∗
So don’t do that: don’t be baffling and indigestible. The good, the thoughtful host doesn’t do that. And he doesn’t do this: he doesn’t overwhelm you. Don’t, for example, harass your visitor with a multitude of fresh acquaintances, as Faulkner tends to do, beginning a short story with something like Abe, Bax, Cal, and Dirk were sitting up front, so I got in back with Emery, Fil, Grunt, Hube, and J-J (who used to be called Zoodie), and out on the flatbed I could see Keller, Leroy, Mo, Ned, Orrin…Even Muriel Spark, often the very deftest of writers, can quickly exhaust your powers of retention (there are far, far too many girls of slender means in The Girls of Slender Means). At the outset, before things loosen up, introduce only one character or maybe two, or possibly three, or at the very most four.
Take the earliest opportunity to give the readers a bit of typographical air – a break, a subhead, a new chapter. As I remember it, the first of Updike’s Rabbit books, Rabbit, Run, trundles on for thirty or thirty-five pages before we get so much as a line-space – long enough, at any rate, to establish an impression of fathomless garrulity. Don’t do that: don’t keep them waiting too long for a stretch of clear white paper. They will be grateful for a chance to catch their breath and to brace themselves for more; and so will you.
This is yet another example of the strange co-identity of writer and reader. Just as guest and host have the same root – from Latin hospes, hospit- (‘host, guest’) – readers and writers are in some sense interchangeable (because a tale, a teller, is nothing without a listener). And readers are artists, too. Each and every one of them paints a different mental picture of Madame Bovary.
Asked to sum up the pleasures of reading, Nabokov said that they exactly correspond to the pleasures of writing. I for one have never read a novel that I ‘wished I’d written’ (that would be simultaneously craven and brash), but I certainly and invariably try to write the novels I would wish to read. When we write, we are also reading. When we read (as noted earlier), we are also writing. Reading and writing are somehow the same thing.
‘I can’t start a novel’, my stepmother Jane used to say, ‘until I can jot down its theme on the back of an envelope. Just a few words – and it doesn’t matter how trite they are. Appearances are deceptive. Cheats never prosper. Look before you leap…Then I’m ready to begin.’
‘That would be impossible for me,’ my father Kingsley used to say. ‘I don’t know what its theme is. I’ve got a certain situation or a certain character. Then I just feel my way.’
‘Well I feel my way too. Once I’ve got going. But I can’t get going until I can at least fool myself that I know what I’m getting going on.’
…For me it’s a journey with a destination but without maps; you have a certain place you want to get to – but you don’t know the way. As you near that goal, though (one year later, or two, or four, or six), you can probably do what Jane did: you can formulate its gist in a single phrase; and that commonplace motto can serve as a touchstone during your final revisions. This is when you begin to sense the salutary pressure to cut…Particular sentences and paragraphs will feel strained and unstable; they seem to be hinting at their own expendability. And now’s the time to consult the back of that envelope: if the passage that disquiets you has no clear bearing on the stated theme – then (with regret, having saved what you can for another day) you should let it go. What you are after, at this stage, is unity.
Writing a novel is a…is a learning experience. In the old days I would get to the end of a first draft and then flip the whole thing over, and stare at it in wonder; and then start reading. And I was always astonished and embarrassed by how little I knew about that particular fiction, how larval it seemed, and how approximate. That’s the first page. By the last page you are back where you were (and confirming that, yes, the entire cast without exception has been transformed en route: their names, their ages, even sometimes their genders)…A much milder reprise of the same experience can be expected when you come to the end of draft two.
In writing this or that novel, you are learning – you are uncovering information – about this or that novel.
∗
I knew at once what he meant. ‘Mart,’ said my brother Nicolas on the phone. ‘It’s happened.’ In other words, Jane had bolted from the house on Flask Walk.
It wasn’t at all unexpected. Here was a marriage audibly pleading to be put out of its misery…Kingsley was hurt, romantically hurt (he came close to writing a poem about it – until his feelings fiercely hardened); and there was a great deal of disruption.*1 But there was no surprise and no censure. Everybody understood.
Still, I am forced to conclude that there was some resentment on my part (filial protective solidarity, perhaps), because I exacted a small but interesting revenge on Jane – strangely mean-spirited, as I now judge it. She ceased to be my legal stepmother in 1983, but she continued to be my confidante and mentor until her death (in 2014 at the age of ninety). It was a writerly revenge. I didn’t stop
