The Literary Novel as an Experimental Form

I knew in high school that I was going to be some sort of an artist. I had a call.

I didn't know whether I'd be a musician, a painter, or a writer. But I knew I'd be an artist.

In 1957, I saw that I would never be the musician Charlie Parker was, or the painter Jackson Pollock was, and if I couldn't be that good, why do it at all?

But Jack Kerouac made me feel that I could be a writer.

He didn't make it look easy. But he made it look possible.

I could roam around having adventures and write about them.

I didn't start writing for another 14 years. But I thought of myself as a novelist-in-training, I read books critically, and I wrote long letters to my friends.

Once I started writing I did not look back.

To me, a writer was a novelist.

There were newspaper writers, like Sydney J. Harris, or magazine writers, like James Thurber, but a real writer was a novelist. Like Ernest Hemingway.

Mind you, after he had written three major novels Hemingway began combining fiction and nonfiction in interesting ways, in books like Green Hills of Africa, the Gulf Stream fishing letters in Esquire, Death in the Afternoon, and the posthumous A Moveable Feast.

If you don't think that book was fiction, ask the people in it.

Novels change people's perceptions of the world they live in and how it works. Changed perceptions change people's worldviews. Different worldviews lead to different behaviors. A man who has had a conversion experience is a changed person. Think of a drunk who hits bottom and sobers up.

The business of business is culture. Manipulating the culture. Managing the zeitgeist.

That's the business of the writer, too. Opposing principalities and powers, the forces of darkness, spiritual wickedness in high places.

Business men want people to care more about material possessions than human values, social justice, or respect for nature. The novelist is a voice for those things. Against greed, bullying, and hypocrisy.

The choices we make are moral choices.

I think of how liberating it was for me to read books like Tropic of Cancer, Journey to the End of the Night, Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Say you dedicated your life to writing a book like that. And succeeded. Then what would you do.

James Jones said that writing without publishing was like chewing without swallowing. You would try to publish it. Then's when you find out the awful truth.

It used to be that if you didn't have an agent, an editor wouldn't read your work, and if you didn't have a track record, an agent wouldn't accept you as a client. Now, it's worse. If you are trying to write literary novels.

American commercial publishing is not interested in literature.

New writers do break in. How does that happen?

A published writer recommends you to an editor or agent or you meet an editor or agent at a writers conference you pay to attend.

Adam Smith said whenever two business men meet they engage in a conspiracy against the public. Conferences are a meat market, like a job fair. People networking with other people, trying to figure out how to get a piece of someone else's change.

This creates bad vibes for a literary novelist, who should be at home, thinking about art.

Tolstoy said, "Vous-voulez écrire? Eh, bien--écrivez, donc. Écrivez."

"You want to write? Very well, then-write."

Perhaps after you commit suicide your mother will badger Walker Percy into reading your unpublished manuscript, as John Gregory Toole's mother badgered Walker Percy into reading A Confederacy of Dunces.

Or perhaps after you have gone unpublished for 16 years, a friend will name you the century's most underrated writer, as Philip Larkin did for Barbara Pym, reviving her career.

Still, they won't want your literary novel.

What do they want? Nonfiction. Or genre fiction.

Nonfiction is just facts, and genre fiction is formula.

No, Phil Dick didn't write formula science fiction, Charles Willeford didn't write formula mysteries, and J. P. S. Brown didn't write formula westerns.

But try to get a book like Ubik, The Shark-Infested Custard, or The Outfit published now.

I don't think even Gilbert Sorrentino could get Mulligan Stew published now.

Charles Bukowski only published Pulp because his publisher was John Martin, Black Sparrow Press.

I bought a reference book listing New York editors, publishers, and literary agents once. The agents had a category called "Areas Not Interested in Agenting." The three I remember that applied to me were poetry, autobiographical fiction, anecdotes and ravings.

I wrote all three.

Often in the same book.

Well, I had precedents. Books which inspired me.

John Dos Passos's U. S. A. James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, and the story collection containing "Through the Panama."

Not to mention Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy.

If you write these books they are not going to be published. What to do? Send them to little magazines. Publish them yourself. As pamphlets.

My first book, Screed, was a collection of related pamphlets that formed a novel.

I published Screed in 1981. I published Forty in 1987. That's seven years.

In seven years I published eight books. Screed, Common Sense, Full Plate, Blue Darter, Lost Writings, Evil Genius, Open Book, Forty.

What was Forty? Forty was my 40th book.

Forty contained fiction, poetry, blurbs for Screed, Evil Genius, and Open Book, letters to the editor, replies to rejection slips. Crank letters. I called what I was doing crank-lettres, by analogy with belles-lettres.

Then what happened?

I didn't have another book-length book published until 2005.

I went 17 years between Forty and Bukowski Never Did This, my new book.

I kept writing, like Barbara Pym. She only went 16 years.

I wrote, I sent them out, I wrote about what happened to them, and how what happened made me feel.

I called this the paranoia-critical method, after Salvador Dali's Autobiography of a Genius.