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"Ayn Rand: My Fiction-Writing Teacher," by Erika
Holzer. Madison Press, 2005, 300 pages.
The Craft of Ayn Rand
by Stephen Cox
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was her generation's largest
influence on libertarian thought. She was also a powerful novelist and a
king-sized American personality. During this, Rand's centennial year, many of her
friends and acquaintances have been communicating their memories of her. I think
it's especially fitting that Erika Holzer, herself a novelist ("Double Crossing,"
1983, and "Eye for an Eye," 1994), has contributed a memoir of Rand as a writing
teacher. To tell the truth, I am on record as one of the many people who urged
Holzer to do it.
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Cox is a professor of literature at UC-San Diego.
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It is very rare for an author to write at length about her literary methods,
and rarer still for an author to write at length about what she learned from a
contemporary. Someone once pointed out that writers tend to rebel against their
"parents," while revering their "grandparents." Thus, modernist writers scorned
the Victorians and did their best to resurrect the poets of the Enlightenment and
the baroque period. The Victorians were still around when the modernists were
growing up, and they were tired of listening to those overbearing parents; but
writers from earlier generations posed no competitive threat. They could be used
as examples for almost any precept. As for writers' explaining their
methods, forget it. Most prefer not to dispel the authorial mystique. Some, of
course, are simply incapable of explaining what they do. A person who is good at
creating plot and evoking character isn't necessarily any good at writing
expository prose. But a perusal of authors' private correspondence will show you
how good they can be at explaining how other authors went wrong, even while
disclaiming, in public, any interest in literary analysis. "Let the work speak
for itself," they say, cloaking with a half-truth their refusal to reveal trade
secrets. The half of the idea that's true is the notion that a work of art
can hardly be improved by someone's explanation of how it was created. Either
Monticello is a successful adaptation of Roman monumental architecture to
American domestic use, or it isn't. No dissertation about what Jefferson thought
he was doing when he decided to make a three-story plantation house look like a
one-story temple will change the aesthetic effect of his decision. The
half of the "let-the-work-speak-for-itself" idea that isn't true is the
implication that there's nothing to be learned by studying how an art object is
created. That's just silly. If you follow "America the Beautiful" through its
various revisions, you will see how much better it is to conclude the "Pilgrims"
stanza in this way — America, America!
God mend
thine every flaw.
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in
law
than in this way — America,
America!
God shed his grace on thee,
Till paths be wrought through wilds
of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee.
Studying the
revisions, you may also see the reason why version A is superior to version B. A
literary image needs to be visualizable. It's a lot easier to imagine the Deity
mending flaws and confirming souls than it is to imagine feet and knees working
their way through thickets of thoughts. Even when one accepts "knee" as a
probable symbol for prayer, it's still hard to see what's going on with these
symbols. The verbal bolts don't fit the verbal nuts. |
| Rand could account for
every word she used, and explain with great lucidity why she wanted to use it.
When she went wrong, she went wrong for a reason.
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The job of a literary craftsman is to find problems like this, and fix them.
Every good writer is such a craftsman; and occasionally — very occasionally
— a craftsman will let you visit her workshop. That's what Holzer
lets you do, and that's what Rand let her do. Rand was an eccentric writer in
many ways, but she was always a very thoughtful one. She could account for every
word she used, and explain with great lucidity why she wanted to use it. When she
went wrong, she went wrong for a reason. I like the epigraph that Holzer takes
from Sophocles: "The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach." It
mirrors the common sense that lies — often unnoticed by readers and
followers — at the basis of most of Rand's literary ideas and
practices. Always a lively writer, Rand was also an exceedingly lively
advice giver. Taking a look at Holzer's fledgling fiction, Rand saw a reference
to faces "explod[ing] in panic." Well, what would you say about that? Many people
would sense that there was something wrong but not be able to explain what it
was. Perhaps they would make a vague reference to "melodrama" or tell the
aspiring writer to "tone it down a little." Rand took a more instructive
approach: "Make your metaphors real, Erika. . . . A good way to put your
metaphors to the test is to try them out in front of a mirror." Holzer took her
mentor's advice, went to a mirror, and made her face look like it was
"exploding." Then she "exploded in laughter" (27). Now, that's good
teaching. Holzer came from a family of lawyers, and became one herself. A
story provocatively entitled "The Secret Room," written at the age of 12, did not
seem to presage a literary career. But an interest in Rand's ideas led to an
invitation to meet with her, and Holzer took along the tell-tale evidence of her
interest in a new career — her early, practice works in fiction writing.
Rand at the time was an enormous best-seller and the demanding leader of an
intellectual coterie. One would have expected her to turn Holzer away with some
remark about coming back when you've finished a book. Instead, she took the time
to teach her.
| Referring to her own
philosophy, Objectivism, she told her followers, "Don't censor yourself by
Objectivist morality." Her advice was seldom heeded, though it deserved to be.
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Much of her advice was about the psychological processes that are most closely
related to writing. She didn't make vague remarks about authors' "inspiration";
she gave specific insights into processes that people can actually control.
You've been told that you should "write what you know." You should write stories
about your profession, for example. Well, that might result in a lot of accurate
surface detail, she said, but there's something more important than surface
detail. Why don't you stop worrying about what you "know" and identify what makes
your "blood boil" (31)? Discover and exploit your real motivation. Rand
showed the same common sense in commenting on the famous "writer's block," from
which, as we know, she herself sometimes suffered severely. She didn't call for
20 sessions with a psychiatrist, or for a voyage to Tahiti. "More than likely,"
she said, you can't write because "you don't know all you need to know about a
given character or a piece of the action" (72). Find out more — but "don't
overdo it. It's a common mistake by the neophyte . . . to read everything ever
written on whatever relates to his subject" (77). What she advocated wasn't
"research" but imaginative meditations on the meanings, motivations, settings,
and implications of one's plot and characters. Writers' problems can be fixed by
writers' work — not by a research library, a psychiatrist's couch, or a
moralist's lectures. It's a remarkable fact that the modern libertarian
movement was largely initiated by creative writers, literary critics, and
essayists, by such people as Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, John Chamberlain,
Albert Jay Nock, and Rand herself. If you told any of those people that
literature is interesting principally because of its "ideas," particularly its
"political ideas," you would soon be having a very bad day. The best word you'd
hear would be "philistine." But that's exactly what a lot of libertarians are.
They are people whose moral concern with political ideas reduces their literary
responses to merely political ones. That's why they read so little real
literature. Conrad? Yeats? Eliot (either of the two)? Not interested. But the
latest work of pulp fiction, with some libertarian ideas thrown in? Hey, this is
a classic! Rand — often unfairly accused of writing propaganda novels
— shuddered at the thought that any of her ideological friends would write
such stuff. Propaganda fiction, she said, was "all facade and no structure," by
which she meant, no aesthetic structure, nothing to which one can respond on a
deeper level than, "I agree with this" (39–40). Holzer, taking up Rand's
theme, sensibly suggests that aspiring writers ask themselves, "Am I really
impassioned about my story or am I just hung up on spreading the Word and
enlightening the masses" (40). That's good advice. Rand went even farther.
Referring to her own philosophy, Objectivism, she told her followers, "Don't
censor yourself by Objectivist morality" (40). Her advice was seldom heeded,
though it deserved to be. But Holzer got the point. She got it so well
that she became a fine Randian teacher herself, as this book shows. It's all
summed up in one of her comments: "I have always believed that writers are made,
not born. That fiction writing, in particular, starts out as a craft. That if you
work at it hard enough and long enough, you can turn it into an art" (51).
Holzer isn't saying that anybody can be a good novelist. She is drawing attention
to an idea that goes back to Aristotle's theories, and beyond them, to Homer's
Odyssey: the idea that art is craftsmanship, or it is nothing. Her book shows the
joy that both she and Rand found in thinking through the problems of craft —
a rare pleasure, both in regard to its intensity and in regard to most people's
ignorance of the fact that it can ever be a pleasure at all. The good thing is
that you don't need to be a writer to feel that pleasure. All you need is some
aesthetic and intellectual curiosity. Holzer rounds out her book with
text and discussion of two fine short stories of her own, "Eyewitness," first
published in this journal in 1988, and "The House on Hester Street." The latter
story, which illustrates the transformation of real situations into imaginative
art, enables Holzer, explaining how it came to be, to evoke a salient picture of
her mother, whose life "may have been conventionally small-town, but who played
the role of co-conspirator to her daughter's romantic notion that life was —
could always be — a grand adventure" (235). Holzer's book shows that an
appreciation for artistic craft can be a tremendously important part of that
adventure.
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