Jens Bjørneboe, “Alene med papiret,” ©1970, 1996 by Pax Forlag A/S. Originally published 1961. In Vi Som Elsket Amerika, 1970. Samlede Essays: Kultur I,, p.174-80. English translation ©1997 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
The novel is the easiest and the most difficult of literary genres. It is so easy that practically every other person can bring off some kind of novel, given something to write about. To begin with, the form offers no resistance; anything goes, so long as it isn't boring; it demands only that you more or less know your mother tongue and can express yourself intelligibly. The novel is like a net with such a big mesh that it lets all the small fish through; only the bigger fish are left hanging fast in the problem which the novel form notoriously and quite mysteriously offers.
Verse, the classical sonnet, the terzina, the short story, the play all have their clear, easily visible formal demands—their metrical, material forms, as it were. It is easy to see if a verse limps in its rhythms, if a short story gets off course, or if a drama fails to fulfill the demands of the stage. The novel has no such direct rules which must be observed; you write away in your unsuspecting innocence; you know approximately what you want to say with the book, and you just write it down. In the worst cases things go well with you, and you write book after book; you learn to write for a certain public, and a routine comes into your work: you learn to “set up” a book; you know what is expected of you, and to the end of your days you can continue to write novels without being caught in the net. In this sense the novel form is easy.
But precisely this lack of outward formal demands is the novel's most fearsome difficulty. That is, instead of the strict internal prosody which the other genres have, the novel possesses its inner poetics, invisible to the naked eye. When you as a novelist begin to suspect this, you lose your virginity; your innocence and spontaneity are gone, and you no longer get anything for free. You know that the inner formal demands do exist, and that they are hard as iron against you, but you cannot say what they are. One of the reasons for this is that they seem to change from book to book. But when the first page of the first chapter is written, then the operative formal demands are given for the rest of the book. And there you sit.
Innocence is gone. Artlessness is gone. Enthusiasm and inspiration, these unconscious forces, are inhibited and suppressed right up until you have reinvented your cosmos, chosen your world, and have yourself decided what rules you will make into laws and follow. You have become conscious in your work, and only when the conception of your book is thought through and worked out, crystal clear as a theorem in geometry, can your unconscious get back to work. Only at this stage is one justified in speaking of art in full seriousness. Your work has now become so concrete, so difficult and so arduous that it can only be compared to hewing stone. At this stage it is child's play, a party game, to write a classical sonnet, or a one-act play, or a short story— compared with writing one page of pure narrative prose. Every word, every comma is a problem: Does it serve the whole, or does it work against the whole? It may be proper to write one sentence about a certain thing. Now and then it is proper to write two sentences about it. Sometimes it's important to be very brief, and sometimes you must be more longwinded. A play, a short story, a poem can be surveyed, but nobody on earth can survey a novel of three or perhaps four hundred closely-written pages. No one can be conscious of all those words and images and rhythms at once. A writer in this stage is the most wretched of all created beings—without help, without friends, without God and without nature. You don't have enough consciousness, you don't have enough direct inspiration. Your only friend is Death, your only liberator and helper. But you must live. Every word you write is literally, artistically, humanly and economically a fight for your existence and its justification.
I like to call this stage, this state, by a specific name: Alone with the paper. You sit face to face with the white, empty paper, and the blank sheets are your predators and your judges. Every word you write will be used against you. By the paper itself, by your own conscience, by your friends, by your spouse, by your publisher, and by your arbiters—the critics. Critics have a remarkable nose for when a writer finds himself in such a situation; even the most insignificant, untalented critics can smell it. In the outward sense your books—the books you write in this state—suffer from the situation; they too have lost their virginity and their innocence. They know more than is in them, more than they can manage to say; they are an exact external replica of your own painful, vulnerable amoeba-state. They are in progress—like you yourself. And from outside it is easy to see that something is missing, that something has gotten lost. But to see that something is in preparation, that is harder. The inner growth taking place both with you and with your books doesn't become visible until later —when the books have been written and lie there in long, long rows, so that the red line of blood in them becomes visible. Then one can see what happened in the years you sat alone with the paper, and were a bad husband and father, a detested item of expense to your publisher, and an incomprehensible plague to your critics.
Kaj Nielsen has said roughly the following about sculptors, but it goes for all artists: You begin with what you unconsciously have with you—then you lose everything, and you must go a long way to meet yourself again at the end. How long the way is I don't know, but I know that you must walk it, no matter what the cost, no matter how long it is. If you don't walk it, then you will remain a parasite on your youthful talent, and will write your first book, in different forms, over and over again. In this way you acquire a routine, a fixed public, you learn to foresee what is expected of you. You can keep your public and your publisher happy for many years, but you kill yourself, you betray whatever call you had been given.
As I said, this condition in which it is difficult to write is an author's second stage. Usually you have to deliver yourself of some four or five novels before you discover what you've let yourself in for. And here, alone with the paper, is where you as author get your true schooling. Now you have become an adult; now you are free in the whole terrible meaning of the word Freedom, for you don't yet know where the boundaries to that freedom lie, from a formal standpoint you don't yet understand the inner laws of the novel's art, and you don't yet know the boundaries of the world you have been set to rule over. Now you must order and oversee your cosmos; you must know what you think of it; you must yourself—utterly alone—bear responsibility for your opinion, and you must say it fully and completely. You must depict and describe your world, hiding nothing, adding nothing; you must say the whole and full truth about the world you see, and you must pronounce your own judgment about it. Every fiber of your nervous system you must give, if it costs you home, family, possessions, honor and life. If you don't do that, then you are one of God's failed creations, useless carrion by the wayside—the filthiest of all sinners because you are without greatness in your sin: You are one who has misused the Word, the tremendous gift of grace which was given to you so that you should be a blood witness.
This must be what the scriptures call the Sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin for which there is no forgiveness.
I have again written a novel. And the Lord have mercy on my soul.
If I could once reach the point of being able to write one single pure and honest and true sentence, twelve words on a piece of paper, twelve words which could witness for me and restore the innocence which has been lost! Twelve words which could say that yes, he has been a witness on the earth, and a drop of truth came out of him at last. It was tough going, and things looked dark for long time, but he ended up being of some use.
Well, it was hard to write this last novel. I wrote it in Ischia, outside Naples, last summer—in about six weeks. I say that it was “written” there, and so it was, literally speaking. But the six weeks had had about a year's preparation, during which I had thought of it almost day and night. Writing it down was merely the last desperate capitulation in the face of reality. At that point, in July, when I began the first chapter, the concept, the synopsis, had approached a size comparable to a small novel; the dialogue was written; the sequence of chapters, episodes, incidents was arranged, all digressions were anticipated and cut out again; the book's idea was focused on one single, firm and unambiguous point; at the same time the inner psychological action was coordinated with the outer, so that nothing external should happen in the book which did not at the same time advance the internal development. (On this point the novel is in fact just as strict as the drama, but readers and critics have forgotten this, and accept external events without inner significance for the sake of their entertainment value.) In any case I thought that the outward and inward action had become one and the same thing.
The material had been gathered in Oslo beginning on September 1 of the preceding year, and I spent the fall and part of the winter trying to order it, get hold of it, find a meaning and a form in it. But it was vast. The central subject was something as abstract as “juvenile crime,” but it had aspects which encompassed the whole of society and human life; everything I had seen and experienced in nine and thirty years could without difficulty go into it. In short, the material encompassed everything human which was accessible to me; it reflected the World in its totality. And you can't write a book about Everything. I had maybe a thousand pages, just of raw material; and done as an ordinary descriptive, classical novel it would have had to be at least a three-volume work. Some writers do that, but it isn't my line, because a book's pattern, the geometric, visible-invisible idea, founders under such masses of narration and description. These mammoth novels are in vogue, and an author's critics, public, publishers and acquaintances have an understandable respect for the large quantity of corporeal labor such a monument of a novel represents. I too have respect for it, but I don't think that is the yardstick which counts in literature.
With a couple kilos of paper in my luggage I then went abroad in February, and a rough draft of the book was written in Hamburg, Lüneburg, Berlin and Paris, while I simultaneously earned my daily bread by writing newspaper articles. It happened amid tears and outbreaks of sweat. The crisis arrived after a couple of months, in the delightful little medieval city of Lüneburg, where I finally decided to let the colossus remain unwritten. It was a wonderful evening and night which followed that decision; I drank a bottle of rum alone and went happily to sleep before a huge fire burning in the fireplace. The next morning—with my very first bottle of beer—the novel's form stood clear and distinct before me, written according to a wholly new concept. I simply drew one single thread out of the carefully planned, massive plot, and knew that this one thread contained everything which was in the thousand pages of material; it had lain with the other threads for a long time, and had sucked up all the power and flavor. After two or three days I was launched on a synopsis of the book itself. This was completed in Paris, and when I came to Ischia it was just a matter of getting down to the final execution.
It was an unusually hot summer in the south of Italy last year, masses of scirocco from Africa, and a generally satanic temperature, especially in August. If one wanted to work, there was only one possibility: a schedule, office hours. Never out of the house before three o'clock. On the other hand it wasn't possible to gain the use of reason before ten or eleven in the morning. That means that I wrote for four to five hours every day until the book was finished, interrupted only by four days' mad titanic labor to finish up a pile of articles with ensuing honoraria for my daily bread. To make the work more fun, God sent me a mild but persistent dysentery to amuse myself with for the duration. When the manuscript was finished—in good time to be printed for fall and the Christmas table, where it would lie along with pork ribs and travelogues—I carried it in my own hands to the post office, and used my last mental resources to pay the postage all the way up to a city called Oslo. Then I got drunk.
This happened toward the end of August last summer, and two months later, in the latter half of October, I could correct the proofs of the book in Oslo. The intervening time I spent in complete lethargy and obliviousness on a long car trip from Naples to Oslo, followed by a few days in the mountains.
Therewith had passed yet another holy, precious year of a writer's briefly allotted span. May the Lord have mercy on both the book and my soul, but meanwhile I've a lot to do just now; namely, I have plans to write a ... a ... a book.