The Faith of a Writer

Joyce Carol Oates

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061742705
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

A tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of our most distinguished writers, providing valuable insight into her inspiration and her method

Joyce Carol Oates is widely regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary literary figures. Having written in a number of genres -- prose, poetry, personal and critical essays, as well as plays -- she is an artist ideally suited to answer essential questions about what makes a story striking, a novel come alive, a writer an artist as well as a craftsman.

In The Faith of a Writer, Oates discusses the subjects most important to the narrative craft, touching on topics such as inspiration, memory, self-criticism, and "the unique power of the unconscious." On a more personal note, she speaks of childhood inspirations, offers advice to young writers, and discusses the wildly varying states of mind of a writer at work. Oates also pays homage to those she calls her "significant predecessors" and discusses the importance of reading in the life of a writer.

Oates claims, "Inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make 'art': for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design." In fourteen succinct chapters, The Faith of a Writer provides valuable lessons on how language, ideas, and experience are assembled to create art.

READING
AS A WRITER:
The Artist as Craftsman

I.

And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, DIARY, 21 APRIL 1928

Of course, writing is an art. And art springs from the depths of the human imagination and is likely to be, in the final analysis as at first glance, idiosyncratic, mysterious, and beyond easy interpretation. We think of that supreme artist of solitude, Emily Dickinson, in the ecstatic grip of inspiration—“Did you ever see a soul at the white heat?”—and we think of the youthful Franz Kafka in the throes of writing his first story, “A Judgment,” working through the night to convert the “tremendous world I have in my head” into prose to release its pressure, he hopes, without “tearing me apart.” We think, with less unqualified admiration, perhaps, of the youthful Jack Kerouac who didn’t so much compose his memoirist novels as plunge head-on into them, typing compulsively through the night fueled by alcohol, Benzedrine, and mania to create what he called “spontaneous prose”: On the Road, which made him both famous and notorious overnight, was written on a single taped-together sheet of Chinese art paper forming a prodigious 150-foot roll through Kerouac’s manual typewriter. We think of Herman Melville’s similarly ecstatic bouts of inspiration in the composition of his masterwork Moby-Dick, and we think of D. H. Lawrence’s fluid, seemingly artless storytelling in such classics as “The Blind Man,” “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and The Escaped Cock. Without such rushes of feeling, private and untrammeled, there can’t be creativity. And yet, inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make “art”: for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design.

And here we arrive at a very different truth: that the writer, even the writer who will seem to readers and reviewers strikingly original, has probably based his or her prose style and “prose vision” upon significant predecessors. Consider the no-longer-young, unpublished poet Robert Frost studying with excruciating care the poems of Thomas Hardy, to the point at which the cadences of Hardy’s language, if not the noble bleakness of Hardy’s vision, would be so absorbed into Frost’s soul as to become indistinguishable from it; with the astonishing result, which no one including Frost might have foretold, that Frost would one day become as great a poet as his predecessor, and far more widely read in the United States than Hardy has ever been. Consider the young Flannery O’Connor, drafting her first novella, to be titled Wise Blood, and discovering Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, both of which made a profound, lasting impression upon her: Sophocles for the tragic dignity of Oedipus’s self-blinding, which O’Connor replicates in Wise Blood; West for his acerbic style, his cruel genius for caricature, and his young male Miss Lonelyhearts as a Christ-fanatic in denial of his faith very like O’Connor’s young Christ-fanatic Hazel Motes. O’Connor’s indebtedness to Nathanael West is pervasive through her fiction, and even a mature work like “Everything That Rises Must Converge” retains the Westian turn of phrase, sharp, revealing yet funny; a comic tone abruptly turned savage in the story’s concluding paragraphs.

Consider the young, exuberant Herman Melville so struck by his contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection of allegorical tales Mosses from an Old Manse that he revised his plans for Moby-Dick, shifting its comic-picaresque tone to a far graver, more elevated and tragic tone and creating in the process what is arguably the most powerful American novel of the nineteenth century, if not of the twentieth as well. Consider William Faulkner, a young writer in his mid-twenties casting about for a voice, a point of view, a vision, taking up and discarding such disparate models as Algernon Swinburne, Aldous Huxley, and even his contemporary Ernest Hemingway before discovering the more temperamentally kindred James Joyce, as well as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, masterpieces of consciously wrought prose that would have an incalculable influence upon Faulkner; as, in turn, Faulkner’s idiosyncratic poetic prose would have an incalculable influence upon writers as diverse as Gabriel García Márquez and Cormac McCarthy. And there is Ernest Hemingway, generally credited with having transformed American prose by way of his minimalist, rigorously unsentimental vision, and yet immensely influenced by such distinguished predecessors as Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, without whose refinement of American vernacular, particularly in such masterpieces as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Winesburg, Ohio, the famous Hemingway style might not have developed.

Sometimes, a writer of stylistic brilliance denies or is unaware of having been influenced by another writer, for as Virginia Woolf notes in her diary for 20 April 1935:

Do I instinctively keep my mind from analysing, which would impair its creativeness? I think there’s something in that. The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself.

Here is Virginia Woolf mulling over the phenomenon of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which she could not have failed to recognize not only as a work of astonishing genius but one that would alter the very concept of prose fiction irrevocably:

I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters . . . ; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom [T. S. Eliot] thinks this on a par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.

(Diary, 16 August 1922)

Woolf’s protestation, which descends even to class snobbery, surely arises from simple jealousy, if not envy, for the energy and inventiveness of Ulysses. Here Woolf senses herself confronted by literary genius beyond her own; however grand her ambition for transforming English fiction, she could not have failed to register how anemic and “impressionistic” her own style is compared to Joyce’s. Yet, in To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and most of all Between the Acts, Woolf will be clearly influenced by the revolutionary Joycean language so like music to the inner ear and elliptical in its communication of ephemeral states of mind in contrast to the nineteenth-century notion of “character.”

Often, “influence” is not immediately discernible but may be said to suffuse a younger writer’s sensibility, rather more in the way of character than in writerly terms. Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy could not be more different as artists, and as visionaries, yet Chekhov revered Tolstoy as he did no other writer:

His illness frightened me and kept me in a state of tension. I dread Tolstoy’s death. If he died, a large vacuum would be formed in my life. In the first place, I never loved any human being as much as I do him. I am an unbeliever, but of all faiths I regard his as the nearest to me and the one that suits me best. Second, when Tolstoy is part of literature, it is easy and agreeable to be a writer; even the knowledge that you have not accomplished and never will accomplish anything is not so terrible, for Tolstoy makes up for all of us. His activity justifies all the hopes and expectations that are pinned to letters . . .

(Letter to M. O. Menshikov, 28 January 1900)

Yet Chekhov continues in this letter to shrewdly criticize Tolstoy for the “too theological” Resurrection, only just published.

In the same way, though there is hardly a glimmering of the ever-subtle Jamesian sensibility in her prose fiction, Flannery O’Connor spoke of reading Henry James with enormous respect and attention. Ralph Ellison closely studied Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein yet would seem to have learned far more, as a craftsman of sentences, from William Faulkner. The lyric fabulist Eudora Welty admired Anton Chekhov, the supreme realist; Henry David Thoreau with the eye of a visual artist for the rich details of the natural world, and a precise prose style to communicate that vision, loved the mythopoetic Homer and such religious-mystic works as the Vedic Upanishad, the most nonspecific, philosophical, and nonnaturalistic of texts. Richard Wright may have believed himself influenced by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment while writing Native Son, but apart from the surface similarity of plot, there would seem to be little of the Russian’s deeper, profoundly religious consciousness in this startling novel of black American ghetto life and racialism. We can understand to a degree why Henry James was fascinated by Honoré Balzac, not least by Balzac’s great celebrity in the nineteenth century; yet Balzac as a stylist would seem to have had no effect upon James at all, and the melodrama of his characteristic plots is totally missing in James, where human relations of a subtle kind, and often merely interior revelations, constitute drama. (As when, in the quintessential James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” the middle-aged bachelor-protagonist finally realizes what most readers would have quickly discerned, that his is a life in which “nothing” has happened.) Yet, surprisingly, here is Henry James musing to himself in his notebook after having read a story by Sarah Orne Jewett, a minor contemporary of his whose best-known work is Tales of New England:

February 19, 1899

Struck an hour ago by pretty little germ of small thing given out in 4 or 5 lines of charming volume of Miss Jewett . . . A girl on a visit to new-found old-fashioned (spinster-gentleman) relation, ‘idealized her old cousin, I’ve no doubt; and her repression and rare words of approval, had a great fascination for a girl who had just been used to people who chattered and were upon most intimate terms with you directly and could forget you with equal ease.’ That is all—but they brushed me, as I read, with a sense of a little—a very tiny—subject. Something like this. I think I see it—must see it—as a young man—a young man who goes to see, for the first time, a new-found old-fashioned (spinster-gentleman) cousin. . . .

Here follows a dense, and intense, paragraph in which James rapidly limns an outline for a story (to be titled “Flickerbridge,” reprinted in The Better Sort) that clearly would not have been imagined, still less composed, without the inspiration of Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Tone of Time.” Henry James’s great notebooks, available in a single volume edited by his biographer Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, are highly recommended for young writers. This remarkable gathering of notes to himself by a writer of genius is filled with gems, revelations, and surprises, more obsessively detailed even than Virginia Woolf’s diary.

I have my head, thank God, full of visions. One has never too many—one has never enough. Ah, just to let one’s self go—at last: to surrender one’s self to what through all the long years one has (quite heroically, I think) hoped for and waited for—the mere potential, and relative, increase of quantity in the material act—act of application and production. One has prayed and hoped and waited, in a word, to be able to work more. And now, toward the end, it seems, within its limits, to have come. That is all I ask. Nothing else in the world. I bow down to Fate, equally in submission and in gratitude.

(14 February 1895)

The inspiration a writer takes from a predecessor is usually accidental, like the inspirations of our lives; those individuals met by chance who become integral to our destinies. We meet—we “fall in love”—we are transformed. (If not always permanently, memorably.) Obviously, a writer is most permeable to influence when he or she is young; adolescence is the fertile turbulent period, a time of luminous dreams and dream-visions when the examples of our elders loom large before us and would appear to be showing us pathways we, too, might take. As a young, already ambitious poet, Sylvia Plath, the perfectionist, typed out poems by such then-popular poets as Sara Teasdale, lamenting in her diary (1946), “What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this!” In her twenties, Plath was so determined to be a writer of saleable short stories that she coolly dissected the stories of the Irish Frank O’Connor: “I will imitate until I can feel I’m using what he can teach” (quoted in Ted Hughes, Introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, by Sylvia Plath, 1979). Plath learned from writers as different as Wallace Stevens and James Thurber; she analyzed stories published in Seventeen, The New Yorker, and The Ladies’ Home Journal; her diary is breathless with self-admonitions and pep talks:

First, pick your market: Ladies’ Home Journal or Discovery? Seventeen or Mlle? Then pick a topic. Then think.

Send it off to The Sat Eve Post: start at the top. Try McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping . . . before getting blue.

I want to hit The New Yorker in poetry and the Ladies’ Home Journal in stories, so I must study the magazines the way I did Seventeen.

I will slave and slave until I break into those slicks.

(quoted in Jacqueline Rose,
The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, p. 170)

In the similarly frank, though not nearly so obsessive memoir Self-Consciousness, John Updike speaks of his country-bred childhood in which he was “in love with not writing but with print, the straight lines and serifs of it, the industrial polish and transcendence of it”; and of his early admiration for works as various as Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, the prose of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Henry Green. (Joyce, Proust, and Green glimmer yet in Updike’s tessellated style, along with Vladimir Nabokov, a later discovery.) Yet in the much-anthologized, irresistible “A & P,” Updike’s most popular story, it’s the voice of American vernacular—Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson (“I Want to Know Why”), J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) as predecessors—fitted to distinctly Updikean themes of class and sexual attraction.

John Gardner, another ambitious young writer even in adolescence, spoke of typing out works of exemplary fiction in order to “feel” the prose rhythms of another’s language; Gardner was a particular admirer of Tolstoy, whose moralizing, didactic tone is echoed in Gardner’s fiction. In D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence reproduces much of the prose of works he admires (Poe’s “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick), commenting so minutely on the passages as to seem a kind of coauthor. This is an extraordinarily sympathetic, uncannily intimate criticism, in which Lawrence hotly discusses fictitious characters like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne as if they were, not mere constructs of language, but somehow real:

Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, genuinely; unless he fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is the nemesis of doubting man. She can’t help it.
And with Hester, after Ligeia, woman becomes a nemesis to man. She bolsters him up from the outside, she destroys him from the inside. And he dies hating her, as Dimmesdale did . . .
Woman is a strange and rather terrible phenomenon, to man. When the subconscious soul of woman recoils from its creative union with man, it becomes a destructive force. It exerts . . . an invisible destructive influence. The woman [like Ligeia] is sending out waves of silent destruction of the faltering spirit in men. . . . She doesn’t know it. She can’t even help it. But she does it. The devil is in her. . . .
A woman can use her sex in sheer malevolence and poison, while she is behaving as meek and good as gold.

(“Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter”)

Readers of Lawrence’s similarly passionate fiction will recognize his narrative voice in such passages, in which textual “analysis” is taken to an extreme of identification and empathy. For Lawrence the moralist didn’t believe that art is merely aesthetic or self-expressive, still less entertaining, but the primary vessel of truth:

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day. . . .
The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

(Introduction, “The Spirit of Place”)

D. H. Lawrence is as intransigent, and controversial, a figure in our own time as he was in 1917–1918, the time ...