YOU’VE SEEN IT HAPPEN. It’s the public-reading train wreck, right up there with “Do you write with pen or pencil (or the keyboard equivalent)?” If you go to even a very few readings, you take your seat with a certain dread clinging to your slumping shoulders: when will it come, when will the awful thing be asked, will it be the first or the second question? It meanders around the hall throughout the reading, until the tension is almost too much for mere mortals to bear. Then, the author’s thanks to the audience, the general approbation, and the call for interrogation. Here it comes, to be followed by an almost inaudible groan: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Um, from my head? To the credit of the writing community, I’ve never actually heard that response, but you can see the thought form, push forward, be squelched by the higher being, and slink sulkily back to the dungeon of wisecrackery. It sounds so naïve, so shallow, so dumb. It sounds like, “How did you get to be creative, when the rest of us aren’t?” Sometimes it even sounds like, “What is wrong with you?” I think, however, it’s more than that, although those questions may be part of the package. It seems to me the question also has to do with some larger issue of creativity: Why this idea and not that? What makes one idea more suitable for a novel than some other? What brings you to borrow from this source rather than some other? Or even, how do you decide from whom to steal? Sounds better, doesn’t it? But let’s face it: it’s just the same. Those of us who don’t write novels are always going to wonder at those who do. Where do they get their ideas? In general, despite the multitude of sources, there’s one common answer.
Look around.
In a course I regularly teach, there is a novel based on the Old English epic Beowulf, another based on the author’s time as a soldier in Vietnam, one that grows out of the writer’s family life on an Indian reservation, yet another that comes from an early-morning vision combined with a vast knowledge of Victorian novels, one that is the product of the novelist’s encounter with African American history, and one that can best be said to spring from, among other things, drug-induced paranoia coupled with prodigious, and quite useless, erudition. So where do they get their ideas? Everywhere. And from one place in particular. Novels come from a host of sources, the most important of which is always personal experience.
So they’re autobiographical?
No. I mean, yes. I mean, what do you mean? “Autobiographical” is one of those highly charged and, therefore, highly suspect terms. Like that other degraded (and related) form, the roman à clef (literally, “novel with a key,” meaning something close to a one-to-one correspondence with real-life persons and events). “Autobiographical” generally means that “about me”-ness lurks in the novel or poem or whatever. Often in the worst way, or at least the way of least imagination and most lawsuits. Think The Devil Wears Prada or one of those thinly veiled Hollywood tell-alls. That’s not exactly what I had in mind by personal experience, although it’s certainly one side of it.
Let’s go back to that course I mentioned a minute ago. What kind of person writes a novel based on Beowulf? How about a scholar of medieval literature? That was John Gardner—writer, critic, medievalist, creative-writing teacher extraordinaire, student of the novel, philosophy, mythology, and Batavia, New York. His novels engage pretty much all of his interests. Grendel (1971), obviously, is taken from that first English literary work, Grendel being the monster who can only be subdued by a hero from outside the warrior community. Freddy’s Book (1980) made further use of his interest in the Middle Ages: the novel is a frame tale; the inner narrative is a saga of sixteenth-century Sweden written by the reclusive giant of the title. He turned to even older source material in The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), a novel consisting chiefly of a dialogue between an ancient philosopher and his pupil, and Jason and Medeia (1973), a verse retelling of the story of the Argonauts and of a wronged wife’s revenge on her faithless mate. Rust Belt western New York comes into several of his novels and many of his short stories, most famously in The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), an encounter between the morose police chief of a mythical Batavia and a magician/madman/genius/natural-philosopher known as The Sunlight Man. Their sometimes madcap conversations range across the fields of ethics, religion, contemporary society, freedom, justice, government, and about anything else eight hundred pages can hold. The Something Dialogues could be the title of almost every Gardner novel. His characters are contentious, thoughtful, and unusually well informed. Each of Grendel’s chapters, for instance, makes use of a form of philosophy unavailable to the characters of the source text; Unferth is a “whiny existentialist” (Gardner’s phrase) about twelve hundred years too early. In October Light (1976), his National Book Award winner, an elderly farmer and his even older sister have an ongoing dialogue, or argument or maybe border war, through the door where either he has imprisoned her or she has locked herself (agency, or at least motive, is a little murky). And in his final novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), the main character is a philosopher and many of his dialogues are with persons who are not, cannot, be there. The novel may or may not pass muster with professional philosophers, but it wrestles with the big issues of life and death through the medium of fiction. And it certainly demonstrates one of Gardner’s abiding preoccupations in full flower.
So where does it all come from? Personal experience. That experience can take lots of forms: reading, social observation, history, myth, obsession and preoccupation, family events, personal failings and successes, the lot.
It comes as a deep shock, no doubt, to find out that literary works grow out of literary sources. Wow! Writers read other writers—what a concept! This phenomenon is sometimes less happy than it might seem. The world is currently awash in novels drawing on, extending, reinventing, and generally maiming poor Jane Austen. I wasn’t aware that we needed a novel on Mr. Darcy’s cousin’s housekeeper’s romance, but I’m pretty sure I saw one in the bookstore the other day. Someone, often a corporate someone, will always want a sequel to a proven moneymaker, to The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind or, yes, Pride and Prejudice. And there will no doubt be a certain audience for such works. But I’m really thinking more here about imaginative reinvestigations of a work than in commercial exploitation.
Nor are those sources inevitably novels. Jane Smiley has made use of King Lear in A Thousand Acres and the Decameron in Ten Days in the Hills. Of course, one needn’t know either Shakespeare or Boccaccio to appreciate the novels. The kingdom being divided in the former is not England but an Iowa farm, the concerns not Elizabethan but contemporary; the rivalries and desolation wrought by that decision are no less for that. She maintains many of the themes and issues of Lear—those of gender roles, sibling rivalry, generation and inheritance, and love true and false, but brings them into her own time, adding others to them. In the latter novel, she follows the pattern indicated in the title of Boccaccio’s great work: ten persons, ten days, something like ten stories per day. Her ten-person party is divided evenly between men and women, rather than into his seven women to three men, and the event they’re escaping isn’t the plague but the beginning of the Iraq War, but conceptually, this book is very much the child of that famous progenitor. There are stories of every type, through which characters reveal themselves, sometimes more fully than they intend. It’s bawdy and sexual, if perhaps more explicit than the original. These are, like their predecessors, privileged individuals, the hills being not Florentine but Hollywood, and most of the participants being attached to the film industry in one way or another. Lacking a true aristocracy, Smiley makes do, like her society, with celebrity. The Decameron has been inspiring other works from the moment it appeared, most famously The Canterbury Tales, which Geoffrey Chaucer published within nine years of Boccaccio’s death. What does Smiley gain by this connection? For one thing, a certain resonance, a sense that others have used the device of character-generated stories to plumb the mysteries and miseries of human existence. And there’s a sanction for following a group of well-off, self-involved, and, dare we say, shallow people for the length of the novel. Whenever readers might object that her characters are insipid or trivial, well, are those of Boccaccio or Chaucer any less so? Chiefly, though, I think she gains a ready-made structure. There’s a template for tossing together a bunch of chatty folks and seeing what comes out, and that template has been around since 1371. That’s a long enough pedigree for anyone.
Some writers have made careers out of cribbing from older sources, even when the sources aren’t all that old. J. M. Coetzee springs to mind. Occasionally the connection is little more than a title, as in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), which is drawn from the title of a poem by the Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy, the signature line of which is, “Because it is night, and the barbarians have not come.” In true Coetzee fashion, the barbarians are not the wild people on the outside, but the forces of empire and “civilization” within. It is they who commit the atrocities, killing, maiming, blinding their victims, suppressing all dissent or humane action, and actively engaging in a campaign of extermination. He upends Cavafy: not only have the barbarians arrived, they’ve been here all along. In Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist has in her youth written a novel, The House on Eccles Street, that reimagines Joyce’s Ulysses from Molly Bloom’s viewpoint.
Later chapters also make free use of Franz Kafka’s work, returning to a source he used extensively in Life and Times of Michael K. (1983). Anyone even mildly aware of Kafka will be familiar with his penchant for the letter K in connection with his besieged heroes, and particularly with Joseph K. of The Trial. Clearly, Coetzee revels in postmodern, intertextual games, yet he does not undertake them lightly or randomly; there is method and seriousness to his play. Perhaps nowhere on earth could more appropriately be called Kafkaesque than apartheid South Africa, with its arbitrary rules and punishments, its thoroughgoing oppression, its brutality. Coetzee makes it more so by rendering a dystopian version where civil war and concentration camps replace race as the dominant mode of inhumanity. Michael K. is a victim of biology, intellectually challenged, and marked by a harelip. His journey to return his mother’s ashes to her birthplace is filled with peril and hostility, including robbery by a soldier. The place he finds seems a refuge, but eventually he is found and arrested for suspicion of abetting insurrectionists he’s never met—a thoroughly Kafkaesque moment. The narrative is shot through with references to Kafka, including a phone call to “the Castle,” but the narrative and ethical force are all Coetzee, as is Michael’s eventual escape and resolution. Rarely in Kafka—I can think of no instances—are characters afforded a revelation that leads to contentment. This use of prior texts to highlight social commentary or moral investigations is typical of Coetzee’s work. He is no slave to the intentions of others.
So what else can he do? How about introducing a female viewpoint into the most famous buddy narrative in English literature, Robinson Crusoe? His Foe plunks a female character, Susan Barton, down on Crusoe’s island, where she finds things not entirely as reported by Daniel Defoe (the “Foe” of the title). Friday is clearly African, as against the nearly European original, and he has been rendered speechless by the mutilation of his tongue, although agency in this horrific act is never established. Cruso (as it is spelled throughout) dies on the return voyage, and it is only through Susan’s importuning of the titular author that his story is told, however distorted in the process. Needless to say, the novel turns an adventure yarn into a meditation on race, gender, and the consequences of colonialism, topics of which Defoe was blithely unaware. It also reminds us of his sources. Defoe typically drew from real-life counterparts for his narratives, from the lives of various female criminals, probably including the notorious Mary Carleton, who had published an autobiography during her own crime spree. Unlike Carleton, who died on the gallows, his Moll repents and is transported, although her protestations of reform and remorse are never as convincing or as engaging as her tales of bad behavior. For Crusoe, he drew upon the most famous castaway of his time, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on a desert island before being rescued and whose tale was told in various fictional “autobiographical” accounts as well as in an interview with the famous journalist Richard Steele. What better figure, then, to draw from than someone who made a practice of reworking sources himself?
Okay, so novelists borrow from other narrative. We’ve got that. Novels, memoirs, letters, stories of all sorts. Check. Sometimes those narratives are really old. Older than writing. Older than anything. The American novelist John Barth has shown that he’ll borrow from anywhere, but he prefers A Thousand and One Nights. And why not? There’s a story there for every occasion. Plus, the really interesting story, for Barth, is the talking-for-your-life tale of Scheherazade herself, whom he sees as a sort of Ur-novelist, a figure compelled by circumstance or fate to spin tales endlessly. A good model for the novelist. In Chimera (1972), he weaves together the tales of his bedtime story genius-heroine and her sister Dunyazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon, along with a figure purporting to represent the novelist himself as genie (or “Djean”). In The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), we’re pretty sure who will make an appearance. Sure enough, when the contemporary man Simon Behler falls overboard off the coast of Sri Lanka, he somehow awakens to find himself trapped in ancient Baghdad and locked in a contest of storytelling prowess with Sindbad the Sailor, no slouch at yarn-spinning. Barth is always enthralled with other storytellers and with earlier literature, and that fascination takes him back toward the great stories, and thence to the great myths. Here’s what matters, though: this is personal experience for him. As much as being a twin, as living in Maryland, as being a sailor, as teaching English, as dealing with publishers and editors all help define him, so does his reading, so do his obsessions and preoccupations.
When Barth encounters these tales, of course, he’s playing his postmodern games with them, but that’s not the inevitable path. Joyce makes use of Odysseus and the Greek gods in Ulysses, Finn McCool and other—many, many other—myths in Finnegans Wake. D. H. Lawrence borrows myth everywhere he travels, perhaps most notably the myth of the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl in The Plumed Serpent. The modernists frequently turn back to ancient myth as organizing principle for their stories of modern struggle. Lawrence and Joyce, though, have a contemporary who made myth seriously fun. A Greek. The Greek. How can you not love somebody named Zorba? You remember Zorba, right? Anthony Quinn playing very far over the top? Well, before it was a Quinn movie (actually, a Michael Cacoyannis movie, but who remembers him?), it was a Nikos Kazantzakis novel. Kazantzakis worked for decades on a long verse epic, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. He became notorious in his own lifetime and then much later, when Martin Scorsese filmed The Last Temptation of Christ, although the novel is simply The Last Temptation. He wrote novels about St. Francis of Assisi and Alexander the Great, and he wrote The Greek Passion, about a passion play that gets out of hand, where, essentially, Christ is recrucified. So he’s pretty familiar with recycling myth. But what made him very famous and much loved, naturally, is Zorba the Greek. Wait a minute, you’re saying—that’s the least mythic of them all. True, if you mean the immediate story. But Alexis Zorba’s no ordinary man. He’s all passions and desires, drink and sex, music and dancing, dark energy and deep digging. He is, in other words, Dionysus. The unnamed narrator, with his emphasis on the mind, his instinctive recoil from sexual urges and the body generally, and his bookishness, is almost pure Apollonian, according to the dichotomy that first comes to us—and to Kazantzakis—from Friedrich Nietzsche. Zorba represents the other, livelier half, of that opposition. Zorba is connected to wine, of course, to harvest bounty more generally, as well as to music and dance, but also to deep drives and urges, particularly those like lust and anger that are most difficult to tame. He has a way with women, reminding us that Dionysus had a cult of wild women, the Maenads, who held orgiastic rituals in the wooded darkness where among other activities they drank, danced, slaughtered animals and consumed them raw. Dark urges, indeed.
Dionysus was the most alarming of the Olympian gods, in part because his specialty, fruitfulness and the vine, was both mysterious and terrifying in its negative consequences. If grapes or olives failed, a community was in great danger of annihilation. What we often regard as the high-water mark of classical Greece, the drama, grew out of primitive dithyrambic rites (dancing and sung narratives) meant to appease and celebrate him. In the theaters there was always a seat in the front row reserved for him, and performances were generally preceded by an animal sacrifice in his honor. He alone of the major deities was not pictured directly in his own person, but as a figure or face reflected in the clouds. Well, one can’t very well write a novel about the god himself, can one? So Kazantzakis gives us Zorba, both the representation of the god and a recognizable figure in himself: the unschooled workman in touch with the earth and its pleasures, the man whose genius is for living.
If a farm kid from Ohio writes such a story, it may come off as a bit contrived. I can speak with some authority on this point. But Kazantzakis grew up in a world infused with knowledge of the ancient world and its deities. He was a scholar and translator of philosophy and classical works, a student of various religious traditions. His Dionysian figure owes as much to Nietzsche as to the ancient tradition. Not for nothing is the narrator writing a book on the Buddha, whose teachings lead invariably away from the body and from desire generally. Does this mean he “believes” in the ancient myths? Not literally, but he does place them in the context of a broader wisdom tradition, reminding readers that salvation (one of Zorba’s favorite topics) relies not only on the spirit and the mind but also on the stomach, the sexual organs, and the body. Those are the lessons of Zorba/Dionysus, and they are available to Kazantzakis through his direct, personal experience of the world.
Okay, that’s one sort of personal experience, but maybe not the most obvious. Much more commonly writers draw on observations of the current social scene, on history, and on their own lives. We’ll speak of history in another chapter, since it warrants a separate discussion. And the rest? For one, there’s the ripped-from-the-headlines school. Okay, maybe that’s a largely degraded subset because of lousy books and movies that thinly veil current events for sensational effects. Maybe we’re better off thinking of ripped-from-the-back-pages as a type of fiction. That’s what much of Fitzgerald could be called. While the Scott-and-Zelda marriage often reads like a novel—by a novelist sadly unfamiliar with limits and decorum—and while the real novelist did use personal events and situations, what really makes his fiction go is the ability to observe the social situation of his time. Gatsby is not autobiographical, yet it draws on persons he met and well-established 1920s types. Tender Is the Night (1934) has a generous helping of Gerald and Sara Murphy, who in some significant ways provide the models for Dick and Nicole Diver; some of Scott and Zelda, chiefly in the disastrous outcome of the grand times; and a great deal of the era. That Fitzgerald could observe his world so carefully, even when drunk, and could work his own flaws and failures into his narrative design, is a powerful testament to his artistic abilities. That he wrote so few novels is a testament to how deeply he fell into the world he so accurately critiqued.
Most of our great writers have been keen observers of the social scene. Mark Twain may have said that any library with no Jane Austen in it is a good library, even if it contained no other books, yet he and Austen share some—okay, maybe just a few—important abilities. The most important is the ability to see what’s flawed in society. And what’s funny. I’m pretty sure Twain had only limited experience with conjoined twins, but he had abundant experience of slavery and racism. When he started out to write what he later categorized as an “extravagant tale,” Those Extraordinary Twins, he had little plan except to tell an extended tall tale that came to him as a result of seeing Italian conjoined twins when he toured Europe. That plan, however, later melted away, as new characters hijacked the narrative. Why? Because Twain, for all his fanciful leanings, is a realist. He’s at his best when scrutinizing the actual world, ruthlessly dissecting its shortcomings. That’s what he does in this tale of switched babies and disastrous outcomes. The slave infant passes for white in the world, but money and privilege teach him to become cruel and selfish, ultimately leading him to commit robbery and murder. The white infant whose place he takes becomes moral and hardworking through his upbringing and circumstances, but he’s also illiterate and saddled with the dialect of Southern slaves; when finally restored to his rightful place, he can never fit in. In novel after novel, Twain skewers the pretensions and hypocrisies of nineteenth-century America.
And Austen? Twain once said in a letter to Joseph Twichell, “Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone,” but he should have had more fellow feeling. She, too, skewers the pretensions and hypocrisies of her era, as different as it was from Twain’s. She, too, finds great hilarity in human folly, whether the ill-advised manipulations of Emma Woodhouse or the romantic mayhem of the Bennett females and the snobbery and class consciousness of the surrounding characters. One would think Twain would have some sympathy for Pride and Prejudice simply for the portrait of the puffed-up, social-climbing clergyman-cousin Mr. Collins. He may not be the Duke and the Dauphin, but he’s not far off.
Both writers are brilliant observers of their times and unsparing in their criticism of pomposity, bombast, and societal duplicity. Most great novelists, in fact, specialize in capturing the telling details of the social scene. But be forewarned: results may vary. In A Changed Man (2005), Francine Prose writes about the white supremacist who came in from the cold. A young skinhead suddenly shows up in the offices of a human rights organization run by a Holocaust survivor, leading to much consternation and intrigue from all parties. John Updike has specialized in capturing the historical moment, whether in the Rabbit novels, where Rabbit Angstrom lives through the various changes in the second half of the twentieth century, or in novels such as Couples (1968) and A Month of Sundays (1975) that meticulously anatomize the foibles of the historical moment. In a much more sober vein, John Steinbeck specialized in capturing the physical and spiritual rootlessness of the first half of twentieth-century America in works like Of Mice and Men (1937), Cannery Row (1945), East of Eden (1952), and, most famously, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In much of his work, there’s a journalistic quality of capturing the historical moment, and indeed, The Grapes of Wrath grew out of a series of newspaper articles that he wrote on migrants escaping dust-bowl Oklahoma in an often futile search for a better life in California. Autobiographical? No. Experience-based? Absolutely. He poured a tremendous amount of himself into the book: observations, outrage over treatment of Okies, leftist political beliefs, hostility to the property-owning class, toughness and tenderness, optimism and something like despair. Nearly every action in the novel proves futile, yet the book ends on a hopeful note through Rose of Sharon, having lost her stillborn baby, nursing a starving man and Tom Joad, on the run from a murder charge, issuing his famous promise to his mother about always fighting for the downtrodden and oppressed. East of Eden is even more personal, addressed as it is to his young sons, even though the story is not “his” story, not his autobiography. The competing sons, the biblical parallels, the war between good and evil—all that is in a sense the purest Steinbeck. Part of what makes this work, like so much of his fiction, personal and gripping is his absolute fidelity to place, to the Salinas Valley and Monterey, that part of central California that inhabited him as much as he inhabited it.
So, who else? Pretty much everybody. D. H. Lawrence’s novels follow him around from Nottinghamshire to London to the Tyrol to Italy to Australia to Mexico new and old. His characters undergo many of his experiences; his wife Frieda once coldcocked him with a stoneware dinner plate, and that incident becomes Hermione Roddice’s conking of Rupert Birkin with a piece of lapis lazuli in Women in Love (1920). And Lawrence’s early personal and romantic tribulations form the basis for Sons and Lovers (1913), his breakthrough novel. Joyce draws heavily on his own childhood and adolescence for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915). Hemingway? Bullfights, fishing, war, personal turmoil, toughness and tenderness in an uneasy mix. Other than that, not much. Dickens? At least half of his novels are, in one way or another, about debtor’s prison, where his father was sent when Charles was twelve years old, and his own work in a bootblack factory at the same age, two experiences from which he never really recovered. Did Franz Kafka live through the events of the posthumously published The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926)? No, but he certainly understood on an extremely personal level the alienation and the rejection they depict, as well as the absurdity of existence. And what of Kerouac and the Beat writers? Much of his work is seemingly direct transcription of experience. We know that much of this self-created myth—the single long roll of paper containing the typescript of On the Road; the almost untutored, offhand narrative stance; the sense of unfiltered reportage—is studied nonsense, that in fact the effects he achieves are the result of considerable labor, or at least they are until he begins to believe the myth, but we like him that way. And you can’t deny that the narratives grow out of personal experience, that he and Neal Cassady dashed cross-country in cars seeking out as much of life as they could drink in (On the Road, 1957), that he and Gary Snyder went hiking in the mountains (The Dharma Bums, 1958), that he used his adventures with his friends for all of his subject matter, sometimes changing characters very little from the originals, aside from some minor name deformation.
Okay, okay. You get the idea. So what does this mean for the reader? What do we do with this information?
Writing grows out of experience. That part’s unassailable. Well, guess what? So does reading. They’re not the same experiences. Happily, you don’t have to have lived in the Salinas Valley or 1920s Paris, don’t need to have bombed across Kansas in the late 1940s or have read the same ancient epics, don’t need any special experience to connect to the novels. This is a place we can meet, reader and writer. Whatever the sources of the narrative, what matters ultimately for readers is the sense that this thing is genuine, that it has the solidity of the real deal. It’s ephemeral, yet we feel we can reach out and touch it. Which leads us to . . .
The Law of Novel Paradox: Novels grow out of intensely private obsessions, which writers then must make public and accessible to readers. They have to move from autobiography, or even diary, to public discourse. They have to make us care about something that we may never even have thought about, and make it seem like our own idea. Did we care, or even know, about the injustice in the George Edalji case? Not until Julian Barnes made us aware of it in Arthur and George, where we find ourselves caught up, amazed, outraged, and ultimately gratified. It’s one of many paradoxes in the novel. You can follow your star, but you have to make it ours. You can use old material, but it can’t be old hat.
Here’s one that’s related: we treat fictional narrative as true, even while acknowledging that it is manifestly false. Sure, we know the tale is made up. All the best writers tell us so, if we ask. You didn’t even have to ask Mark Twain; he’d tell anyone who’d listen that he was a professional liar. Yet he was also a professional truth-teller. Amidst all the lies, made-up stories, and outrageous jokes, he finds the things that matter. Bigotry. Hypocrisy. Loyalty. Morality. He found a lot of them. We know they matter, moreover, because his writing just feels right—strangely honest. The novel is both counterfeit and authentic. Okay, Bub, we say, you can tell us falsehoods, but you better not be faking it.