The Value of Not Understanding Everything

The difference between writers and critics is that in order to function in their trade, writers must live in the world, and critics, to survive in the world, must live in literature.

That’s why writers in their own work need to have nothing to do with criticism, no matter on what level.

In fact, since seminars and discussions move forward a lot more cheerily if a couple of bald statements are made, I’ll make one: you can lunge off into an interesting and true career as a writer even if you’ve read nothing but the Holy Bible and the New York Daily News, but that is an absolute minimum (read them slowly).

Literary criticism always ought to be of great interest to the historian, the moralist, the philosopher, which is sometimes me. Also to the reader—me again—the critic comes as a journalist. If it happens to be the right decade, he may even bring great news.

As a reader, I liked reading Wright Morris’s The Territory Ahead. But if I—the writer—should pay too much attention to him, I would have to think an awful lot about the Mississippi River. I’d have to get my mind off New York. I always think of New York. I often think of Chicago, San Francisco. Once in a while Atlanta. But I never think about the Mississippi, except to notice that its big, muddy foot is in New Orleans, from whence all New York singing comes. Documentaries aside, my notions of music came by plane.

As far as the artist is concerned, all the critic can ever do is make him or break him. He can slip him into new schools, waterlog him in old ones. He can discover him, ignore him, rediscover him …

Apart from having to leave the country in despair and live in exile forever—or as in milder situations, never having lunch uptown again—nothing too terrible can happen to the writer’s work. Because what the writer is interested in is life, life as he is nearly living it, something which takes place here or abroad, in Nebraska or New York or Capri. Some people have to live first and write later, like Proust. More writers are like Yeats, who was always being tempted from his craft of verse, but not seriously enough to cut down on production.

Now, one of the reasons writers are so much more interested in life than others who just go on living all the time is that what the writer doesn’t understand the first thing about is just what he acts like such a specialist about—and that is life. And the reason he writes is to explain it all to himself, and the less he understands to begin with, the more he probably writes. And he takes his ununderstanding, whatever it is—the face of wealth, the collapse of his father’s pride, the misuses of love, hopeless poverty—he simply never gets over it. He’s like an idealist who marries nearly the same woman over and over. He tries to write with different names and faces, using different professions and labors, other forms to travel the shortest distance to the way things really are.

In other words, the poor writer—presumably in an intellectual profession—really oughtn’t to know what he’s talking about.

When people in school take their first writing classes, it is sometimes suggested to them that they write about their own experience. Put down what you see. Put down what you know. Perhaps describe a visit you have just had with a friend.

Well, I would suggest something different. I would say, don’t knock yourself out. You know perfectly well what happened when your friend Helen visited last Friday. This is great practice for a journalist and proper practice for a journalist. As for an inventing writer, I would say something like this:

Now, what are some of the things you don’t understand at all? You’ve probably taken all these psych courses, and you know pretty well what is happening between your mother and yourself, your father and your brother. Someone in your family has surely been analyzed, so you’ve had several earfuls as well as a lot of nasty remarks at dinner. Okay—don’t write about that, because now you understand it all. That’s what certain lessons in psychology and analytical writing effect—you have the impression that you know and understand because you own the rules of human behavior, and that is really as bad as knowing and understanding.

You might try your father and mother for a starter. You’ve seen them so closely that they ought to be absolutely mysterious. What’s kept them together these thirty years? Or why is your father’s second wife no better than his first?

If, before you sit down with paper and pencil to deal with them, it all comes suddenly clear and you find yourself mumbling, Of course, he’s a sadist and she’s a masochist, and you think you have the answer—drop the subject.

If, in casting about for suitable areas of ignorance, you fail because you understand yourself (and too well), your school friends, as well as the global balance of terror, and you can also see your last Saturday-night date blistery in the hot light of truth—but you still love books and the idea of writing—you might make a first-class critic.

What I’m saying is that in areas in which you are very smart you might try writing history or criticism, and then you can know and tell how all the mystery of America flows out from under Huck Finn’s raft; where you are kind of dumb, write a story or a novel, depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness. Some people can do both. Edmund Wilson, for instance—but he’s so much more smart than dumb that he has written very little fiction.

When you have invented all the facts to make a story and get somehow to the truth of the mystery and you can’t dig up another question—change the subject.

Let me give you a very personal example: I have published a small book of short stories. They are on several themes, at least half of them Jewish. One of the reasons for that is that I was an outsider in our particular neighborhood—at least I thought I was—I took long rides on Saturday, the Sabbath. My family spoke Russian, but the street spoke Yiddish. There were families of experience I was cut off from. You know, it seemed to me that an entire world was whispering in the other room. In order to get to the core of it all, I used all those sibilant clues. I made fiction.

As often happens when you write something else, a couple of magazines asked to hear from me. They wanted a certain kind of story—which I’d already done—

But the truth of the matter is, I have probably shot my Jewish bolt, and I had better recognize that fact and remember it. It’s taken me a long time, but I have finally begun to understand that part of my life. I am inside it. I could write an article, I imagine, on life in the thirties and forties in Jewish New York, but the tension and the mystery and the question are gone. Except to deceive my readers and myself, in honor I could never make fiction of that life again. The writer is not some kind of phony historian who runs around answering everyone’s questions with made-up characters tying up loose ends. She is nothing but a questioner.

Luckily for my craft—for my love of writing—I have come up against a number of other inexplicable social arrangements. There are things about men and women and their relations to each other, also the way in which they relate to the almost immediate destruction of the world, that I can’t figure out. And nothing in critical or historical literature will abate my ignorance a tittle or a jot. I will have to do it all by myself, marshal the evidence. In the end, probably all I’ll have to show is more mystery—a certain juggled translation from life, that foreign tongue, into fiction, the jargon of man.

(mid-1960s)