Unless It Moves the Human Heart Page 11

  Kristie and Diana trade funny teaching stories. Ana tells of having a dinner party where, scared to death, she found herself preparing dinner for the greatest cook in Europe. George tells us he used to be a food critic. “I weighed a hundred and ninety pounds before that.” He laughs. “The job did me in.”

  “Out,” says Suzanne.

  Like Diana, Sven is writing in new and different forms. “I used to think I was a short story writer,” he says. “Now I’m finding stories the hardest to do.”

  Donna has sent out four stories in the past year, all rejected, though she received an encouraging note from the editor of National Geographic. “Is that good?”

  “You bet it is.” I start to tell her not to be discouraged by the rejections. But one look tells me that’s unnecessary. She’s hooked. They all are.

  “May we talk about stuff you never let us talk about in class?” says Sven.

  “Like what?”

  “Things writers do other than write.”

  “Like drink?”

  “Like readings. The thought of giving a public reading of anything I wrote scares me to death,” says Veronique.

  “I love going to poetry readings,” says Suzanne. George and others nod. “Poets are so crazy. You can see it in their faces. It’s great.”

  “I think they’re sexy,” says Inur. “Not like prose writers.” She indicates me.

  “Do you think poetry readings are better than readings by novelists and essayists?” Jasmine asks me.

  “Probably, if the poet is a good reader, like Billy Collins, or Dylan Thomas. Lowell was a terrible reader, and if you’ve ever heard recordings of the vaguely British, dry-as-dust voice of T. S. Eliot, you’ll wonder what happened to his hometown of St. Louis.”

  “Poetry readers are easier to listen to,” says Ana. “Because the readings come in short bites.”

  “Did you ever hear Billy’s joke about imagining Dante at the lectern as he was about to give a reading? Dante says, ‘I’ll just read three poems.’ ” I tell them to be careful about reading their work too well, that mistakes can be covered up by hypnotic voices. “Your silent reader won’t cut you as much slack. You should have fun with readings, poetry or prose, because the audience can’t really understand everything it hears. You might as well make the most of it. Years ago I saw a cartoon in a magazine, in two frames. A writer bends over his book at a reading. He looks up at the audience and says, ‘Oh. You mean aloud!’ ”

  “I’d like to talk about the writing life,” says Diana.

  I am about to say, “What life?” but I hold my tongue. “You mean things about the way writers live? I have no idea how you should live.”

  “Yeah,” says Donna. “Let’s get down to all that stuff you hate to talk about—editors, publishers, advances, agents. Fame!”

  “Let’s get real,” says Diana.

  “A few minutes ago you said that you didn’t want to be real.”

  “Come on,” says Jasmine. “We’re not in a classroom now. You won’t lose your virtue.”

  “Everyone sinks to the lowest level at Robert’s,” says Robert, raising his shot glass. “It’s a regular joint.”

  “All right.” I sigh dramatically. “You want to know about agents? I cannot tell you how to get one. My agent, Gloria Loomis, has been with me for thirty-four years. When I started out writing for The New Republic, Gloria read an essay I wrote and called to ask if she could represent me. I was so flattered, I think I said ‘Huh?’ or ‘Wow!’—something sophisticated like that.”

  “So we should all get jobs on The New Republic and wait to be discovered?” says Diana.

  “Yes.”

  “Why does everyone look down on agents?” says Inur.

  “Because they are indispensable, like dentists and lawyers. And they’re subject to the same jokes. They deal with all the things you don’t want to touch.”

  “Money!” says Donna.

  “Money.”

  “What about editors?” asks Ana.

  “You have to be lucky, and I’ve been lucky there, too. There are very few real editors these days. Most people who call themselves editors merely acquire books or authors. They don’t get into the texts, and by that I do not mean line-editing or copyediting. Great editors determine what it is you want to say—”

  “What is this about?” says Veronique.

  “Exactly. Great editors become their authors. They question what you have written the way you would yourself, had you come up with the question. It’s a weird process for a writer. First you resist a correction or a suggestion, thinking, ‘That can’t possibly be right.’ Then you realize that your editor has seen your intentions more completely than you have. They will tell you what you meant to say. They will point out what’s missing, or whether you need a new direction, or that you ought to go further in the direction you’ve chosen.”

  “Some writers say they don’t need an editor,” says Sven.

  “Not the good ones. In the very least, an editor saves your ass. I’ve never known a good writer who did not profit from the hand of a first-rate editor. Sven? You have any more questions?”

  “This may sound funny,” he says. “But is there a particular kind of place a writer should live? Is one location or another better for one’s work?”

  “It doesn’t matter where you live. Country, city, suburb—all three have been home to great writers. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, either, though try to live within the general vicinity of your means. You don’t want money to drive your artistic decisions, and poverty will do that to you. Neither does it matter if you hold another job while you write, especially if you need to pay the heating bill. Chaucer was a civil servant, Keats and Joyce were medical students. Wallace Stevens an insurance man. Melville a customs inspector. Nathaniel West was the night manager in a cheap hotel. Frank O’Hara worked at the ticket counter in the Museum of Modern Art. It is common practice to advise young writers to take jobs that have nothing to do with reading and writing, so as to create some space between the real world and the imagined.”

  “We’ve heard that a lot,” says Inur.

  “But being a book editor didn’t get in T. S. Eliot’s way. And writers such as Doctorow, Alice McDermott, Ann Beattie, and Joyce Carol Oates continue to teach writing and literature. The trick is to find your place in the world—your town, your home, your room—which is usually achieved by hit-and-miss. After that, the trick is to recognize what you’ve got once you’ve got it, and not to let success or ambition lead you away from it. It took me thirty years to realize that where I wanted to be was in a lumpy white chair positioned at a forty-degree angle from a window looking out on a pine tree in front of my house.”

  “What about your friends?” asks Inur. “Should writers hang with other writers?”

  “Or we shall all hang separately,” says George.

  Many young writers seek the company of other young writers because they share a common world of gripes, celebrations, professional problems and interests, and because companionship lessens their loneliness. Dr. Johnson had his circle, Keats his. Both groups consisted of artistic folks such as Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, and Leigh Hunt. Hemingway chose a rougher crowd made up of boxers, big-game hunters, and Gertrude Stein. These little conventions are usually pictured in convivial situations, like weekly dinners in picturesque taverns. The participants are shown being witty and happy together, though I saw a black-and-white photo of Joseph Heller, James Jones, Truman Capote, and others drinking together in a Hamptons dive, each seemingly competing for the title of “Grimmest Face in America.” Yet for Johnson, Keats, Hemingway, or any first-rate writer, the idea of clubby companionship is nearly always a pretense. History’s more amiable writers, such as Oliver Goldsmith and Charles Lamb, were anomalies. And the most famous American circle, the Algonquin Round Table in New York, had no first-rate writers at all.

  “At the outset of your careers, you will probably enjoy the company of others for a while, up to th
e point that you know for certain what your life’s subject is, and your craftsmanship has risen to meet it. Then you will notice that you are increasingly disinclined to be in contact with your old friends, even the most beloved. Your husband, wife, partner, whoever, will constitute all the social life you need, and surprisingly little of that. In the end, you will find yourself glorying in that same solitude you sought to avoid at the start.”

  “Do you think our group could become a circle of writers?” asks Kristie.

  “First become writers.”

  “Will we all turn out to be disagreeable old men like you?” asks Jasmine.

  “If you’re lucky.”

  “I think you’re suggesting that we shouldn’t get married or live with someone,” says Kristie.

  “Too late,” says Suzanne, turning to George.

  “What sort of person would want to live with a writer?” asks Veronique.

  “A patient one.”

  “Should a writer marry another writer?” asks Jasmine.

  “A patient one”—and before they tell me that my wife must be very patient, I suggest we order dinner.

  For three hours more we sit and enjoy one another’s company. We drink. We overeat—lobster bisque, polenta, lamb, salmon, rib eye. The talk glides from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Steven Seagal and Nicolas Cage and Tiger Woods, and a guy who delivered pot-laced brownies to the office where Inur once worked. I sit back and listen. After two shots of Jameson’s neat, everything can look lovable, but cold sober I would love this group, especially for their affection for one another. Kristie asked me if they might become a literary circle. They are something better—a circle of friends.

  Diana looks up at me, sensing we are about to call it a night. “Is there anything you haven’t told us?” she asks. “Last chance.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” says Suzanne to the others. “He’s talked too much. Yak yak yak.”

  “Well, there is something I might have mentioned, but it’s difficult, so I didn’t think you were up to understanding it. Anyway, it’s too late now.” I get my coat, and move toward the door, accompanied by a chorus of boos. We hug, and we part. I decide to toss in my parting shot from long distance.

  TO: My ungrateful students

  RE: An inspirational letter

  Oh, read it anyway. You may not need this postscript as much as I need to give it to you. But there is something about writing I haven’t told you, in part because it smacks of the sentimental and abstract—two of the monsters I’ve hoped to drive from your work. And yet, if I fail to give you this final piece of information, if I let you stride toward that desk of yours thinking that good writing consists only of precision and restraint, and of the right words in the right order, and using anticipation over surprise, and imagination over invention and the preference of the noun to the adjective and the verb to the adverb, and a dozen other little lessons, however helpful they may be, you may conclude that once you’ve nailed these ideas, well, you’re a writer. Well, you’re not. Not yet.

  Lewis Thomas said that there’s an evolutionary tendency on the part of the species to be useful. He told me this in 1993, when I was doing a series of interviews with him for a piece for the New York Times Magazine. I had known Lewis a little before that, and like millions of others, had much admired his Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail and his other books that, thanks to his generous and observant eye, brought science to philosophy with a rich, joyous appreciation of the world. He was dying of lymphoma, and I asked him, since he had shown so many people how to live, if he might talk about how to die. This is what we discussed as we sat in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, week after week, in the mornings with the sun blasting the white walls and his wife Beryl nearby and his Yorkie at his feet—the imponderability of death, his wish not to be reincarnated because he’d had so good a life the first time round, his disbelief in an afterlife, which was undercut by his conviction that nothing in nature disappears. But in the fall of 1993, as his stern and handsome face was growing paler and bonier, he paused in mid-sentence and said, “You know, I really don’t want to talk about death anymore. I’d rather talk about life, how to live.” He said he thought that nature was basically amiable—good-natured. And that the proof of nature’s amiability was usefulness. He cited female beetles in an area near Houston, Texas, who lay their eggs in a slit that they cut in a branch of a mimosa tree. The eggs develop and crowd out the tissue of the branch, and eventually the branch falls, but not until the eggs hatch. This pruning keeps the mimosa trees healthy. The trees are useful to the beetles, the beetles are useful to them. “There’s an art to living,” Lewis said. “And it has to do with usefulness. I would die content if I knew that I had led a useful life.”

  Toward November, Lewis weakened, just about the time my essay came out in the Times. For the next ten days or so, hundreds of letters from Lewis’s readers came to the Times or to me directly, saying how grateful they were to him, how much he had taught them, and how sad they were to learn he was dying. He read many of these letters, and when he fell into a coma, I continued to read them to him in the hospital. You never know. When he died not long after that, there could be no question in his mind that his life had been useful.

  You see where I’m going with this. For your writing to be great—I mean great, not clever, or even brilliant, or most misleading of all, beautiful—it must be useful to the world. And for that to happen you must form an opinion of the world. And for that to happen you need to observe the world, closely and steadily, with a mind open to change. And for that to happen you have to live in the world, and not pretend that it is someone else’s world you are writing about. A tendency of modern literature is to claim, “We must love one another or die,” or “be true to one another,” or “only connect.” Sweet as such sentiments may be, they give up on the world and imply that the best way to live in it is to hide from it in one another’s embrace. Instead, you must love the world as it is, because the world, for all its murder and madness, is worth loving. Nothing you write will matter unless it moves the human heart, said the poet A. D. Hope. And the heart that you must move is corrupt, depraved, and desperate for your love.

  How can you know what is useful to the world? The world will not tell you. The world will merely let you know what it wants, which changes from moment to moment, and is nearly always cockeyed. You cannot allow yourself to be directed by its tastes. When a writer wonders, “Will it sell?” he is lost, not because he is looking to make an extra buck or two, but rather because, by dint of asking the question in the first place, he has oriented himself toward the expectations of others. The world is not a focus group. The world is an appetite waiting to be defined. The greatest love you can show it is to create what it needs, which mean you must know that yourself.

  Everything contains significance. But some significances are more equal than others. The writers whom we agree are the great ones deal only in matters of proved importance. They are great because their subjects and themes are great, and thus their usefulness is great as well. Their souls are great, and they have had the good sense and the courage to consult their souls before their pens touched paper. Go and do likewise. And do not tell me that greatness lies out of your reach, because that would mean your soul is out of your reach. The trouble with much writing today is that it has been fertilized and nurtured in classrooms like ours, where the elements of effective writing have been isolated and studied in parts. No teacher of writing, myself included, dares speak of the subterranean power available to every writer, if that writer will but take the time to brood on the matter and unearth it. In a way, you and I have been in a conspiracy against each other. By emphasizing the apparent this and that about writing—this verb, that line—we have been ignoring the invisibilities that are the source of greatness in you. We dwell on style. I cannot tell you if Swift or Cervantes was a great stylist. The lesser excellences of great writers rarely occur to us, because their works are overwhelming
. When most modern writers come in for our praise, it is because of their little tricks or little twists. When Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, or Chekhov are recalled, it is as if tidal waves are washing over us. We cannot catch our breath. If I have taught you only to write so that your contemporaries may say nice things to you, I have failed you. I should have been teaching you that the one goal you must aim for is the stunned, silent gratitude of history.

  I have known several great writers well and have met several others. All have in common a certain innocence of mind that allows them to observe life openly and with a sense of fair play, though not without judgment. Whatever they write, a sonnet or a satire, arises from their liberalism of spirit, which is a restless spirit. They also cultivate their innocence and rediscover the virtues they believe in every time they sit down to write something new. They may surprise themselves by the insistence of their own high motives and values. Picture Dickens working out his labyrinthine plots on his long walks around London, forever returning to the child of his imagination—Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Ebenezer Scrooge as a schoolboy—whom he could trust to bring him back to a defense of the just, the right, and the good.

  It is your soul I am talking about, I’ll say it again. And if, upon examination, you find your soul inadequate to the task of great writing, then improve it, or borrow someone else’s. Commencement speakers are forever telling you to be yourself. I say, be someone else, if that other self is superior to yours. Borrow a soul. I am not in the least being facetious. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov says that the soul “is but a manner of being,” not a constant entity. Dissatisfied with the makeup of your old soul? Trade it in. But always trade up, and make the new one a great soul, capacious, kind, and rational, for only a soul of such quality and magnitude will produce the work you aspire to. If there is one lesson I hope to have given you in our classes, it is that your life matters. Now make it matter to others.