists, a trail of words is being laid down, and you want to keep going. Then you reread it. Perhaps you don’t dare be satisfied, but at the same time you like what you’ve written. You find yourself taking pleasure—a reader’s pleasure—in what’s there on the page.
Writing is, finally, a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find your own inner freedom. To be strict without being too self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to reread. Allowing yourself, when you dare think it’s going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along. No waiting for inspiration’s shove.
Of course, blind writers can never reread what they dictate. Perhaps this matters less for poets, who often do most of their writing in their head before setting down anything on paper. (Poets live by the ear much more than prose writers do.) And being unable to see doesn’t
mean that one can’t make revisions. Don’t we imagine that Milton’s daughters, at the end of each day of the dictation of Paradise Lost, read it all back to their father and then took down his corrections? But prose writers—who work in a lumberyard of words—can’t hold it all in their heads. They need to see what they’ve written. Even the most forthcoming, prolific writers must feel this. (Hence, Sartre announced, when he went blind, that his writing days were over.) Think of portly, venerable Henry James pacing up and down in a room in Lamb House composing The Golden Bowl aloud to a secretary. Leaving aside the difficulty of imagining how James’s late prose could have been dictated at all, much less to the racket made by a Remington typewriter circa 1900, don’t we assume that James reread what had been typed, and was lavish with his corrections?
When I became, again, a cancer patient two years ago and had to break off work on the nearly finished In America, a friend in Los Angeles, knowing my despair and fear that now I’d never finish it, offered to come to New York and stay with me to take down my dictation of the rest of the novel. True, the first eight chapters were done (that is, rewritten and reread many times) and I’d begun the next-to-last chapter, with the arc of the last two chapters clearly in view. And yet I had to refuse his touching, generous offer. It wasn’t just that I was probably too befuddled by drastic chemotherapy and morphine to remember what I was planning to write. I had to be able to see what I wrote, not just hear it. I had to be able to reread.
READING USUALLY PRECEDES writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And, long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write—and rereading the beloved books of the past—constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And, yes, inspiration.
Not all writers will admit to this. I remember once saying something to V. S. Naipaul about a nineteenth-century English novel I loved, a very well known novel, which I assumed that he, like everyone I knew who cared for literature, admired as I did. But no, he’d not read
it, he said, and, seeing the shadow of surprise on my face, added sternly, “Susan, I’m a writer, not a reader.”
Many writers who are no longer young claim, for various reasons, to read very little, indeed, to find reading and writing in some sense incompatible. Perhaps, for some writers, they are. If the reason is anxiety about being influenced, then this seems to me a vain, shallow worry. If the reason is lack of time—there are only so many hours in the day, and those spent reading are evidently subtracted from those in which one could be writing—then this is an asceticism to which I don’t aspire.
Losing yourself in a book, the old phrase, is not an idle fantasy but an addictive, model reality. Virginia Woolf famously said, in a letter, “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.” Surely the heavenly part is that—again, Woolf’s words—“the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.” Unfortunately, we never do lose the ego, any more than we can step over our own feet. But that disembodied rapture, reading, is trance-like enough to make us feel egoless.
Like reading, rapturous reading, writing fiction—inhabiting other selves—feels like losing yourself, too.
Most people seem to think now that writing is just a form of self-regard. Also called: self-expression. As we are no longer supposed to be capable of authentically altruistic feelings, we are not supposed to be capable of writing about anyone but ourselves.
But that’s not true. William Trevor speaks of the boldness of the non-autobiographical imagination. Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.
Needless to say, I lend bits of myself to all my characters. When, in In America, my immigrants from Poland reach southern California—they’re just outside the village of Anaheim—in 1876, stroll out into the desert, and succumb to a terrifying, transforming vision of emptiness, I was drawing on my own memory of childhood walks into the desert of southern Arizona—outside what was then a small town, Tucson—in the 1940s. In the first draft of that chapter, there were saguaros in the southern California desert. By the third draft I had taken the saguaros
out, reluctantly. (Alas, in 1876, there weren’t any saguaros west of the Colorado River.)
What I write about is other than me. As what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. My books know what I once knew—fit—fully, intermittently. And getting the best words on the page does not seem any easier, even after so many years of writing. On the contrary.
Here is the great difference between reading and writing. Reading is a vocation, a skill at which, with practice, you are bound to become more expert. What you accumulate as a writer is mostly uncertainties and anxieties.
All these feelings of inadequacy on the part of the writer—this writer, anyway—are predicated on the conviction that literature matters. “Matters” is surely too pale a word. That there are books which are necessary, that is, books which, while reading them, you know you’ll reread. Maybe more than once. Is there a greater privilege than to have a consciousness expanded by, filled with, pointed to literature?
Book of wisdom, exemplar of mental playfulness, dilator of sympathies, faithful recorder of a real world (not just the commotion inside one head), servant of history, advocate of contrary and defiant emotions—a novel that feels necessary can be, should be, most of these things.
As for whether there will continue to be readers who share this high notion of fiction, well, “There’s no future to that question,” as Duke Ellington replied when asked why he was to be found playing morning programs at the Apollo. Best just to keep rowing along.
[2000]