THIS ENGLISH summer has been cloudy, cold, thundery, and it has matched the clinical bulletins about the British economic situation. The other night, after a painful session at the dentist’s, I had a painful session watching Harold Wilson on television. We have been over-spending; we must retrench; we must restore confidence in sterling. One of my few motives for trying to earn more money must be the increase in the price of Scotch. I can think of no other motive. Foreign holidays are, thanks to currency restrictions, out, and I have no strong desire to holiday in Britain; the more I earn, the closer I approach that precipice that tumbles me into paying 19 shillings out of every pound in surtax. Two years ago the Labour Government promised us hard times; it seems to have been faithful to that promise.
It is now midnight. This morning I climbed to my study to push on with a comic novel I am trying to write. It is a great wonder to the laity that comedians are able to go on with their routines while suffering bereavement, an abscess or an economic recession. It is also a great wonder to me. Writing a comic novel can be approached with the same weariness and pain as writing a tragedy, and the weariness and pain will, with a professional, never show.
Yet there is something showing in my work that I am far from happy about, and perhaps it is only the general ambience of depression that makes me willing to speak of it. I mean evidence of dissatisfaction with forms and tropes and vocabulary and rhythms that orthodox English provides. I am now working on my seventeenth novel, and I doubt if I can go on much longer in the same modes – straight narrative, naturalistic dialogue, bits of interior monologue, atmospheric récit. I feel, as every writer must feel on his seventeenth novel, that I am in danger of repeating myself.
The hero of this novel is a middle-aged poet who is working as a bartender in an American-owned London hotel. The sixth line of the first chapter described him washing glasses. I have written: ‘He burnished an indelible veronica of lipstick.’ What I mean is that he polished a red smear that, like the imprint of Christ’s bleeding face on the towel of St. Veronica (preserved to this day in Rome), seemed to be set there in perpetuity. There is no intention of facetious blasphemy: it is necessary to establish certain religious undertones as soon as possible, since these are relevant to the character and preoccupations of my poet.
Setting down the image, I was well enough pleased. It seemed sufficiently apt and original. And then came the doubt: Had I used it before? I searched through my published books – a very wearisome job – and found that I hadn’t, but with no real sensation of relief. I had not used it before but, I thought, I might use it again.
The more fiction one writes, the more one sees a certain pattern of locales and situations. In my books, people drink in bars or pubs, and these are becoming more alike; worse, the drinkers are always behaving in the same way; worse still, I am more and more tempted to draw on the same kind of language for describing pub, people and behaviour. Two men will fight, and the fights are becoming more like each other. Faced with the need to describe a city street, I can find nothing to say about it that I have not previously, and more freshly, said.
I have created so many characters, major and minor, that I am in danger of completing the roster and having to go back to the beginning again. There is a limited number of ways in which a woman can be pretty and a man ugly, and an even more limited number of modes for the conveying of these qualities. One’s readers may not notice, since they have mostly, thank heavens, rather poor memories, but one notices oneself and one does not like to cheat. A book may bore its reader, but it ought not to bore its author. One’s 17th attempt at an orthodox piece of fiction ought to carry the same tremulous glamor as one’s first.
It is because of this fear of self-repetition and, more than that, this dissatisfaction with the limitations of ordinary language that I begin to look with a sort of wistfulness at the fictional experimentalists. And I have become convinced that none of these undertakes a new approach to fiction to bring new enlightenment to his readers or to carve, with Flaubertian martyr’s courage, new paths for other writers. The writer experiments because he is bored. He is like God, who, suffering with Alberto Moravia’s hero from La Noia, has to create a new cosmos to become less annoiato.
Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a little tedious to read, but it must have been very exciting to write. Some of the novels of the French nouvelle vague are, with their stasis, their concentration on things rather than people, more than a little tedious, but one can see that they had to be written to save their authors from the ennui or treading the worn path again. William Burroughs’s cut-out and fold-in techniques, designed to give a ‘new look’ to language, perhaps give this new look only to their author. But their author must be allowed to protect himself from boredom.
It is the need to make language genuinely new, rather than merely look new, that drives James Joyce to create the pun-Eurish of a Finnegans Wake. One can understand Joyce’s position very well. In Ulysses he had used up the resources of orthodox language, not only in the fabrication of portmanteau-words, pastiche, mimicry and mockery, but also in the exact notation of action and speech. What could his next book be except a new limitation or a tame repetition unless he broke language up and recast it? The author is told to think of his readers, but he must also think of himself.
Ideally, a novelist should be not just a polyglot but a panglot. Let him write his first novel in English, exploiting all the resources of the language; then let him shake French by the scruff of the neck and go on to demotic Greek. One can only be truly creative if one creates not merely a subject but the medium in which that subject moves. The most that the average novelist or poet can do is to fashion an idiom; sometimes this does not seem to go far enough. Neither Schönberg nor Picasso was content with an idiom; it had to be a new language or nothing.
I cannot create a new language, though I have found, by accident and with a shock, that, in my novel A Clockwork Orange, I made a transitory dialect for real as well as fictional teenagers. But I feel that I must, to counter my own weariness, do something new. The new fictional images that present themselves to me in the still summer watches, with the wind temporarily quiet, are fantastic. Will they work?
Before The Times changed, for the worse, its format, I dreamed of a novel in which the hero’s life was presented in strict Times form, from opening advertisements to closing crossword. I am dreaming, more wakefully, of a novel presented as a mock-biography, complete with photographs and index. I have thought of telling one story in the text and a counterpoint story in footnotes. In delirium it occurred to me that I might recast one novel already half-written in the form of a small encyclopedia, so that the reader, armed with all the relevant information, might work out the plot for himself.
These things require a courage which perhaps very few professional novelists, faced with the need to earn a living, can really possess. A married woman can find this courage more easily than a married man. Sterne began Tristram Shandy from the fortress of a clerical living. Joyce at least had a patroness.
And yet, when one looks at some of the experimental novels that stem from Sterne or from Nathalie Sarraute, one is struck by the salutary realisation that the new shapes are not really enough. Sterne had Uncle Toby and Mr Shandy; Nabokov has Kinbote; Joyce had both Bloom and Earwicker. There are certain things that the novel cannot do without, and the greatest of these is character. Some of our young British experimentalists grumble because of lack of appreciation, but they have all the Shandeian tricks off pat, but they have none of the Shandeian grotesques.
The terrible daring of Ulysses comes off because Bloom and Dedalus are big enough to survive their torturing. Tell a young experimentalist to try something on the lines of the lying-in hospital scene in Ulysses, and he will produce a passable pastiche history of English literature, but he will not have the human tension of Bloom’s first true meeting with Stephen. A novel should not be an evening of conjuring tricks; it should be a genuine play.
What I have said is obvious enough. The fact remains that, at least for myself, to make novel-writing a genuine intellectual stimulus I must impose on myself certain formal stringencies. The big secret perhaps will be the rendering of these so unobtrusive that the reader will think he is reading something very orthodox. The listener to Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, may not be aware that one act is in the form of a symphony and another in the form of a suite, but that does not invalidate Berg’s sense of the need for such a subtle imposition. I have myself, perhaps overcautiously, followed Berg in certain novels, making one paragraph a Petrarchan sonnet set as prose, turning a whole opening section into a slavish simulacrum of Wagner’s Das Rheingold (nobody noticed; in any case, the novel – for a quite different reason – got itself banned), identifying, in Nothing Like the Sun, the drunken narrator with the dying subject of his narration.
The reader may draw his own conclusions, and they will probably not be favourable. One conclusion may be that I should give up writing novels, but another may be that the traditional novel-form is no longer very satisfying to the novelist.
Having said all this, I feel a little better now. The night air is warmer, and tomorrow brings the task of pushing on with my comic novel. What I have already written may cease to seem pedestrian and become fresh, incisive, original; the new sheet in the typewriter may fill itself with all sorts of daring felicities which, pleasing the reader, shall not have bored the author. In any case, one must get on with the work one thinks one does best. The fact that one can have doubts about it may be a good sign, since doubt, as we know, is an intermission of faith. Only the very bad writer is always absolutely sure of the value of what he is doing.
New York Times, 21 August 1966