The Hazards and Sources of Writing

Abstract

This address was delivered at the Hopwood Awards ceremonies at the University of Michigan, April 1984. It was first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 24 (Summer 1985). It was later reprinted in Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures. Nicholas Delbanco, ed. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1990. Mailer reprinted a truncated version of the essay in The Spooky Art (2003) 67-73. Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. There's nothing more boring than a speaker who starts to talk about a writing award and quickly reveals that he knows nothing about it. But it so happens that the Hopwood Awards really do have a well-deserved fame because they were the first significant college literary awards in the country. In the years when I went to Harvard, from 1939 to 1943, we always used to hear about them and wish we had awards of that sort at Harvard, at least those of us who were certain we were going to be writers. In 1946, the year I got out of the Army, I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and in the same brownstone, which had only four apartments in it, lived Arthur Miller. I soon learned from his and my friend Norman Rosten that Miller had won a Hopwood Award. That was the first thing I knew about him. He had a play on Broadway that year called All My Sons and that was the year he was writing Death of a Salesman and I was writing The Naked and the Dead. We used to meet occasionally in the hall when we went down to get our mail. Those days Miller was a shy man and I was fairly shy myself and we would just mutter a few words to each other and try to be pleasant and then go our separate ways. I think I can speak with authority about Miller's reaction, I know I can about my own: each of us would walk away and say to himself, "That other guy, he ain't going to amount to nothin." It's an anecdote about another writer that introduces my talk today. Kurt Vonnegut and I are friendly with one another, but wary. There was a period when we used to go out together a great deal because our wives liked each other and Kurt and I would sit there like bookends. We would be terribly careful with one another; we both knew the huge cost of a literary feud so we certainly didn't want to argue. On the other hand neither of us would be caught dead saying to the other, "Gee, I liked your last book" and then be met with a silence because the party of the second part could not reciprocate. So we would talk about anything else, we would talk about Las Vegas or the Galapagos Islands. We only had one literary conversation and that was one night in New York. Kurt looked up and sighed, "Well, I finished my novel today and it like to killed me." When Kurt is feeling heartfelt he speaks in an old Indiana accent which I will do my best to reproduce. His wife said, "Oh Kurt, you always say that whenever you finish a book" and he replied, "Well, whenever I finish a book I do say it and it is always true and it gets more true and this last one like to killed me more than any." Before I talk about the ways in which books kill you I want to tell you one final story that has obsessed me for a long time. I have pondered this story for years and just the other day while thinking about it I came up with a new idea. So I'll tell you the story the way I used to tell it and only then will add the new thought. The story is that the distinguished painter Robert Rauschenberg was once given a gift of a pastel from Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg, with de Kooning's permission, erased the pastel and then signed it Pastel by de Kooning Erased by Robert Rauschenberg and then he sold it. To be crude about it, that story fried one half of my mind because I thought, there's something profound here but I can't get ahold of it. And then the light came to me. I said, "Of course, what Rauschenberg was saying is that the artist has the same right to print money as the financier. Money is nothing but authority imprinted upon emptiness" and laid the story to rest and was totally content until the other day when I thought, wait a minute, maybe the person who bought the pastel was neither a gambler nor even someone who is so aware of chic in painting that he knew he would make a profit from it. …