Tales of the Craft

AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS: Edited by Thomas McCormack. 231 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

When a physician enters his office, his identity is immediately ratified by the tools of Hygeia that surround him. There are also the parchments on the wall to reassure him that "Dr." is part of his name. By contrast, a novelist may have a few of his books on the shelf (unlike the physician, the writer cannot bury his mistakes), but when he goes to work he is greeted by the gaping anonymity of blank paper. More than most working people, the professional writer of fiction must constantly create himself out of himself if he is to know who he is with any regularity.

This lonely situation is occasionally relieved when he is asked to talk publicly about his work. If a man is what he does--and that is the American view --how satisfyingly stimulating it is to talk about one's work. The perceptive vigor in much of what 14 novelists have to say for themselves in this book seems to bear out this notion.

Editor Thomas McCormack asked his contributors for a "craftsman's journal" telling how one of their books came to be written. The answers range widely in tone and intent. In discussing The Rector of Justin, Louis Auchincloss, a New York aristocrat and a practicing attorney, makes novel writing sound only slightly more difficult than drawing a will. He acknowledges the existence of problems and flounderings, but they all seem to succumb to his analytic brain. In addition, he appears to know just where he stands: "I am neither a satirist nor a cheerleader," he says with cool assurance. "I am strictly an observer." An honorable position honestly stated, it should quiet those critics who want an Auchincloss novel to be more than a well-crafted, highly polished portrait of the world he knows.

At the other extreme stands Norman Mailer, accounting for the pain and exertion that accompanied the writing and publishing of The Deer Park. His piece is another of those arresting homemade commercials for N.M., now no longer a product in search of market but a literary institution of proven value. Mailer attacks his subject with the energy of pent-up resentment and a confidence in the infallibility of his instincts.

A born brawler and natural teller of war stories. Mailer gives us the coordinates of the enemy--the timid, shortsighted publishers who at first shrank from the novel's excoriating, charged treatment of Hollywood life. He tells of his anxieties and the state of his abused liver--which, if the laws of metaphor may be suspended briefly, he has worn as proudly as a Purple Heart. And Mailer never lets the reader forget that he is an important and dedicated writer constantly bent on making his prose as penetrating as his visions.

Creative Excitement. Between the extremes of Auchincloss and Mailer, Afterwords offers a variety of literary experiences. Wright Morris is vague about the moment when something that is most often called inspiration strikes. "In whatever medium that is congenial to his talent," he writes of the artist, "he painlessly cracks through how things were, to how things are." Truman Capote is more succinct, though no more enlightening, when he records that "excitement--a variety of creative coma--overcame me."

Unable to induce a coma of any kind, Robert Crichton, author of The Secret of Santa Vittoria, outflanked his writing block with the aid of Dick and Jane. After months of feeding his wastepaper basket, Crichton sat down and began his book: "There is a little town on a hill called Santa Vittoria. It is in Italy. The people in the town grow grapes and make wine." He kept it up until he had a skeletal manuscript that could walk by itself.

William Gass, a philosophy professor at Purdue, demonstrates the difficulties involved in his experimental novel, Omensetter's Luck and asserts that it "was written to not have readers." Still, he is eloquent in describing what a few great books can achieve. "They measure the emptiness of their readers, for these books completely and absolutely are. Many times I have had the experience of holding in my hand a book that was more real, more alive, more sensitive than I was."

The sentiment is likely to cause confusion among the many who like their fiction with obvious factual referents and their facts falsified by melodrama. While Afterwords will not teach anyone how to write, it may prove valuable in indicating how to read.

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