On Becoming a Novelist is another book by Gardner on writing, but it is slim and less famed than The Art of Fiction. It was published in 1983, posthumously. Raymond Carver, who had been Gardner's fiction student at what was then called Chico State College, wrote the introduction and informs us that "in those days he looked and dressed like a Presbyterian minister, or an FBI man." More importantly, Carver sings of the book to come by telling us that On Becoming a Novelist "seems to me to be a wise and honest assessment of what it is like and what is necessary to become a writer and stay a writer."
What wisdom is to be found in what wound up being Gardner's final book?
Well, for one thing, he muses on what amounts to the distinction between writers and philosophers. The irony of a writer philosophizing on this distinction is not lost on me, nor is his very masculine frame around the writers he sees himself addressing -- I trip over the pronouns much more than when I first read this at age twenty. But Gardner's thinking intrigues all the same.
Theme is like the floors and structural supports in a fine old mansion, indispensable but not, as a general rule, what takes the reader's breath away. More often than not, theme, or meaning, is the statement the architecture and decor makes about the inhabitants. When we think about it, it seems to me, the all but universal fascination with theme in high-school and college English courses has to do with the teacher's need to say something intellectual and surprising. A flawlessly told story by Boccaccio, Balzac, or Borges is hard to talk about simply as a story, and since all stories "mean" things -- sometimes quite odd and surprising things -- the temptation to talk about the meaning rather than the story may be irresistible.
For this reason the college-age student is easily persuaded to the view that great writers are primarily philosophers and teachers; they write to "show" us things. This is the message teachers and professional critics suggest in such misleading locutions as "Jean Rhys is showing us" or "Flaubert is demonstrating..." Teaching creative writing, one constantly hears students say of their work, I am trying to show...." The error in this is obvious once it's pointed out. Does the twenty- or twenty-five-year-old writer really have brilliant insights that the intelligent reading public ... has never before heard or thought of? If the young novelist's answer is an emphatic yes, he would do the world a favor by entering the ministry or the Communist party. If I belabor the point, I do so only because the effect of English literature courses is so often, for a certain kind of student, insidious.
...no doubt the arrogance of the young has also to do with the age-old idealism of teachers, who forever harp, not without some justice, on how the former generation failed and the world's salvation is up to the new generation. Whatever the cause, the young person -- the young novelist -- is encouraged to feel he is life's hope, he is the Messiah.
There's nothing wrong with that feeling. It's natural -- part of nature -- and no artist ever became great by violating his deepest feelings, however youthful, neurotic, or wrongheaded. ... One of the great temptations of young writers is to believe that all the people in the subdivision in which he grew up were fools and hypocrites in need of blasting or instruction. As he matures, the writer will come to realize, with luck, that the people he scorned had important virtues, that they had better heads and hearts than he knew. The desire to show people proper believes and attitudes is inimical to the noblest impulses of fiction.
In the final analysis, what counts is not the philosophy of the writer (that will reveal itself in any case) but the fortunes of the characters, how their principles of generosity or stubborn honesty or stinginess or cowardice help them or hurt them in specific situations. What counts is the characters' story.
This reminds me of something I wrote years ago for Isak, titled rather formally, and with airs of a philosophical treatise, "On the education of literature and writing: the annotated edition." I've evolved my thinking somewhat since then, but it's interesting to re-visit.
In a post that manages to give nods to George Orwell, Nick Carraway, Gustave Courbet, The Brothers Karamazov, and Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I wrote:
There is over-emphasis on teaching "themes" and "symbols," and in creating a chronology of literary movements. Books are taught as social artifacts. Which indeed they are. But what's missing in English classes is the study of books as ... well, as books. Your standard literature major won't be able to tell you beans about how a book is made
While drawn from the heat of a long late-night conversation, fired with the sense of discovery, some of Gardner's ideas seem to have sunk in so deep, I felt them as my own.
Comments