Over the holidays, some friends asked me if I was working on anything, and I confessed that I had just completed a novel. I said I would most likely continue working on it for a while, tinker with it, run it through another draft. But essentially, to my mind it was finished. Maybe. One never knows. I might have sipped my mineral water and mentioned Paul Valéry’s statement that “a work of art is never finished, but abandoned.”
But yes, I said, I have been working on a novel.
“Oh?” came the dreaded next question, “What’s it about?”
I had no answer. What is any novel about? I think of Archibald MacLeish’s famous dictum: “A poem should not mean / But be.” And I remember Michael Ondaatje, when asked the dreaded question during an interview, replying that if he could say what the novel was about, he wouldn’t have had to write it. The question leaves writers speechless. And I think I know why.
In 1939, the British writer Christopher Isherwood published Goodbye to Berlin, the novel that was later made into the movie Cabaret. That year, Isherwood moved to the United States, settling in California. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath also came out in 1939, and Isherwood was asked to write a review of it for the Kenyon Review. In his article, Isherwood was hard on Steinbeck. After a brief nod to Steinbeck’s “powers of observation,” he wonders why The Grapes of Wrath is not “entirely satisfying as a work of art.” He then, in a somewhat priggish way, goes on to tell us why.
The problem, Isherwood says, is that The Grapes of Wrath is a “propaganda-novel.” In a great novel, Isherwood says, the “propaganda has been completely digested, it forms part of the latent content” of the work. What the novel is “about” is never stated. On the other hand, he writes, “the novelist of genius, by presenting the particular instance, indicates the general truth…but he does not attempt to state it.” Steinbeck states it: migrant farm workers in California in the 1930s, driven from their farms in Oklahoma by drought, were treated badly. “In an imperfect work of art,” says Isherwood, “the ‘propaganda is overt. It is stated, and therefore limited. The novelist becomes a schoolmaster.”
Isherwood was referring to the passages in Steinbeck’s novel that read more like literary journalism than fiction. Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin takes place in the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, when Hitler was steadily gaining power. Although the rise of Nazism is an ominous background menace, the terror has been woven into the fabric of the novel. Although a few banks close, Berlin is still a city in which “the cafés were putting up wooden platforms on the pavement and the ice-cream shops were opening, with their rainbow-wheels.” It’s as though naming the thing that terrifies you is considered bad form. “Fiction is fiction,” Isherwood writes. “Its truths are parallel to, but not identical with, the truths of the real world.”
Isherwood objected to the separation of fiction and nonfiction in Grapes of Wrath. He thought the two should be blended. He blended them in his own novels constantly. The main character of Goodbye to Berlin is a writer named Christopher Isherwood. Sally Bowles, the cabaret singer played by Liza Minnelli in the film version, is a sharp portrait of the writer Jean Ross, who shared a flat with Isherwood in Berlin and sang in nightclubs for extra cash. Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, published in 1964, about a middle-aged gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles university, was written while Isherwood was a middle-aged gay Englishman and a professor at Los Angeles State College.
In the Grapes of Wrath review, Isherwood notes that America was “extraordinarily rich” in Steinbeck’s “peculiar kind of talent.” I don’t think he meant it kindly. He might have been thinking of Melville, who inserted chapters on the whaling industry and the natural history of cetaceans in Moby-Dick. Or John Dos Passos, whose USA trilogy, published from 1930 to 1936, includes newspaper clippings, song lyrics, and biographies of Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford. I wonder what he would have made of creative nonfiction, in which writers inhabit the overlap between fiction and nonfiction, or autofiction, which is to fiction what Andy Warhol’s film of the Empire State Building is to cinema.
I think Isherwood’s experience of 1930s Berlin allowed him to foresee a similar dark future for the United States, in which the separation of fact and fiction opens a door to Fascism. When fact and fiction are separate entities, you can choose which one you want to believe in, and influence others into believing what you want them to believe. In an article that appeared last March in the New York Review of Books, about “the Trumpification of our politics,” Fintan O’Toole warned that “the relationship between reality and story has gone buck wild.” O’Toole was writing about Trump’s indictment for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, and how that simple tale became distorted and politicized. His concern, that “in a very Trumpian world…the relationship between real events and the narratives they generate has gone wild,” is exactly what happens in a dictatorship. A few years ago, at a writer’s conference, I asked a Nicaraguan writer why he wrote nonfiction. He replied that no one in Nicaragua read novels any more. “In my country,” he said, “if you want to read fiction you read the newspapers.”
When one of the characters in my novel, a writer, is asked what his novel is about, he is tempted to reply: “Why does a novel have to be about something? It’s about everything, it’s about nothing. It’s about life.” But he doesn’t say that, because he doesn’t want to sound like a prig. He mutters something evasive, like “It’s too early to tell.” Like me, he is uncomfortable saying what his novel is about. Mine takes place during the pandemic, but it isn’t about the pandemic. It has unhoused people in it, but it isn’t about homelessness. It’s a story in which people make up stories to help them negotiate the reality of their lives. A story about making up stories, about how we blend imagination and reality in order to make reality more understandable.
That could be an answer, I suppose. But I might be making it up in order to avoid the discomfort of not having an answer.
Loved this one. Now I have to lay hands on Goodbye to Berlin. Meanwhile, the sentence below. I think you should devote an entire post to unpacking this for the likes of me. . . . especially re: autofiction, which to me still remains awfully vague.
I wonder what he would have made of creative nonfiction, in which writers inhabit the overlap between fiction and nonfiction, or autofiction, which is to fiction what Andy Warhol’s film of the Empire State Building is to cinema.
Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard . . . maybe I'm missing something, but to me, they're writing old-fashioned autobiographical novels. Just using real names. I don't see that as justifying all the hoopla about a new genre: autofiction! Looks more like a marketing ploy to me. Clearly, I've grown jaundiced!