Summer, 1960
I AM SCHEDULED, I find, to talk to you about “Problems of Writing a Novel.” Where this title originated no one seems to know—doubtless in the same bureau that supplies titles for school children’s compositions: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” or “Adventures of a Penny” or simply “Why?” The problems of writing a novel, to those who do not write, can be reduced to the following questions: “Do you write in longhand or on the typewriter?” “Do you use an outline or do you invent as you go along?” “Do you draw your characters from real life or do you make them up or are they composites?” “Do you start with an idea, a situation, or a character?” “How many hours a day do you spend at your desk?” “Do you write on Sundays?” “Do you revise as you go along or finish a whole draft first?” And, finally, “Do you use a literary agent or do you market your stuff yourself?” Here curiosity fades; the manufacture and marketing of the product complete the story of a process, which is not essentially different from the “story” of flour as demonstrated to a class of boys and girls on an educational trip through a flour mill (from the grain of wheat to the sack on the grocer’s shelf) or the “story” of a bottle of claret or of a brass safety pin. This is the craft of fiction, insofar as it interests the outsider, who may line up, after a lecture like this, to get the author’s autograph, in lieu of a free sample—a miniature bottle of wine or a card of “baby” safety pins.
Now I am not going to talk about the problems of the novel in this sense at all but rather to confront the fact that the writing of a novel has become problematic today. Is it still possible to write novels—in longhand or on the typewriter, standing or sitting, on Sundays or weekdays, with or without an outline? The answer, it seems to me, is certainly not yes and perhaps, tentatively, no. I mean real novels—not fairy tales or fables or romances or contes philosophiques, and I mean novels of a high order, like War and Peace or Middlemarch or Ulysses or the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky, or Proust. The manufacture of second-rate novels, or, rather, of facsimiles of the novel, is in no state of crisis; nor is there a difficulty in marketing them, with or without an agent. But almost no writer in the West of any consequence, let us say since the death of Thomas Mann, has been able to write a true novel; the exception is Faulkner, who is now an old man. What was the last novel, not counting Faulkner, that was written in our day? Ulysses? Man’s Fate? Camus’ The Stranger? Someone might say Lolita, and perhaps it is a novel, a freak, though, a sport or wild mutation, which everyone approaches with suspicion, as if it were a dangerous conundrum, a Sphinx’s riddle.
What do I mean by a “novel”? A prose book of a certain thickness that tells a story of real life. No one could disagree with that, and yet many will disagree with much that I am going to say before I am through, so I shall try to be more specific. The word “prose” and “real” are crucial to my conception of the novel. The distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics. If I point to Jane Austen, Dickens, Balzac, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Melville of Moby Dick, Proust, the Joyce of Ulysses, Dreiser, Faulkner, it will be admitted that they are all novelists and that, different as they are from a formal point of view, they have one thing in common: a deep love of fact, of the empiric element in experience. I am not interested in making a formal definition of the novel (it is really a very loose affair, a grabbag or portmanteau, as someone has said) but in finding its quidditas or whatness, the essence or binder that distinguishes it from other species of prose fiction: the tale, the fable, the romance. The staple ingredient present in all novels in various mixtures and proportions but always in fairly heavy dosage is fact.
If a criterion is wanted for telling a novel from a fable or a tale or a romance (or a drama), a simple rule-of-thumb would be the absence of the supernatural. In fables and fairy tales, as everyone knows, birds and beasts talk. In novels, they don’t; if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel. That takes care, for example, of Animal Farm. Men in novels may behave like beasts, but beasts in novels may not behave like men. That takes care of Gulliver’s Travels, in case anyone were to mistake it for a novel. The characters in a novel must obey the laws of nature. They cannot blow up or fly or rise from the dead, as they can in plays, and if they talk to the devil, like Ivan Karamazov, the devil, though he speaks French, is not real like Faust’s Mephistopheles, but a product of Ivan’s derangement or fissionization. The devil is a part of Ivan. In the same way, in Mann’s Dr. Faustus, the devil is no longer a member of the cast of characters but resident, you might say, in the fatal spirochete or syphilis germ. This is not a difference in period; Goethe did not believe in real devils either, but he could put one on the stage, because the stage accepts devils and even has a trapdoor ready for them to disappear through, with a flash of brimstone, just as it used to have a machine, up in the flies, for the gods to descend from. There are no gods in the novel and no machinery for them; to speak, even metaphorically, of a deus ex machina in a novel—that is, of the entrance of a providential figure from above—is to imply a shortcoming; Dickens is always criticized on this score. But a tale almost requires the appearance of a deus ex machina or magic helper. The devil can appear in person in a tale of Hawthorne’s like “Young Goodman Brown,” but not in Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, though he may be there in spirit.
The novel does not permit occurrences outside the order of nature—miracles. Mr. Krook’s going up in spontaneous combustion in his junkshop is a queer Punch-and-Judy note in Bleak House, Actually, Dickens thought science had found out that people could explode of their own force, but now it seems that they can’t, that Mr. Krook couldn’t; it would be all right in a fantasy or a pantomime but not in a novel. You remember how in The Brothers Karamazov when Father Zossima dies, his faction (most of the sympathetic characters in the book) expects a miracle: that his body will stay sweet and fresh because he died “in the odor of sanctity.” But instead he begins to stink. The stink of Father Zossima is the natural, generic smell of the novel.
By the same law, a novel cannot be laid in the future, since the future, until it happens, is outside the order of nature; no prophecy or cautionary tale like 1984 is a novel. It is the same with public events in the past that never happened, for example the mutiny at the end of World War I led by a Christlike corporal in Faulkner’s A Fable; the title is Faulkner’s warning to his readers that this volume, unlike his “regular” books, is not to be considered a novel but something quite different. Because the past appears, through recession, to be outside the order of nature (think how improbable and ghostly old photographs look), most historical novels, so-called, are romances, not novels: George Eliot’s Romola in contrast to Middlemarch. This rule is broken by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel if there ever was one, and the reason for this is that history, as it were, has been purged by Tolstoy’s harsh and critical realism of all “historical” elements—the flummery of costume, make-up, and accessories and the myths and lies of historians. The time, moreover (his grandfather’s day) was not very remote from Tolstoy’s own. When he experimented with writing a novel about the days of Ivan the Terrible, he found he could not do it. A borderline case is Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, where actual history (Napoleon’s entry into Milan; the Battle of Waterloo, so much admired by Tolstoy) is succeeded by mock-history—the spurious history of Parma, complete with numbered despots, prisons, and paid assassins, a travesty invented by Stendhal to correspond with the (literally) travestied Fabrizio in his violet stockings and with the mock-heroics of this section of the book. The book is a novel that turns into parody at the moment that history, in Stendhal’s opinion, ceased to make sense and turned into a parody of the past. That moment was the triumph of reaction in Europe after 1815.
I ought to make it clear that these distinctions are in no way pejorative; I do not mean “Novel good, fable bad,” merely “Novel novel; fable fable.” Candide is not a novel, but to say so is not a criticism of Candide. Indeed, there are certain masterpieces—Rameau’s Nephew, Gogol’s Dead Souls, The Charterhouse of Parma itself—so quicksilver in their behavior that it is impossible to catch them in a category; these are usually “destructive” books, like Candide, where the author’s aim is, among other things, to elude the authorities’ grasp. When people nowadays tell you something is “not a novel,” as they are fond of saying, for instance, about Dr. Zhivago, it is always in a querulous tone, as though someone had tried to put something over on them, sell them the Empire State Building or Trajan’s Monument or the Palace of Culture, when they know better; they were not born yesterday. That is not my intention; I am not speaking as an aggrieved consumer of modern literature (and I admire Dr. Zhivago too passionately to demand its identity papers before I will let it pass); I am only trying to see why a special kind of literature, a relatively new kind, what we call the novel, is disappearing from view. To do that, I must know what the novel is; it is like advertising for a missing person; first you need a description of what he looked like when last seen.
Let me begin with the birthmarks. The word novel goes back to the word “new,” and in the plural it used to mean news—the news of the day or the year. Literary historians find the seed or the germ of the novel in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of tales set in a frame of actual life. This frame of actual life was the Great Plague of 1348 as it affected the city of Florence, where more than a hundred thousand people died between March and August. The figures and dates come from The Decameron, along with a great deal of other factual information about the Black Death: its origin in the East, some years before; its primary and secondary symptoms, differing from those in the East; the time between the appearance of the first symptoms—the tumors or buboes in the groin or armpits, some the size of a common apple, some of an egg, some larger, some smaller—and the onset of death; the means of contagion; the sanitary precautions taken; the medical theories current as to the proper diet and mode of life to stave off infection; the modes of nursing; the rites and methods of burial; and, finally, the moral behavior (very bad) of the citizens of Florence during the scourge. Boccaccio’s account is supposed to be a pioneer contribution to descriptive medicine; it is also a piece of eyewitness journalism, not unlike the Younger Pliny’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; the difference is that Pliny wrote his report in a letter (a classic literary form) and that Boccaccio’s report is used in a new way, as a setting for a collection of fictions. The “realism,” also new, of the separate tales, is grounded, so to speak, in the journalistic frame, with the dateline of a certain Tuesday morning, of the year 1348, when seven young ladies, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, and three young men, the youngest twenty-five, met in the Church of Santa Maria Novella.
If Boccaccio is the ancestor, the “father of the modern novel” is supposed to be Defoe, a Grub Street journalist, and the author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and many other works, including The Journal of the Plague Year (not Boccaccio’s; another one—1664–1665). Robinson Crusoe was based on “a real life story,” of a round-the-world voyage, which he heard described by the returned traveler and which he pieced out with another, a written account. Not only was the “father of the modern novel” a journalist, but he did not distinguish, at least to his readers, between journalism and fiction. All his stories pretend to be factual reports, documents, and one perhaps is—the life of a famous criminal “as told to Daniel Defoe,” i.e., ghostwritten. This pretense, which might be called the reverse of plagiarism, the disclaiming, that is, of authorship rather than the claiming of it, was not a special pathological kink of Defoe’s. The novel in its early stages almost always purports to be true. Where a fairy tale begins, “Once upon a time, in a certain kingdom,” a tale of Boccaccio (chosen at random) begins: “You must know that after the death of Emperor Frederick II, the crown of Sicily passed to Manfred, whose favor was enjoyed to the highest degree by a gentleman of Naples, Arrighetto Capece by name, who had to wife Madonna Beritola Caracciola, a fair and gracious lady, likewise a Neapolitan. Now when Manfred was conquered and slain by King Charles I at Benevento ... Arrighetto, etc., etc. ...” The effect of this naming and placing makes of every story of Boccaccio’s a sort of deposition, and this is even truer when the sphere is less exalted and the place is a neighboring village and the hero a well-known lecherous priest.
Many of the great novelists were newspaper reporters or journalists. Dickens had been a parliamentary reporter as a young man; in middle age, he became a magazine editor, and the scent of a “news story” is keen in all his novels. Dostoevsky, with his brother, edited two different magazines, one of which was called Time (Vremya); he supplied them with fiction and feature stories, and his specialty, you might say, was police reporting—he visited suspects (usually female) in prison, interviewed them, and wrote up his impressions; he also reported trials. Victor Hugo too was a confirmed prison-visitor; his “impressions” of prisons and of current political events—demonstrations, tumults, street-fighting—are collected in Choses Vues. Tolstoy first became widely known through his reports from Sebastopol, where he was serving as a young officer in the Crimean War; he was telling the news, the true, uncensored story of the Siege of Sebastopol, to the civilians back home, and throughout Tolstoy’s work, most noticeably in War and Peace but in fact everywhere, there is heard the scathing directness of the young officer’s tone, calling attention to the real facts behind the official dispatches—the real facts of war, sex, family life, glory, love, death. As he wrote in his second sketch from Sebastopol (which was immediately suppressed by the Czar), “The hero of my story ... is—the Truth.” Coming to the twentieth century, you meet the American novelist as newspaperman: Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, O’Hara, Faulkner himself. The American novelist as newspaperman, in the twenties, became a stock figure in the American myth, so much so that the terms could be inverted and every obscure newspaperman, according to popular belief, had in his desk drawer, besides a pint of whiskey, the great American novel he was writing in his spare time.
There is another kind of “fact” literature closely related to the novel, and that is the travel book, which tells the news of the exotic. Melville’s first book, Typee, was a book of travel, and you find something of the travelogue in Conrad, Kipling, and a good deal of D. H. Lawrence: Aaron’s Rod, The Plumed Serpent, Kangaroo, “The Woman Who Rode Away.” There is very little difference, really, between Kangaroo, a novel about Australia, and Sea and Sardinia, a travel book about Lawrence himself and Frieda in Sardinia. Hemingway remains half a war correspondent and half an explorer; The Green Hills of Africa is his “straight” travel book. The type seems to go back to Robinson Crusoe; most of Conrad’s heroes, one could say, are stranded Robinson Crusoes, demoralized by consciousness. In a more conventional way, Dickens, Stendhal, Henry James all published journals of travel—“impressions.” Mark Twain, Henry Miller, George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London, Shooting an Elephant)—the list is even more arresting if you consider the theatre and try to imagine Ibsen, Shaw, or O’Neill as the authors of travel books. Yet Ibsen spent years abroad, in Italy and Germany, and O’Neill, like Melville and Conrad, went to sea as a young man.
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist. Most of the great novels contain blocks and lumps of fact—refractory lumps in the porridge of the story. Students often complain of this in the old novels. They skip these “boring parts” to get on with the story, and in America a branch of publishing specializes in shortened versions of novels—“cut for greater reading speed.” Descriptions and facts are eliminated, and only the pure story, as it were the scenario, is left. But a novel that was only a scenario would not be a novel at all.
Everyone knows that Balzac was a lover of fact. He delighted in catalogues of objects, inventories, explanations of the way institutions and industries work, how art is collected, political office is bought, fortunes are amassed or hoarded. One of his novels, Les Illusions Perdues, has a chapter which simply describes the way paper is made. The chapter has nothing to do with the action of the novel (it comes in because the hero has inherited a paper factory); Balzac put it in because he happened at the time to know something about the paper business. He loved facts of every kind indiscriminately—straight facts, curious facts, quirks, oddities, aberrations of fact, figures, statistics. He collected them and stored them, like one of his own misers, intending to house them in that huge structure, The Human Comedy, which is at once a scale model of the real world and a museum of curios left to mankind as though by a crazy hermit who could never throw anything away.
This fetishism of fact is generally treated as a sort of disease of realism of which Balzac was the prime clinical exhibit. But this is not the case. You find the splendid sickness in realists and nonrealists alike. Moby Dick, among other things, is a compendium of everything that was to be known about whaling. The chapters on the whale and on whiteness, which are filled with curious lore, truths that are “stranger than fiction,” interrupt and “slow down” the narrative, like the excursus on paper. Yet they cannot be taken away (as the excursus on paper certainly could be) without damaging the novel; Moby Dick without these chapters (in the stage and screen versions) is not Moby Dick. Or think of the long chapter on the Russian Monk in The Brothers Karamazov. Father Zossima is about to enter the scene, and, before introducing him, Dostoevsky simply stops and writes a history of the role of the elder in Russian monasticism. In the same way, in War and Peace, when Pierre gets interested in Freemasonry, Tolstoy stops and writes an account of the Masonic movement, for which he had been boning up in the library. Everyone who has read War and Peace remembers the Battle of Borodino, the capture and firing of Moscow, the analysis of the character of Napoleon, the analysis of the causes of war, and the great chapter on Freedom and Necessity, all of which are nonfiction and which constitute the very terrain of the novel; indeed, it could be said that the real plot of War and Peace is the struggle of the characters not to be immersed, engulfed, swallowed up by the landscape of fact and “history” in which they, like all human beings, have been placed: freedom (the subjective) is in the fiction, and necessity is in the fact. I have already mentioned the first chapter of The Charterhouse of Parma describing Napoleon’s entry into Milan. In The Magic Mountain, there are the famous passages on tuberculosis, recalling Boccaccio’s description of the plague, and the famous chapter on time, a philosophical excursus like the chapter on whiteness in Moby Dick and the chapter on Freedom and Necessity in Tolstoy. Closer to Balzac is Dreiser’s picture of the hotel business in An American Tragedy; when Clyde becomes a bellhop, Dreiser (though this is not “important” to the story) stops and shows the reader how a hotel, behind the scenes, works.
In newspaper jargon, you might call all this the boiler plate of the novel—durable informative matter set up in stereotype and sold to country newspapers as filler to eke out a scarcity of local news, i.e., of “plot.” And the novel, like newspaper boiler plate, contains not only a miscellany of odd facts but household hints and how-to-do-it instructions (you can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina and how to reap a field and hunt ducks).
The novel, to repeat, has or had many of the functions of a newspaper. Dickens’ novels can be imagined in terms of headlines: “Antique Dealer Dies by Spontaneous Combustion in Shop,” “Financial Wizard Falls, Panic Among Speculators,” “Blackleg Miner Found Dead in Quarry.” Henry James, who did his best to exclude every bit of boiler plate from his books and who may have killed the novel, perhaps with kindness (consider the unmentionable small article manufactured by the Newsomes in The Ambassadors; what was it? Garters? Safety pins?), even James has the smell of newsprint about him, the smell of the Sunday supplement. His international plots recall the magazine section of the old Hearst newspaper chain, in which every Sunday, after church, Americans used to read about some international marriage between an American heiress and a titled fortune-hunter: Anna Gould and Count Boni de Castellane.
Novels, including James’s, carried the news—of crime, high society, politics, industry, finance, and low life. In Dickens you find a journalistic coverage of the news on all fronts and a survey of all the professions from pickpocket to banker, from lawyer to grave-robber. His books tell the whole story of Victorian society, from the front page to the financial section. This ideal of coverage requires him, in fairness, to print, as it were, corrections; a bad Jew is followed by a good Jew, a bad lawyer by a good one, a bad school by a good one, and so on. Or, to put it another way, it is as though he were launching a great roomy Noah’s Ark with two of each species of creation aboard. In a single book, Middlemarch, George Eliot “covers” English life and institutions, as found at their median point—a middling provincial town. The notion of coverage by professions was taken up, somewhat mechanically, by the American novelists Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. You can hear it in Dreiser’s titles: The Titan, The Financier, The Genius, Twelve Men. Lewis ticked off the housewife (Main Street), the realtor (Babbitt), the scientist (Arrowsmith), the preacher (Elmer Gantry), the social worker (Ann Vickers), the retired businessman (Dodsworth). A similar census, though of more mobile social types, is seen in Dos Passos. It is Faulkner, however, the most “mythic” of recent American novelists, who has documented a society more completely than any of the realists. Like Dickens, he has set himself the task of a Second Creation. Yoknapatawpha County (capital, Jefferson), Mississippi, is presided over by its courthouse (Requiem for a Nun), where its history and vital statistics are on file; we know its population of lawyers, storekeepers, business men, farmers, black and white, and their forebears and how they made or lost their money; we know its idiots and criminals and maniacs, its geology and geography, flora and fauna (the bear of that story and the cow of The Hamlet); some editions of Faulkner include a map of Yoknapatawpha County, and a letter addressed to Faulkner at Jefferson, Mississippi, would almost certainly reach him, although there is no such place.
The more poetic a novel, the more it has the air of being a factual document. I exaggerate when I say this, but if you think of Faulkner, of Moby Dick of Madame Bovary or Proust, you will see there is something in it. Joyce’s Ulysses is a case in point. There is no doubt that Joyce intended to reconstruct, almost scientifically, twenty-four hours of a certain day in Dublin; the book, among other things, is an exercise in mnemonics. Stephen and Mr. Bloom, in their itineraries, cover certain key points in the life of the city—the beach, the library, the graveyard, the cabman’s stand, Nighttown—and a guide to Joyce’s Dublin has been published, with maps and a key. Nor is it by chance that the peripatetic Mr. Bloom is an advertising canvasser. He travels back and forth and up and down in society like Ulysses, who explored the four corners of the known world. The epic, I might put in here, is the form of all literary forms closest to the novel; it has the “boiler plate,” the lists and catalogues, the circumstantiality, the concern with numbers and dimensions. The epic geography, like that of the novel, can be mapped, in both the physical and the social sense.
This clear locative sense is present in all true novels. Take Jane Austen. Emma and Pride and Prejudice contain few facts of the kind I have been speaking of—nothing like the paper business or the history of the Russian monk. Yet there are facts of a different sort, documents like Mr. Collins’ letters, charades, riddles, menus, dance programs (“‘Then the two third he danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two sixth with Lizzy, and the Boulanger—’”)—feminine facts, so to speak—and a very painstaking census-taking of a genteel class within the confines of a certain income range, marked off, like a frontier. One difference between Jane Austen and Henry James is that the reader of Pride and Prejudice knows exactly how much money the characters have: Mr. Bingley has four or five thousand a year (with a capital of nearly one hundred thousand); Mr. Bennet has two thousand a year, ENTAILED, while Mrs. Bennet brought him a capital of four thousand from her father, an attorney at Meryton; Mr. Darcy has ten thousand a year; his sister, Georgiana, has a capital of thirty thousand. The same with distances, ages, and time. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have been married twenty-three years; Mrs. Weston, in Emma, has been Emma’s governess for sixteen years; Mr. Knightley is about seven or eight and thirty; Emma is nearly twenty-one; Jane and Elizabeth, when they are finally married, live thirty miles apart; Highbury is about a mile from Mr. Knightley’s property. Whenever the chance arises, Jane Austen supplies a figure. Everything is lucid and perspicuous in her well-charted world, except the weather, which is often unsettled, and this fact too is always noted (“The shower was heavy but short, and it had not been over five minutes when ...”). The names of persons who are never seen in the story, like that of “Miss King” just now, are dropped as if artlessly to attest the veracity of the narrative—inviting the reader to clothe these names himself with the common identities of real life.
This air of veracity is very important to the novel. We do really (I think) expect a novel to be true, not only true to itself, like a poem, or a statue, but true to actual life, which is right around the corner, like the figure of “Miss King.” We not only make believe we believe a novel, but we do substantially believe it, as being continuous with real life, made of the same stuff, and the presence of fact in fiction, of dates and times and distances, is a kind of reassurance—a guarantee of credibility. If we read a novel, say, about conditions in postwar Germany, we expect it to be an accurate report of conditions in postwar Germany; if we find out that it is not, the novel is discredited. This is not the case with a play or a poem. Dante can be wrong in The Divine Comedy; it does not matter, with Shakespeare, that Bohemia has no seacoast, but if Tolstoy was all wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon, War and Peace would suffer.
The presence of a narrator, writing in the first person, is another guarantee of veracity. The narrator is, precisely, an eyewitness, testifying to the reader that these things really happened, even though the reader knows of course that they did not. This is the function of the man called Marlow in Conrad’s books; he is there to promise the reader that these faraway stories are true, and, as if Marlow himself were not enough, the author appears as a kind of character witness for Marlow, testifying to having met him in reliable company, over cigars, claret, a polished mahogany table, and so on. The same function is served by the narrator in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, who writes in the excited manner of a small-town gossip (“Then I rushed to Varvara Petrovna’s”) telling you everything that went on in that extraordinary period, which everybody in town is still talking about, that began when young Stavrogin bit the governor’s ear. He tells what he saw himself and what he had on hearsay and pretends to sift the collective evidence as to what exactly happened and in what order. Faulkner’s favorite narrator is Gavin Stevens, the lawyer, chosen obviously because the town lawyer, accustomed to weighing evidence, would be the most reliable witness—one of the first sources a newspaper reporter sent to do a story on Yoknapatawpha County would be likely to consult.
There is the shadow of an “I” in The Brothers Karamazov, but The Possessed is the only important novel of Dostoevsky’s that is told straight through in the first person, i.e., by a local busybody who seems to have seized the pen. The Possessed (in Russian The Devils) is the most demonic of all Dostoevsky’s novels—the most “unnatural,” unfilial, “Gothic.” It would seem that the device of the narrator, the eyewitness “I,” like Esther Summerson in Bleak House (not the autobiographical “I” of David Copperfield or of Proust’s Marcel, who is something more than a witness), is more often used in novels whose material is exotic or improbable than in the plain novel of ordinary life, like Middlemarch or Emma or any of Trollope. These novels of ordinary life put no strain on the reader’s credulity; he believes without the testimony of witnesses. The first-person narrator is found in Conrad, in Melville, and in Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Jane Eyre, all of which center around drafty, spooky old houses and are related to the ghost story. In the same way James, who rarely used the first-person narrator, does so with the governess in his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. In other words, on the periphery of the novel, on the borderline of the tale or the adventure story you find a host of narrators. And you arrive, finally, at Lolita and meet Humbert Humbert, telling his own story (which you might not have believed otherwise), having been first introduced by another narrator, his “editor,” who authenticates his manuscript; Humbert himself has been executed. In short, you are back with Defoe and his “true biographies” of great criminals who were hanged, back at the birth of the novel, before it could stand without support.
Even when it is most serious, the novel’s characteristic tone is one of gossip and tittletattle. You can hear it in the second sentence (originally the first sentence) of Anna Karenina: “Everything was upset at the Oblonskys’.” The cook, it seemed, had left; the underservants had given notice; the mistress was shut up in her bedroom because the master had been sleeping with the former French governess. This (I think) is a classic beginning, and yet some person who had never read a novel, coming on those sentences, so full of blunt malice, might conclude that Tolstoy was simply a common scandal-monger. The same might be thought of Dostoevsky, of Flaubert, Stendhal, and (obviously) of Proust, of the earnest George Eliot and the lively Jane Austen and the manly Charles Dickens. Most of these writers were people of high principle; their books, without exception, had a moral, ethical, or educational purpose. But the voice we overhear in their narratives, if we stop to listen for a minute, putting aside preconceptions, is the voice of a neighbor relating the latest gossip. “You will hardly believe what happened next,” the novelists from Jane Austen to Kafka (yes indeed) seem to be exclaiming. “Wait and I’ll tell you.” The whole narrative method of Dostoevsky could be summed up in those two sentences. In Conrad, more ruminative, there can be heard the creaking of chairs as the men around the table settle down to listen to the indefatigable Marlow, who only halts to wet his whistle: “Pass the bottle.” The scandals the novelists are primed with are the scandals of a village, a town, or a province—Highbury or Jefferson, Mississippi, or the Province of O——; the scandals of a clique—the Faubourg St. Germain; of a city—Dublin or Middlemarch; or of a nation—Dickens’ England; or of the ports and hiring offices—London or Nantucket, where news of the high seas is exchanged and a black mark put against a man’s name or a vessel’s. Here is another criterion: if the breath of scandal has not touched it, the book is not a novel. That is the trouble with the art-novel (most of Virginia Woolf, for instance); it does not stoop to gossip.
The scandals of a village or a province, the scandals of a nation or of the high seas feed on facts and breed speculation. But it is of the essence of a scandal that it be finite, for all its repercussions and successive enlargements. Indeed, its repercussions are like the echo produced in an enclosed space, a chambered world. That is why institutions (“closed corporations”) are particularly prone to scandal; they attempt to keep the news in, contain it, and in doing so they magnify it, and then, as people say, “the lid is off.” It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets. Nobody can get them excited about or even greatly interested in what-will-happen-next to the world; the plot does not thicken. In the same way, Hiroshima, despite the well-meant efforts of journalists and editors, probably caused less stir than the appearance of comets in the past; the magnitude of the event killed even curiosity. This was true, to some extent, of Buchenwald and Auschwitz too.
Yet these “scandals,” in the theological sense, of the large world and the universe have dwarfed the finite scandals of the village and the province; who cares any more what happens in Highbury or the Province of O——? If the novelist cares, he blushes for it; that is, he blushes for his parochialism. Middlemarch becomes Middletown and Middletown in Transition, the haunt of social scientists, whose factual findings, even in the face of Auschwitz or a space-satellite, have a certain cachet because they are supposed to be “science”; in science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. Among novelists, it is only Faulkner who does not seem to feel an itch of dissatisfaction with his sphere, and there are signs of this even in him—A Fable, for example.
But it is not only that the novelist of today, in “our expanding universe,” is embarrassed by the insignificance (or lack of “significance”) of his finite world. A greater problem is that he cannot quite believe in it. That is, the existence of Highbury or the Province of O—— is rendered improbable, unveracious, by Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the population curve of China, and the hydrogen bomb. Improbable when “you stop to think”; this is the experience of everybody and not only of the novelist; if we stop to think for one second, arrested by some newspaper story or general reflection, our daily life becomes incredible to us. I remember reading the news of Hiroshima in a little general store on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and saying to myself as I moved up to the counter, “What am I doing buying a loaf of bread?” The coexistence of the great world and us, when contemplated, appears impossible.
It works both ways. The other side of the picture is that Buchenwald and Auschwitz are and were unbelievable, and not just to the German people, whom we criticize for forgetting them; we all forget them, as we forget the hydrogen bomb, because their special quality is to stagger belief. And here is the dilemma of the novelist, which is only a kind of professional sub-case of the dilemma of everyone: if he writes about his province, he feels its inverisimilitude; if he tries, on the other hand, to write about people who make lampshades of human skin, like the infamous Ilse Koch, he feels still more the inverisimilitude of what he is asserting. His love of truth revolts. And yet this love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. Putting two and two together, then, it would seem that the novel, with its common sense, is of all forms the least adapted to encompass the modern world, whose leading characteristic is irreality. And that, so far as I can understand, is why the novel is dying. The souped-up novels that are being written today, with injections of myth and symbols to heighten or “deepen” the material, are simply evasions and forms of self-flattery.
I spoke just now of common sense—the prose of the novel. We are all supposed to be born with it, in some degree, but we are also supposed to add to it by experience and observation. But if the world today has become inaccessible to common sense, common sense in terms of broad experience simultaneously has become inaccessible to the writer. The novelists of the nineteenth century had, both as public persons and private figures, great social range; they “knew everybody,” whether because of their fame in the great capitals of London, Paris, St. Petersburg, or in their village, province, or county, where everybody knows everybody as a matter of course. Today the writer has become specialized, like the worker on an assembly line whose task is to perform a single action several hundred times a day or the doctor whose task is to service a single organ of the human body. The writer today is turning into a machine à écrire, a sort of human typewriter with a standardized mechanical output: hence the meaning of those questions (“How many hours a day?” “How long does it take you?” “Have you ever thought of using a dictaphone?”). This standardization and specialization is not only a feature of his working hours but of his social existence. The writer today—and especially the young American writer—sees only other writers; he does not know anyone else. His social circle comprises other writers and his girl friends, but his girl friends, usually, are hoping to be writers too. The writer today who has a painter for a friend is regarded as a broad-ranging adventurer, a real man of the world. If he teaches in a university, his colleagues are writers or at any rate they “publish,” and his students, like his girl friends, are hoping to write themselves. This explains the phenomenon, often regarded as puzzling, of the “one-book” American writer, the writer who starts out with promise and afterward can only repeat himself or fade away. There is nothing puzzling about it; he wrote that first book before he became a writer, while he was still an ordinary person. The worst thing, I would say, that can happen to a writer today is to become a writer. And it is most fatal of all for the novelist; the poet can survive it, for he does not need social range for his verse, and poets have always clubbed together with other poets in exclusive coteries, which is perhaps why Plato wanted them banned from the Republic.
The isolation of the modern writer is a social fact, and not just the writer’s own willful fault. He cannot help being “bookish,” which cuts him off from society, since practically the only people left who read are writers, their wives and girl friends, teachers of literature, and students hoping to become writers. The writer has “nothing in common” with the businessman or the worker, and this is almost literally true; there is no common world left in which they share. The businessman who does not read is just as specialized as the writer who writes.
To throw off this straitjacket is the recurrent dream of the modern novelist, after the age, say, of thirty or thirty-five; before that, his dream was the opposite: to come to New York (or Paris or London) to meet other writers. Various ways out are tried: moving to the country, travel, “action” (some form of politics), the resolute cultivation of side-interests—music, art, sport, gardening; sport is very popular with American men novelists, who hold on to an interest in baseball or a tennis racket or a fishing-rod as a relic of the “complete man” or complete boy they once were. But if these steps are sufficiently radical, their effect may be the reverse of what was intended. This is what seems to have happened to Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Malraux, Camus, George Orwell. Starting as novelists, they fled, as it were, in all directions from the tyranny of the novelist’s specialization: into politics, diary-keeping, travel and travel-writing, war, art history, journalism, “engagement.” Nor did they ever really come back to the novel, assuming that was what they wanted to do. Gide stopped with The Counterfeiters; Lawrence with Women in Love; Malraux with Man’s Fate; Orwell with his first book, Burmese Days; Camus with The Stranger. Their later books are not novels, even if they are called so, but fables of various kinds, tracts, and parables. But they did not settle down to a single form or mode, and this perpetual restlessness which they have in common seems a sign of an unrequited, unconsummated love for the novel, as though in the middle of their oeuvre there were a void, a blank space reserved for the novel they failed to be able to write. We think of them as among the principal “novelists” of our time, but they were hardly novelists at all, and in each case their work as a whole has an air of being unfinished, dangling.
They are certainly key modern figures. Allowing for differences in talent, their situation is everybody’s; mine too. We are all in flight from the novel and yet drawn back to it, as to some unfinished and problematic relationship. The novel seems to be dissolving into its component parts: the essay, the travel book, reporting, on the one hand, and the “pure” fiction of the tale, on the other. The center will not hold. No structure (except Faulkner’s) has been strong enough to keep in suspension the diverse elements of which the novel is made. You can call this, if you want, a failure of imagination. We know that the real world exists, but we can no longer imagine it.
Yet despite all I have been saying, I cannot, being human, help feeling that the novel is not finished yet. Tomorrow is another day. Someone, somewhere, even now may be dictating into a dictaphone: “At five o’clock in the afternoon, in the capital of the Province of Y——, a tall man with an umbrella was knocking at the door of the governor’s residence.” In short, someone may be able to believe again in the reality, the factuality, of the world.
This is a paraphrase of a talk or talks given to Polish, Yugoslav, and British audiences in the winter of 1960.