178
PARTISAN REVIEW
who have chosen to listen to what I've said have registered it, I've sort
of used up my audience, and I thought, well, I want another
audience. I want those people who think I'm difficult to read. And I
must confess, there was also something else. I think we can name
twenty American writers who each believe secretly and not so secretly
that he or she is the best American writer living. I'll confess I'm one
of those twenty. And I also know I can write in a number of styles–
that is one of my talents, at least. All proportions kept- I don't
pretend I'm one-hundredth as important in the cultural scheme of
things-but I wish a few critics could see that I may feel a legitimate
kinship to Picasso's need to keep changing his style. Preserving one's
artistic identity is not nearly so important
to
me as finding a new
attack on the elusive nature of reality. Primarily, one's style is only a
tool to use on a dig. Of course, with such an attitude, you have to be
able to mimic other writers. I've al ways been amused by people who
say, "Oh, well, Norman Mailer can't write a simple sentence." I'm
the guy who started by writing simple sentences. There's nothing
easier than
to
come full circle and write a book with prose even
simpler than
The Naked and the Dead.
fA:
I think it's the simplest prose you 've ever written.
NM:
There is real amusement in that, you know. I think of all those
constipated, stingy writers who stick to a simple style all their lives
and claim that's the only kind of prose worth doing. What nonsense.
It's harder to write in a good baroque style than good simple
English. For one thing, it takes a lot less time to write good and
simple. That doesn 't mean it's easy, and available to all, but it's not,
you know, all that hard. Besides, the material called for such prose.
The book has so much going on that its novelistic nature is rich
without language. There just wasn't space to take an in teresting
character, and, make the room in which he is sitting equally
interesting. In the past, I al ways liked long descriptions, but in this
book there's just enough to keep the background from blurring out.
A minimum of description is, of course, perfect for Utah. The
variation from town to town is not great, and the variation from
living room to living room is rarely striking. Even variations of
income are not that dramatic.
If
people have a great deal of money,
they usually don ' t show it in Utah. And if people are poor, they may
live in a shack, or a sleazy two-story apartment building, but there's a
beautiful mountain on the horizon. So I eschewed description where
I could. I wanted to get 3000 pages of material into half the space. I
wanted my story to
move.
