The Adding Machine: Selected Essays Read online

  It is of course easier to tell someone how not to write than how to write. Remember for example that a bad title can sink a good book or a good one sell a bad book. But it can sink a film faster and deeper, because a film has just one shot to make it. A book with a bad title or a slow beginning may make a come-back — a film just gets one chance. Here again there are no absolute rules; but there are guidelines. A good title gives the reader an image and arouses his interest in the image. Bad titles convey negative images, refer to images which the audience cannot understand until they see the film, or convey no image at all. Titles of more than three words are to be avoided — such turn-off titles as ‘The Marriage of a Young Stock Broker’. ‘The Conformist’ is a turn-off title. Those of you who have seen the film will know it is about a fascist who ends up denouncing his blind friend as a fascist when Mussolini falls. ‘The Survival Artist’ would have been a better title.

  There is a definite technology for the negative use of words to cause confusion, to create and aggravate conflicts, and to discredit opponents. This is the opposite of what a writer does. Here, the more abstract words and meaningless statements there are, the better. This technology has been developed in the mass media by Hearst and others, refined in LIFE and TIME, and carried still further by the CIA in some subsidized literary periodicals. The technology for writing a turn-off review is so definite that one sentence will tell you when it is being used — and it is much more complicated than just saying derogatory things about the book. It is very important for any writer to be able to absorb unfair criticism calmly and, when given the opportunity, to reply to it. It is also good practice to write book reviews.

  To return to the matter of technology, let us consider first the question of our materials: Words, Korzybski’s book. Science and Sanity, is a great timesaver. The fact that a word is not the object it represents — that this desk, whatever it may be, is not the label ‘desk’ — fully realized, will save the student a lot of pointless verbal arguments. Look at abstract words that have no definite referent — words like communism, materialism, civilization, fascism, reductivism, mysticism. There are as many definitions as there are users of these words. According to Korzybski, a word that has no referent is a word that should be dropped from the language, and I would say, certainly from the vocabulary of the writer. For example, take the word ‘fascism’: what does it mean? What is the referent? Consider the phenomenon of Nazi Germany — the military expansion of an industrialized country; now consider South Africa — oppression designed to maintain a status quo; are these both fascism?

  In short, we have so many different phenomena lumped under this word that the use of the word can only lead to confusion. So we can drop the word altogether and simply describe the various and quite different political phenomena. I have been accused of being an arch materialist and a bourgeois mystic. What do these words mean? Virtually nothing. And because they mean nothing you can argue about them for all eternity. Any words that have referents cannot be argued about; there it is — call it a desk, a table, call it whatever you like, but no argument is possible. All arguments stem from confusion, and all arguments are a waste of time unless your purpose is to cause confusion and waste time.

  I have learned as lot about writing by writing film scripts. As soon as a writer starts writing a film script — that is, writing in terms of what appears on screen — he is no longer omniscient. He cannot for example inform the reader that ‘It was a clear bright day in May of 1923 in St. Louis, Missouri.’ How does the film audience know that the month is May, the year 1923, the locale St. Louis? This information must be shown on the screen, unless the writer falls back on the dubious expedient of the offstage voice. Or:’As he left his house and turned onto Euclid Avenue that morning, he felt a chill of foreboding.’ Did he indeed — and how is this to be shown on screen? Some incident must be presented that gave him this chill; perhaps someone passing him on the street who mutters something that may or may not be directed towards him — or he intercepts a malignant expression as someone passes on a bicycle. And such phrases as ‘words cannot convey’, ‘indescribable’, unspeakable’, cannot be shown on screen. You cannot get away with an indescribable monster. The audience want to see the monster. That’s what they are paying for. The ability to think in concrete visual terms is almost essential to a writer. Generally speaking, if he can’t see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, he can’t write it.

  The impact of the mass media is more directly felt in films than in books. In the 1920’s, gang war was box office year after year, but remember that there were no television pictures of gang war on screen. There were only still pictures and newspaper accounts. It was front-page news and people were interested because it was something going on which they could not see directly. Had they seen it day after day, like the terrorist activity in Belfast today, they would have lost interest. Image loses impact with use. Anyone like to try making a film about the IRA in Belfast? Or writing a book on the subject for that matter? People are fed up with the IRA in Belfast. Or how about the Arab terrorists? Call it ‘Death in Munich?’ World War II — there were of course films on location, but not all that many, and no TV cameras at the front. There have been a lot of successful films made since then, and at least two books: From Here To Eternity and The Naked and the Dead. But who has written a bestseller about the Vietnam War?

  Dreams are a fertile source of material for writing. Years ago I read a book by John Dunne called An Experiment with Time. (1924). Dunne was an English physicist, and he observed that his dreams referred not only to past but also to future events. However, the future material, since it often seems trivial and irrelevant, will not be remembered unless it is written down. This got me into the habit of writing dreams down, and I have done this for about thirty years. I began writing dreams down long before I started to write. I have, over a period of years, turned up a number of future references; but much more important is the number of characters and sets I have obtained directly from dreams, and at least forty percent of my material derives from dreams. When I contact a character, I start building up an identikit picture. For example, I meet a character in a dream; then I may find a photo in a magazine that looks like the character, or I may meet someone who looks like him in some respect. Usually my characters are composites of many people — from dreams, photos, people I know and quite frequently characters in other writing. Over a period of years I have filled a number of scrapbooks with these identikit pictures.

  Finally, I will examine the connections between so-called occult phenomena and the creative process. Are not all writers, consciously or not, operating in these areas?

  One more thing: Sinclair Lewis said: ‘If you want to be a writer, learn to type.’ This advice is scarcely necessary now. So then sit down at your typewriter and write.

  Creative Reading

  Having given courses in creative writing, I have come to doubt whether writing can be taught. It is like trying to teach someone how to dream. So I now teach creative reading. A few comments or quotations can turn a receptive student onto a book, and learning to read with discrimination is a crucial step towards learning to write. Creative reading demands the active participation of the reader, and the first step is critical evaluation.

  Matthew Arnold formulated three questions for a book critic to ask and answer:

  1. What is the writer trying to do?

  2. How well does he succeed in doing it?

  3. Is it worth doing? Does the book achieve what he calls ‘high seriousness’?

  So what is the writer trying to do? Many critics disparage a writer because they don’t like what he is trying to do, or because he is not trying to do something else.

  Ask the second question and you are well on the way to creative reading and the useful exercise of putting what the book is about into one or two sentences. Take Jaws: Menace posed by great white shark eating the bathers and endangering the tourist trade.

  Menace poses challenge. Man meets challenge
. Menace is removed by protagonist. What is The Great Gatsby about? Poor boy loves rich girl. He loses rich girl to rich man and meets a violent death trying to turn back the clock and realise ‘the last and greatest of human dreams.’ What is Lord Jim about? Honor lost. Honor regained.

  Now the third question poses itself. Is it worth doing? Art makes us aware of what we know and don’t know that we know. Our conscious awareness, our ego, has been compared to the tip of the iceberg that appears above water. Fitzgerald shows us more of the iceberg, more of the hidden depths than O’Hara. He is literally a deeper writer. Gatsby touches us in a way that the protagonist of O’Hara’s Appointment in Sumarra does not

  Some other questions the creative reader can ask are: Does the writer have an ear for dialogue? Many good writers don’t. Fitzgerald’s characters are delineated more by his descriptive prose than by what they say. His dialogue tends to be wooden, with occasional flashes of brilliant insight as when Gatsby says about Daisy’s voice: ‘It’s full of money.’ John O’Hara, a much lesser writer, had a superb ear for dialogue.

  Does the writer have a distinctive style? Style, the manner of writing, the choice of one word rather than another, may be so distinctive that you read one sentence and you know who wrote it: ‘The hole in his forehead where the bullet went in was about the size of a pencil. The hole in the back of his head where the bullet came out was big enough to put your fist in if it was a small fist and you wanted to put it there.’ Who else but Papa Hemingway could have penned these lines and challenged Dryden’s hitherto undisputed title to the most atrocious conceit in the English language for his stunning lines on Lord Hasting’s smallpox:

  ‘Each little pimple had a tear in it

  To wail the fault its rising did commit.’

  ‘In his youth he had considered raising alligators in Florida. But there was no security in the alligators.’ Janey Bowles — who else?

  ‘I had not ridden since I was ten years old when my horrible little black pony had at last been given away. How I hated it! Once it had broken out of the stable and had galloped through the roses and over the lawns, showing its awful yellow teeth,’ Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage.

  Style can become a limitation and a burden. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him. ‘I’d shoot down my own mother,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. If she was a mallard and I could lead her sweet and clean with no. 4 load.’

  Papa is explaining to Papa about Hollywood. ‘One can with honor sell one’s soul in Hollywood. Everyone does it here,’ he says. His style was hermetic. No escape for Papa. Mektoub. It was written. Sold his soul for a Safari. For a valorous wildebeest steak after a muscular martini. For the sheer joy of killing a charging rhino. ‘Aye,’ says the wise old hunter puffing on his pipe which he lights from a firebrand, ‘That’s a natural feeling for a man.’

  And the quick shot straight from the hip to the shoulder just so long and long enough, almost a snap-shot from my 270 Weatherby that folded the wildebeest at 305 yards, my boy paced it, the meat sweet and clean. If your wildebeest runs even three yards after the hit the glandular juices of stress spoil the meat The meat stinks of fear and death. The guests start back from the barbecue pit appalled.

  ‘Qu’elle est cette bête morte?’

  ‘What is this dead beast?’

  This was a fearless kill it would yield up brave steaks. And this was a joy too but a different joy, steadier, quieter, the joy of a craftsman in his trade. Joy that leaves a man fresh inside like the smell of salt spray and the smell of valor in the bull ring...

  ‘S’Death what stuff’s here?’

  The Snows of Kilimanjaro was certainly the best if not the only writing Hemingway ever did. It is one of the best stories in the language about death, the stink of death. You know the writer has been there and brought it back. The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s The Dead and the end of The Great Gatsby. The pilot was pointing: ‘White white white as far as the eye could see ahead, the snows of Kilimanjaro.’ And a blinding flash of white must have been the last thing Papa saw when he put the double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.

  So Papa sold death to Hollywood when he let them tack a happy ending onto their dreadful movie of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Instead of the phantom messenger of death who appears at the end of the story, a real live shitting pilot from Hollywood arrives with penicillin —just the thing for a writer’s gangrene. And Papa sat and watched this butchery and signed his name to it.

  ‘Look, they’re gone!’ says wifey pointing to where the vultures had been roosting. Yes even the vultures have flapped away in disgust from that sell out.

  On a sell-out you have to think in terms of properties. I mean he sells The Snows of Kilimanjaro which is gilt-edged stuff for The Green Hills of Africa. Was The Green Hills even worth doing? No. For all that hunting and loading shit I’d rather read Field and Stream and The American Rifleman. But the real tragedy is that The Snows of Kilimanjaro could have been a great film about Death. Hemingway could smell death on others. Here he is in a jeep with General Lanham, known as Bucky to his friends, and Ernie was a real general lover. It’s worse than being a cop lover.

  ‘Have to relieve that man,’ says Bucky.

  ‘Bucky,’ says Ernie, ‘You won’t have to relieve him. He won’t make it. He stinks of death.’

  When the jeep reached Regimental Command Post it was stopped by Lieutenant Colonel John Ruggles.

  ‘General...’ said Ruggles saluting. ‘The Major has just been killed. Who takes the First Battalion?’

  And there is a great description in Farewell to Arms of the feeling you get when leaving the body at death. He has an opportunity to do a film about his specialty the thing he does best as a writer. And he throws it away for an expensive hunting trip. So the writer doesn’t die after all. He will go back to America and hole up in a cabin he knows about in Minnesota and write the great American novel. His gear is packed. The jeep will come at dawn. The sun is setting. The wise old hunter lights his pipe and points with the burning firebrand to the white dome of Kilimanjaro.

  ‘Don’t ever sell your dream, son.’ The old hunter waves to the jeep. ‘You see he had learned that life is more important than death. He had learned to live humbly for something he believed in. I guess it was just making his own dream real for a lot of people. You see Ernie wanted to give, he wanted to give from the heart with every word he wrote.’

  He’s gonna pay death off with a load of corn, or so he thinks.

  ‘You reckon ill who leave me out

  When me you fly I am the wings.’

  Who wrote that? I mean Death was Ernie’s inspiration. When Death walked out on him in Hollywood he took Ernie’s inspiration with him. ‘It doesn’t come anymore,’ he groans. You have to respect him for the courage to blow his brains out like that, don’t care what you say about the higher courage of living, it takes guts to do that. Makes me feel queasy just to think about it He certainly died in style.

  ‘I reckon you could have put your foot in the back of his head where the two barrels of heavy duck load splattered out even if it was a medium-sized foot and you didn’t want to put it there.’

  Old Lady: It must be very dangerous to be a writer.

  Papa: It is Madam, and few survive it.

  Does the book contain memorable passages? I first read Denton Welch in 1948. I re-read Maiden Voyage thirty years later and found that I had virtually memorized passages from the book. I have already quoted an example concerning his ‘horrible little black pony, its awful yellow teeth.’

  And here is the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us t
hen, but that’s no matter, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further and one fine morning... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.

  This passage stays with the reader and becomes part of his inner landscape ‘commensurate with his capacity for wonder.’

  And the characters? Can you see them? So long as there are readers Gatsby will look across his blue lawn to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. But I can’t see the protagonist of Appointment in Samarra. I can’t remember his name. He is as real and as quickly forgotten as today’s newspaper: Elderly Woman Dies in Fire. Death was attributed to smoke inhalation. Why should this elderly woman thrust her death upon one? I doubt if she even made a good-looking corpse.

  Does the writer play fair with the reader? There are rules to this game between reader and writer. Two books are on the list simply to illustrate the violation of the rules.

  The Critical Threshold by Brian Stableford. Colonists stranded on a distant planet undergo an alteration through contact with a powerful hallucinogenic substance given off by mating butterflies. The change leaves them devoid of language and so altered that the human rescue party inspires in them horrors and something akin to nausea. A very interesting idea, but the writer couldn’t follow through. We never find out what this wondrous change consists of. We are led to expect something that is not forthcoming.

  In The Great Sun Flower by Clifford Stone, the protagonist has a strange experience in Nice. He won’t talk about it. So this experience which leads to his madness and suicide by hanging is never revealed to the reader. It’s like a who-done-it where you don’t find out who done it or a monster movie where you never get to see the monster. It’s just the old ‘Nothing will ever bring me to reveal what I saw in that infamous crypt...’ (where the inventiveness of the writer lies buried).