The Real Secret of Santa Vittoria

The only thing I ever wanted to accomplish in life was to write a good novel. I wanted this so much that I came to think of myself as a novelist, even though I had never written one. Despite this little failing. I was quite convinced that were I to die right then, my obituary would read "Crichton, Novelist, Writes Last Chapter," because everyone would know how much it meant to me. And it would only be fair; I had the novels in my head. All that was lacking was the technical formality of transferring them to paper.

This state of affairs went on until I was past 30. When no novel had appeared, in order to account for the void and save my self-respect, I was driven to conclude that I was a classic example of the pitfalls of Grub Street. I was a free-lance magazine writer then, living from one assignment to the next, always one advance behind, and I saw myself as a victim of the literary sharecropper system, as hopelessly snared in my web of circumstances as those wretched cotton farmers James Agee described in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The matter was out of my hands. I was a victim and I was quite happy that way until the spring of 1962, when a magazine publisher named Henry Steeger came back from a lunch he had had with some Italian winegrowers and told me the story of a small Italian hill town where the people had hidden 1,000,000 bottles of wine from the Germans, and of how they had managed to keep their secret.

"Someone should write that," Mr. Steeger said. "It has the quality of legend and yet it happened in our own time."

I could recognize that much. I was astonished, in fact, that this fact plum of a story, swelling with possibilities, was still unplucked. By this time, however, I had so perfected my defenses to repel anything that even hinted at the potential of becoming a novel that I was able to tell myself that it actually wasn't a very good story at all. I increasingly found it more desirable to apologize for a book I hadn't written (but which just might be great) than to apologize for one I had written.

Camus wrote that ultimately all men are prey to their truths, even in the act of denying them, and Santa Vittoria become one of mine. Even while denying it, I knew the story of this town was the basis for a big grab bag of a novel, a Bildungsroman, in which, because of the sprawling framework of the story, almost anything goes and anything works. Against my will, the story preyed upon me, fermenting in my doughy spirit, fizzing there like a cake of yeast in a winevat.

I woke one morning in March—there was snow and thunder, very rare and very strange—with the line "In dreams begin responsibilities" running through my mind. It is a line from Yeats (borrowed from some obscure Indian poet, I have since found out) that I used to write in all my notebooks when I was in college. It is a line that has been the subject of profound scrutiny, and some subtle interpretations have resulted from it. But on this morning, the line was very clear to me: If you dream about something all the time, you have a responsibility to do something about it. I apologize to William Butler Yeats. I began going around New York that morning trying to raise enough money to take me to Italy. I felt the least I could do was look at this place that had become my responsibility. When I accumulated $800 beyond the round-trip air fare, I set out for Santa Vittoria.

The trip to Italy, which in any terms other than those of a writer would have to be classed as a continuous disaster, I include here because it illustrates something important about the craft; namely, anything that happens to a writer can, with good fortune, be turned into something of value. In a matter of weeks, I was run down by a car in Rome, robbed in a country inn and managed to make a profound fool of myself in Santa Vittoria; and each event turned out to be more fortunate than the one before it.

The car incident is a good example. I was in a pedestrian crosswalk that guaranteed me the right of way, when the car bore down on me. I, an American and a believer in the sanctity of signs, couldn't believe he was going to keep on coming. He couldn't believe I wasn't going to jump out of the way. He must have been a good driver, because he drove only halfway over my body before managing to stop. I had my first intimation of the way things were going to go when a man helped me out from under the car.

"You're very lucky," he said. "You didn't dent the fender."

My last intimation, or my first revelation of truth, came in the police station. I was talking about justice and my rights and I could see that they felt I was not well balanced. I didn't get the idea, they assured me. The car was bigger and faster and stronger than I and therefore the car had the right of way. Couldn't I see that much?

So, on only my second day in Italy, I was privileged to begin to understand the basic fact of Italian life, which is that power, the balance of it, the having and not having it, is the key to all life. Survival depends on a respect for it. The possession or the lack of it determines the course of a man's existence. Success depends on how well you learn to manipulate it. I was never able to get anyone in Italy to be sympathetic about being run down in a safety zone. They would listen to the story and they would nod and then they would always say: "Yes, but why didn't you jump out of the way?"

These people, then, who pass themselves off to the world and to themselves as romantics, are the most realistic of people. Two broken fingers and the knees gone from the pants of my one good suit were a small price to pay for such knowledge. I might have spent months in Italy before learning what I did.

The robbery was a very Italian kind of crime. I was headed north to Santa Vittoria, taking all the back roads available so I would have a feel of the country before getting there, and I took a room with a terrace on the second floor of a country inn. Few Italians would have taken that room. It faced away from the inn and not in toward the courtyard. Italians like to be with people. Americans, who have allowed the north-European psyche to inflict itself upon their national soul, prefer privacy. Even if he took the room, no Italian would have then opened the window onto the terrace. They don't trust the night air and what might come in with it. Americans like to clean the portals of the mind with fresh night air and they like to be trusting and believe in the possibilities for humankind to be good.

It must have looked like a ritual scene from some old Italian novella. The thief came up the stone wall at night and onto the terrace and into the room and through my pockets. I should still be angry with him, but the thief did one marvelous thing; he left me half of my money. I picture him working swiftly and dangerously in the dark to leave me my share and I warm to him. He was a humanist and a man generous to strangers, which is as good a definition of a gentleman as any. So another factor: Life is a matter of power tempered by an incorruptible humanity, which in itself is a kind of power. I was a more tolerant man after that and I was also one long step down toward poverty and my ultimate entry into the Italian lower depths, where few outsiders are allowed to go.

In Santa Vittoria, on my first day, I was invited to a luncheon at the winery held for some American wine buyers and I proceeded first to praise and then to rave about one particular wine, which I assured those present made all the rest taste like scented toilet water. Certainly someone should have warned me that the wine I was praising was a comparison wine, designed to make the local wines taste good by comparison. It was suggested by a company official after the lunch that I didn't seem to be the right man to tell the story of the great thing they had done in Santa Vittoria. I left the town the same day I arrived in it.

And this was fortunate, too. Fearful of attempting a novel, I had determined to write a nonfiction book; but now I had no alternative. I also thought that I would be able to live off the generosity of the people I was writing about, and now I was condemned to live off the land. I headed south, down the spine of the Apennines, in search of my own Santa Vittoria. In all, I stayed in 20 hill towns, each one separate in my mind and yet all of them finally merging into one conglomerate city, richer than the sum of its parts. I learned some things of value along the way.

In the beginning, I had the belief that people would resent my intrusion and I sat at solitary tables in the café in the piazza and, like Proust at a party, "j'observe, j'observe." It took some time to learn that my discretion only bred suspicion. No one told me anything honest. At last, I fell back on the tactic of simple honesty. On arriving in a new town, I learned to approach the first person who seemed to command respect and tell him exactly what I was doing in his town. I was an American, a writer. I was planning a book on just such a town as this one, but not this one, and I wanted to know everything good and everything bad about life in a hill town that anyone wanted to tell me. Very often, the man would take me to the mayor, who would tell me everything good about the town, and then the people would come and tell me everything bad about it.

Every day I grew poorer, and this was good, since it put me into the hands and then the homes of people I couldn't have met otherwise. Toward the end of my stay, I was reduced to knocking on strangers' doors and asking if they would like to sell me a plate of peas and rice or some soup and bread and wine for 100 lire. They were always happy to do it. Someone could always go without a meal, but where could they get an extra 100 lire? I learned a great many things with my soup.

The trouble with poverty as a tactic is that you can't fake it. I don't think you can plan to be poor and in this way get to meet what are always referred to as the people. I tried it afterward in Appalachia and in the coal fields of Scotland and it was no good. Peasants smell the poverty in you. When you pay the 100 lire, you have to feel the sweat on your forehead as you count the money out. And you have to do sneaky little things to save little sums of money that peasants recognize but which the bourgeois never even notice.

There is little to do in hill towns after dark and because of it, the loneliness, I developed a system of information gathering that has proved invaluable to me since. From a simple need to communicate, with no specific purpose in mind, I began to write long, rambling letters home, putting down everything that interested me or puzzled me during the day. Months later, when I sat down to start on the first draft of Santa Vittoria, it was the letters that turned out to be filled with the kind of information I needed. My notes were mostly useless.

The reason for this, I think, is that a letter is an inclusive thing. Notes tend to be selective and, therefore, exclusive. When a person is taking notes, he generally has some idea of what he is looking for. The haphazard, the irrelevant, the unexpected, since they don't fit the pattern, are ignored or not even seen. I suppose it is possible to do as well by keeping a diary as writing a letter, but most people tend to cheat in diaries. As time passes, entries tend to become more terse and cryptic; the diary becomes filled with one-line notations the writer is sure he will be able to re-create later, with all the emotion and sounds and smells. In a letter, since it is going to someone else, the effort to re-create has to be made right then, if the letter is going to make any sense at all. It's more interesting to write to someone other than oneself, anyway. The only people who write good diaries are people who know their logs will be part of history and egoists who hope theirs will be.

When I returned from Italy, I attempted to organize my notes, because this was what I felt writers did. The notes were so meager and pointless, however, that I began making notes from the letters. These I put in a large shoe box, because I couldn't think of any sensible way to file them. It was sloppy and disorganized and yet the system had an unexpected virtue to it. In order to find out something, I was compelled to flip through as many as 100 notes; and while doing this, I was reminded of all kinds of facets of Italian life that I wouldn't have remembered if I had been able to go to the source at once. Some of this haphazard extraneous information was bound to seep into the scene I was working on and the scene would be a little richer for it. In time, I came to think of the shoe box as my compost pile, a dung heap for potential fertility, and the leaping from note (continued on page 192) Santa Vittoria (continued form page 128) to note as an act of cross-fertilization. Marianne Moore once wrote something close to "Thank God for the privilege of disorganized things"; and in this case, she is right.

I kept making notes, because I was afraid to actually start the book. For the same reason, to avoid starting, I began to read a great deal about Italy, hill towns, wine making, despite the fact that I had been led to believe that it wasn't a good idea for a novelist to read too much about the subject he would be writing about. The idea was that the reading tended to rob the writer of his individuality and that he would be exposed to material similar to his own and would not want to use it, although he might actually handle it in quite a different fashion. There is also always the danger of reading something so superlative that the writer will be smothered by it. Who wants to write a novel about the War of 1812 after reading War and Peace? In my case, while admittedly stalling, the reading turned out to be enormously rewarding. Everything seemed to trigger some kind of creative response in me. It didn't matter very much what the subject was or whether the writing was good or bad; everything I read had the potential to give birth to an idea, often one that had no relationship to the reading at all. Some African tribes believe that energy creates energy, and it got this way with my reading; every response seemed to create a climate for a heightened response. One of what I will boldly call the more effective scenes in Santa Vittoria, a competitive dance in a wine press, was suggested to me by a series of letters form an Edwardian schoolteacher to her class while on vacation in Sicily. She thought the wine pressers were ugly, because they looked like hairy pagan goats. One incident, which plays an important part in the book, occurred to me while leading the financial statement of a modern wine company. When the barometer of the creative nature is set for a spell of writing, evidently anything can excite it; and in my experience, and to my surprise, reading had the strongest potential of all.

There finally came a time when I could no longer find a believable excuse not to begin. I even announced the fact to my family and friends. "Tomorrow, I begin." I made it easy on myself. I vowed I would write exactly one page and write just one page each day for a week. This shouldn't frighten anyone and at the end of the week, I would be like a colt let out to his first pasture.

But I couldn't do it. All day I sat at my desk and I wrote one word. If. Toward evening, I wrote the word in pencil, so that it covered the entire page. The next day, I worte, "So now I begin," and never got further than that. The day after that, I tried the reliable weather-and-date technique. "On a cold blustery morning in May 1943, on the sunless eastern slopes of the Apennines, spring was coming hard...."

After that, I quit. I rented an office away from home, not to inspire creativity but to hide from those who could see me doing nothing for hours on end. I gave up the idea of one page; this goal seemed insurmountable. I thought that if I could get one good opening sentence, the keynote, and get it down right, the rest of the book would unravel itself form there. I was very conscious of the fact that I was like the man in Camus' The Plague who spends 30 years on his opening sentence, honing it, pruning it, polishing it; but it didn't matter. Who was to say if he had gotten his sentence right the rest of his book wouldn't have inevitably followed? It was all I had to hang on to.

"How did it go today?" my wife would ask.

"It's coming; it's coming," followed by several very strong drinks.

One afternoon. I realized I was never going to write the sentence; and once I understood that, I arrived at the idea of disowning art. I had become so self-conscious about style and craft that I had become incapable of reading or hearing words any longer. When I said them, they sounded strange; and when I put them down on paper, they looked strange. I recall writing "This book begins" and then stopping because the word "book" looked wrong. What kind of word was book? An indefinite word. It could be a checkbook or the Bible. Volume was better. Journal even better. "This journal begins...." Too pompous. But I couldn't go back to book. Novel, that was the real, precise word I wanted. But what kind of novel? The reader had a right to know.

In this way, the day went. It was possible to fill a wastebasket in a day and never write over four different words. I always used a clean, fresh sheet for a clean, fresh start. With every empty sheet there was hope, and failure. On this afternoon, however, I began to write the story of Santa Vittoria in the form and style of a Dick and Jane first reader.

"There is a little town on a hill called Santa Vittoria. It is in Italy. The people in the town grow grapes and make wine. A great thing took place in the town. One day, not too long ago...."

It astonishes me now that I was able to keep this up for several weeks. Because the words didn't count, the words poured out. And I was happy about the sound of my typewriter, because I had grown embarrassed by the silence from my cubicle.

"What's he do?"

"He's a writer."

"Oh. What's he write?"

"I don't know. I never heard him write."

I heard that. Now the pages were piling up and I felt good. It was silly, considering the manuscript was one that I would have shot someone before allowing him to see it; and yet the feeling was real. In the end, I had several hundred pages filed with one-syllable words; and while I pretended to disown the pile of paper, it meant a great deal to me. It was no good, but at last I had something that was no good. All kinds of things were missing, but now they were missing from something. I was conscious that through Dick and Jane I had outflanked art.

A week later, I cut the manuscript down to 125 pages and, in the process, something strange happened to it. In the starkness of its naked simplicity, the book became mysterious in tone. In the cutting, the manuscript had become fragmented into a series of pared-to-the-bone pastiches and I was faced with the realization that somehow, inadvertently, I seemed to have written A New Novel. I had the wild thought that Alain Robbe-Grillet would discover me. The book would be published by Grove Press and reviewed by The New York Review of Books, perhaps—who could tell how far it might go—by Susan Sontag, favorably, of course, thereby immortalizing me to my peer group; and then the thought passed. I was a fraud and what could be more fraudulent among the grapes and stones and lives of Santa Vittoria than a novel Alain Robbe-Grillet could approve of? Marienbad, oui, Santa Vittoria, non.

I had the bones of a book. The problem now was to flesh out the skeleton. I was still afraid to begin, but not as much as before. The first act of creation is the terrifying thing; and once this is done, it now seems to me, no matter how badly, something menacing has been overcome. I wasn't swimming yet, but I was in the water.

I began by putting place in the book. I wanted a sense of the town to permeate it, because place plays such an important part in the book. What happened could only happen in an isolated hill town. Whenever there was a change of scene, I began to describe in detail what the new place would look like, whether it was a room, the piazza, the entire town itself. In this process of supplying place, the absence of people made itself evident. Almost in spite of myself, I began to people the places; and in this way, the book began to get itself written.

I have never had any idea about character. It is one reason I don't think I could teach literature. I seem to see only what people do. I don't recognize an evil man until he does something evil, and then I'm not sure that he meant it to be evil. The same goes for good people. There is no good or evil in itself, as Camus has pointed out, but only the consequences of acts. All things are in all people at all times. So I couldn't plot out a character or even conceive of one, they simply happen, and from day to day, capable of a ridiculous, mean action one day and something generous the very next.

"The character lacks unity." What nonsense. "He wouldn't have done that." What nonsense. He did it. Everyone is ultimately capable of almost everything, which is, after all, the fascination and horror of life.

In his book Individuals, P.F. Strawson has written that "the primary conceptual scheme must be one that puts people in the world. A conceptual scheme which puts a world in each person must be, at least, a secondary product."

This idea is one of the few dogmas about writing that I am conscious of holding. I didn't want my characters to stand for anything, to explain, to symbolize, to account for anything, but simply, in the words of Denis Donoghue when describing what a novel should be, possessed of life to a degree of irrelevance ... all carelessness and luck, who, when given their first push, would leap on their way.

My final concern was style, although I didn't know it then. I am ashamed to admit that I thought of style as a manerism, the decor of a book. I learned later that this is a technique, an artifice, not a style. The best description of style I have ever read and one of the most valuable lines about writing is by the same Donoghue, who says: Style is the right feeling animating the voice.

I had no voice. I didn't know who was telling the story and why he was telling it. If I chose a Santa Vittorian, I would be compelled to accept the limitations of a peasant's vision of life. I could choose to be the author as God, omniscient, willful, intolerant, irrational, as gods tend to be; but I knew I didn't function well as God. It's not my type. One day, I thought of an Italian writing a novel about life in Conway, Arkansas, and I almost fell apart. The opportunities for error were endless. As a result, my decision was made for me. I was forced into what might be called a literary cop-out, but which became inevitable. To account for my ignorance, I invented as narrator an Italian-American airman, a deserter, who parachutes from his plane after a pointless bombing of a nearby hill town and who has remained in Santa Vittoria after the War because of his fear of returning and a misguided sense of shame about what he did. He hopes that by telling this story, he can earn some money; and by explaining why he deserted in one part of the book, in exchange for telling the greater story, perhaps redeem himself.

Was it the proper voice? Does it meet Donoghue's criteria? Probably not. In the long haul, the narrator is not truly a voice but a device and not a character (he mercifully almost never appears in the book) but a sound. The worst part of it for me was that I didn't commit the errors that I was certain I would. So I didn't need Robert Abruzzi after all; but I didn't know it then and that was important. He served me well, but let him know this. If he came back to Santa Vittoria again, I would have him stood up against a wall and put to death.

When I had written 150 pages through the eyes of Abruzzi, I sent what I had done to my publisher, Simon & Schuster, in the hope of getting an advance. Unfinished manuscripts tend to seem more promising to editors, I was told. Also, if the publisher gives an advance, he now has a vested interest in the final product. An advance tends to blind an editor's judgement of a manuscript, since the house is already committed. Finally, the advance is supposed to bolster the unsure writer's confidence.

"They really want me. They believe in me."

None of it worked this way for me. I did nothing until I got the advance; and when I did, it had the effect of stopping me altogether. Now there was no way out. I had taken the money and I was the one who was committed. I had a contract. They could take me to court if I didn't produce a novel. But perhaps it was all to the best. I determined not to spend the money, but I did; and it was finally my fear of having to pay the money back, which grew stronger than my fear of failure, that led me to finish the book. It was this version the publisher brought.

I felt they were wrong to buy it. I knew the book was all wrong. I had the place I wanted in the book and the people and the story, but each of these elements stood in its own place, one immovable chunk of writing hard by another. The novel seemed to me like a freshly blasted quarry with no one to pick up the pieces. By chance. I saw an editor's note about the book that said: "This is really very good, you know," and I felt the note was a plant, a kind of editor's water wings designed to buoy me up for the sea of revisions ahead.

They asked for very few revisions, and this I took as a very bad sign. If they were really interested in the book, they would want all kinds of changes. I figured they had given up on the book but would go ahead and print it in the hope of recovering their advance. They gave me two weeks to make the revisions we agreed to. One of them was on page one, a four-letter word that wasn't called for but which I had included to show right off that I wasn't afraid to use four-letter words. I scratched the word out and the page looked messy and so I retyped it and it came out a line short, so I retyped the second page and it came out wrong, so I went on to the third page. I began cutting some paragraphs and then an entire scene and adding dialog and changing dialog and somewhere along the way that morning a new character entered the story. I had meant to work until lunch; but when I stopped, I was surprised to find that it was five O'clock in the afternoon and I had written 42 pages. I had no sensation of having worked hard. I intended to stop the next day, but I didn't. I wrote 85 pages that day, much of it a complete reworking, and i knew that evening I was going to do the whole book. There was no question that it was exciting to me and that I knew I was doing something good, because for no reason I could explain, the immovable blocks were beginning to join one another in a way I had never been able to make them do.

The word I have found for the experience is immersion. It is something I intend to work to find again. Previously, I had worked on the book and at the book, but all at once I was immersed in the book. It seemed to be carrying me instead of me pushing it. It was a very rare sensation. The book was much more real than anything else in my life then. As I went into the second week. I had the sensation of being drawn very fine, as if I could thread myself through a needle. I seemed to have my own sense of the way things were, while before I had always been listening over my shoulder to see if I could get a lead on the way things should go. I was out of life, under water, immersed.

I was, of course, making mistakes, but they were my own mistakes; and because of this, they at least had the virtue of a certain consistency about them. I told no one what I was doing, for fear of breaking the spell. Physically, I must have shown it. In three and a half weeks' immersion. I lost 20 pounds. One night, my wife said. "Bob, you seem so small"; but the only physical effect I experienced was the phenomenon of the missing drinks. In the evening, I would pour myself a drink; and when I looked for it, it would be empty. Evidently. I was masking fatigue with alcohol and I must have drunk a great deal to sustain myself, but I had no conscious desire to do this and never got drunk. At the end of 23 days. I finished a manuscript that, when published, occupied 447 reasonably tightly printed pages. The following day, while walking down Madison Avenue, I collapsed in the street. It was, I tried to tell the doctor, a case of the bends, coming up too quickly after my immersion; but he didn't understand.

What were the mistakes? I think I know most of them now. Most of them were the products of a lack of self-confidence caused by a lack of experience. Partially, they were the results of waiting too long, so that the assurance of youth, when one trusts one's judgment, even it one has no reason to do so, gave way to the doubts of middle age, which is far more dangerous. I couldn't imagine who would be listening to me and who would want to read anything I wrote. As a consequence, I determined to make them hear, if I could. I overloaded scenes that were loaded enough as they were. If there was a legitimate chance to grab the reader by the lapels, I took it. I left nothing to trust and I presumed my potential reader was half deaf and half blind. I even worried about Marshall McLuhan and tried to make everything as visual as possible, so I couldn't be accused of being a disciple of Gutenberg. The result is that there is too much muscle in the prose. I could see none of this then. When I turned in the book. I thought it was thin and reedy and hollow and that wind could blow right through it. I now know that it is actually a rather dense book (in the best sense of that word), too dense, but I didn't know. Now perhaps I will.

Out of the whole experience, I developed one tactic of writing that other writers might be able to profit from. I call it across the river and into the prose. During the Second World War, a friend of mine serving in the Alaska Scouts noticed that when an American squad came to a river near the end of the day, the squad would ford the river, so they could build fires and dry their equipment and be dry when starting out in the morning. The squads with Indians always stopped on the near shore. The reason for this was another facet of immersion. In the morning, the Americans, comfortable, warm and dry would tend to move very carefully and slowly across the tundra, to avoid getting wet. They would detour for miles to avoid crossing a stream. The Indians, on the other hand, would start the day by fording the river and they didn't give a damn what happened to them after that. The worst had already been done.

I felt this could be applied to writing. There is a desire to finish a paragraph or a chapter and enjoy the satisfaction of finishing. It is a good feeling. But in the morning, there now is only that blank white sheet of paper to be filled. I have wasted days trying to regain a momentum I have lost. Now I don't allow myself the luxury of finishing, of getting dry and comfortable. When I am going good but have worked enough for the day. I stop before finishing a paragraph I am anxious to finish and then I stop in the middle of a sentence. It is irritating and frustrating but also effective. There is nothing in writing harder to do than to start. But in the morning, I finish the sentence that has been left unfinished and then I finish the paragraph, and all at once I am in the river again.

Now I intend to write the book I intended to write all along, the one I used to think I had written, the one they would mention in the first paragraph of the obituary. There is a saying attributed to the French that no man should write his first novel until he is 40. This is the age when most Americans cease writing their last novels. I do hope the French are right.