On Writers & Writing

Booksby lobn Gardner NOVELS The Resurrection The Wreckageof Agarhon Grendel The Sunlight Dialopes Nickel Mounrain October Light In the SuicideMountains Freddy'sBook Mickelsson'sGhosts Sdllnessand Shadows NONFICTION The Life and Times of Chaucer The Poetry of Chaucer On Moral Ficrion On Becominga Novelist The An of Fiction STORIES The King's Indian The An of Living and Orher Stories POETRY Jasonand Medeia TRANSLATION Gilgamesh (witb Jobn Maier) FORCHILDREN Dragon, Dragon Gudgekin the Thistle Girl and Other Thles The King of the Hummingbirdsand Other Thles

onWiters &Witins byJohn Gardner

MJFBOOr(S NEWYORK

O

Publishedby MJF Books Fine Communications 322 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10001 On Writers and Writing LC Control Number 2002112163

rsBN t-5673 r-600-X Copyright @ 1994 by the Estateof John Gardner Introduction @ 1994 by CharlesJohnson This edition publishedby arrangementwith PerseusPublishing, a member of The PerseusBooks Group. All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproducedor transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storageand retrieval system,without the prior written permissionof the publisher. Manufactured in the United Statesof America on acid-freepaper m MJF Books and the MJF colophon are trademarksof Fine Creative Media, [nc. BG

IO

9

8 7 6

5

Cor.rTENTs

INrRoDUcrroN ny CHARLE J oSH N s o N "Bartleby":An and SocialCommitment An InvectiraAgainstMere Fiction

It

More Smogfrom the Dark SatanicMills

tt

Witchcraftn Bulla Park, by John Chee\cr Alice in Wonderland, by kwis Carnrll TbeBreast,by Philip Roth

6t

The W^y We Write Now

70

Saint Walt

I

tt

60

78

TbeAdamturn, by Paul Zweig

86

BeyondtbeBedrowtWall, by Larry Woiwode

g0

Amber (Get) Waves(Your)of (Plastic)Grain (Uncle Sam) IR, by William Gaddis

l0l

Tbe Aas of King Anbur and His NobleKnigbts, by John Steinbeck I 12 Larcelot,by WalkerPercy

I 19

Falconn,by John Cheerrer

| 24

gt

vi /

coNrENrs

Tbe Castleol' Crossed Destinies, by ltalo Calvino Daniel Martin, by John Fowles

I t0

I t4

TbeSilmarillion,by J.R. R. Tolkien

140

Tbe Storiesof lobn Cbeeaer I4t Dubin's Liaes,by BernardMalamud Sopbie's Cboice, by William Styron

149 tt4

A Writer's View of ContemporaryAmericanFiction Bellellrur,by JoyceCarol Oates

199

Italian Folktales, editedby ltalo Calvino Fiction in MSS What WritersDo Canoons

20t

212 216

228

Julius Caesarand the Werewolf 2 t 7 General Plan for TbeSunligbtDialogues 2 t 8 Illonx

289

I6t

INTRODUCTIOI{

O T .TI H E D A Y O F H I S F A T A L M O T O R C Y C L EA C C I dent on September14, 1982,on a lonely though not panicularly dangerouscurving stretchof road in SusquehannaCounty, Pennsylvania,John Gardner,the embattledadvocatefor higher anistic and moral standardsin our fiction, was snatchedat age fony-nine from the stageof contemporaryAmerican literature beforewe could properly measureeitherhis contributionto literary culture or the man himself. In the wake of his staggeringlyprolific, driven, and very public life as a popular novelist,critic, teacher,and classicsscholar,he left behind a workroom loaded with intriguing projects,some recendy completed,like his widely usedhandbook on craft TlteArt of Fiction; some unfinished,like his proposedopus Sbadouss; and some works, such as the novel Stillness, written for the purpose of "self-therapy" during his stormy first marritge,that he might not havepublishedin the form given to us posthurnously.There were, of course,rurnors flying that his death was suicide,that he willingly rode the rnachine that becameone of his symbols,a '79 Harley-Davidsonbog,into oblivion. But asalwaysthe truth is otherwise,more banalthan rumor, and far more illustrativeof the missionthat made him one of the most inventivenovelistsand outstandingwriting teachersof our time: he died en route to yet anothermeetingwith one of his studentsat the

v i i i/

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

StateUniversityof New York (SuNn0-Binghamton,with yet another stackof manuscriptsstrappedto the backof his black,monstrousbike. As one foot soldierin that coa$-to-coastarmy of young artistshe inspiredand influencedforever,perhapshis only blackformer apprentice now publishing(for reasonsI don't know, he alsoclaimedToni Morrison),my filing cabinet,indeedmy entire horne,groanswirh material by and aboutGardner,for it washis peculiartrait,like D. H. Larvrence, to externalizeon the pageeverythinghe felt, thought,and experienced as a way of taking control of his life. One library wall in rny house holdsa still life he paintedin 1980,a presentto me and my wife when we bought our first home in Seattle(a city he disliked,though he nevertold me why); it is balancedon either side by his lovely Lord John Pressbroadside"On Books" (a paeanto their physicalbeauty) and his eulogisticpoem to his dearestfriend, sculptorNicholasVergene, who died of cancerin 197+.Thirty of his books,criticisffi,translations, poetry and adult and children'sfiction stretchingfrom TbeForms of Fiaion (1962) rc Stillness and Sbadows(1986) fill one bookshelfin my study,along with copiesof his literary journal MSS (in its earliest incarnationhe publishedearlyworks byJoyceCarol OatesandWilliam Gass),and no lessthan ten critical volumeson his work that range from studiesof his major novelsto his shon fiction to collectedinterviews(he gavemore than 140).On the shelfbelow sitshis photograph' he peersout from the fraffi€,tired, shorthairedin 1982, wearinghis black fisherman'ssweater,Dunhill tobaccosmokestreamingfrom the pipe in his mouth. Somewherein one of my deskdrawersis one of his big churchwardenpipeshe gaveme two decadesago in an effon to wean me off cigarettes. In disorganizedenvelopesI havestacksof his letters(someof our is in a specidcolleaion devotedto him at the University correspondence of Delaware,and has been edited by ^ black graduatestudent);the copy for producedradio and theaterplays("The TemptationGame," "Helen at Home") and unproducedones("Death and the Maiden") for opera librettosand musicalcomedies;videompesof the low-budget novel NickelMountain andthe animated film basedon his best-selling (which I know disappointedhim, being the Walt versionof Grendel Disney fan he was), plus a tape of his freewheelingpublic-television "Wrirer's Workshop" interyiewwith JamesDickey and William Price Fox before an audienceof baffledyet enchanredUniversityof South

T N T R O D U C T I O N/ i x

Carolinastudents(to whom he-relaxed, longhaired,and handsome in his blackleatherjacketand maybea little drunk-said, "What htPpenswhen you havea really fine characteris that you get not only a senseof that kind of person in that kind of town but yourself and everybodyaroundyou. Finally you get a kind of control over the uni' from having understoodother people"); verse,a kind of fearlessness handwritten essayson the nature of moral an he gaveme when he guided me through the composition of my novel Faitb and tbe Good Ttting; his lecture notes (faded dittos now) from classeson the epic and black literaturehe taught at Southern lllinois University in the early 1970s;yellowedbook reviews(happily,most are now collected addition to Gardner scholarship),prefaces, in this extremelyrnaluable introductions,lettersto the editor, and statemenmhe wrote for popular obscurejournds, now-defunctpublications,and to endorse magazines, noralslong forgotten;and his early interviews,one of which he granted as a favor to me onJanuary 21, 1973, when I was a young repofter and philosophymaster's-degree studentat Southern Illinois University. There he confessedhis affection for the works of R. G. Collingwood and Alfred Nonh Whitehead, his belief in the "connectedness"of all life, his disdainfor most famouswriters at the time, then, in a way both grim and optimistic, concluded' I think a cenain kind of America is doomed, though something greatermay be coming. The noralist and only the norrelist thriveson breakdown,becausethat's the moment when he can analyzethe beauty of the valuesthat are falling and rising. . . . The end of a great civilization is always e great moment for {iction. When the old Englandat the end of the nineteenthcentury fell, dong cameDickens;when Russiafell apan, alongcame Tolstoy. . . . One looks forward to the fall of great civilizations becauseit grvesus grear arr. Over two decadesI've returned again and again to this profusion of archiraldocuments,r€memberingminutiae about the man, his work, and alwaysI come to the sameconclusion,that no American fiction writer in our generationwill be able to match the incredible ambition, the unusualaestheticproject-two pans Dickenseanand one pan Sanrean-that this farm boy from up$ate New York broughr to Yankee literature in the postwar years.

x /

oN wRTTERS AND WRTTTNG

I was rwenty-four yearsold when I drifted into his orbit, and perhaps he saw me as an oddity among his other Carbondalestudents,not simply becauseI wasblack but in termsof the creatirrebagage I brou$t dong behind m€: two publishedbooks of comic srt; rDorethan a thousand individual political drawings,some of which he'd encountered on the editorial pagesof the town newspaper,the Soztbmt lllinoisan; and an early how-to-draw PBS seriesI'd hosted,which most likely he'd seenwhen flipping channels(he wouldn't have missedthe first seasonof "Kung Fu"). I say oddity becaus€,s the only professional canoonist among his Southern lllinois writers, my imagination and creativeskills at the time were directedtoward a stylized,broad-stroke forrn of expression-caricature,boiling things down to their essential visual traits-that Gardner himself favored in his favorite writers (for such influenceon his work seehis lively essay"Cartoonsl' in this volume). Included in my baggagewere six novelsI'd written in the two years before I met Gardner, all heavily influencedby the Black Ans mo\ement and authorsI then admired(RichardWright, JamesBaldwin, John A. Williams). Naturdly, I knew of him beforewe met in the fall of 1972 in his workshop "ProfessionalWritingJ' which convenedin the eveningat his farnhouse on Boskelell Road.Like R. Buckminster Fuller, he was a local celebrity, particularly after he published Grtndel, which cementedhis reputation among critics. Friends of mine took his English classes,and spoke with excitementabout him; they also said he was the bitrerestman they'd ever known-this becausefor fifreen yearshe wrote in vinud obscuriry as an underpublishedauthor whose closet spilled open with brilliant, original fiction. Enrolling in his course, I wasn't sure what to expect. What I did know after pounding out six norels,and readingaswidely as I could in literature and philosophy as well as every handbook on craft and theory I could find, was that after writing a million words of fiction I neededa good teacher,a genuinementor, a senior crafts' man wirh grearerexperiencethan mine whom I could aPPrenticemyself to, adding what he'd learnedto what I'd alreadydiscovered.That circumstancesshould havebroughr me, six book'length manuscripts under my arm, ro rhe Gardners' home on a rainy Septembernight is one of those formarive,fork-in-the-roaderantsin my life that I have neler fully been able to unkey. A few editorswho'd rejectedmy fiction remarked that I could stand improvementon such mattersas "voice"

INTRoDUcTIoN / xi

and "prose rhythml' Gardner'sreply wls, "Oh, I can help you with tbatl' And it was rru€: he prided himself, as a trailblazerof the New Fiction that arosein the early 1970s,on his prodigiousunderstanding of technique,his gift for voice and narrativeventriloquislrt,his magisterial, musical prose,which, for example,in the opening Paragraph 'John Napper SailingThrough the Universe," achieved of his srory fused nearly perfectpitch in fully cadenced,poetic lines that seamlessly in modimmersed so soon enough, was, I learned He idea. imageand ern, medieral,and classicalphilosophiesthat on any occasionin his office, in his car, aswe wdked acrosscampus,or at a pafty, he could questionsabout the history of ideasand answermy graduate-student offer, dways ro my shock,his own thought-prorokingopinion on the of any Westernmetaphysicd system-as well srrengthsand weaknesses asopinions,alwaysfresh,about any aspectof theater,painting, sculpture, music, or popular culture. Tiue enough, there were in the early 1970s a few good authors teachingcreativewriting (which, incidentally,Gardner once told me was "a joke" in terms of how it was then approached,a touchy-feely affar with little foundation in skill acquisition),and any one of them could haveaddedto my repeftoireof technique.John Banh, say,with whom Gardner felt a certain competitiraness,most likely becauseour nationd magazinesherdded him u tbe high priest of literary invention. Or his friend William Gass,whose symphonicdly orchestrated books he often praised.But for tbislllinois colored boy raisedhappily in the African Methodist Episcopalchurch in a Chicago suburb by hardworking father and a mother with the soul of an a conservative, actress,it was Gardner's personality,not just his knowledge of tecbne, that madehim both an artist and a human being I could deeply respect. Unlike his equally skillful postmoderncontemporaries,experimentalistsand polytechnicalinnovatorswho rolled their eyesor looked confounded when the touchy subjectof religion or spirituality came up, Gardner-the son of a sermonizer-was as frank and fonhcoming as Flannery O'Connor about'the significanceof morality and the life of the spirit in literature. He praisedmy charactersin Faitb for their "dignityl' a characteristiche complainedwas missingin so many stories, all by acclaimedauthors,who (he felt) wdlowed in fashionabledespair, entropy,defeatism,cheapfireworks,and a cynical vision of humankind. (By the way, for the ancientGreeks,the word cynicmeant "doglike:')

xii/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

Gardner, and perhaps ml! Gardner, had the courageto say,ashe does 'A in Writer's View of Contemporary American Fiction," rhat "at a conservativeestimate,90 percentof the so-cdlednew fiction is soporificl' Read' boring, despiteits dazzling originality. Added to that, and mo$ imponant of all, I saw in Gardner's boundlessself-confidenceand passionfor writing in the early '70s exactly the same do-or-die love I had since my teensfor drawing. For Gardner, writing wils not a "career."It was not so pedestrianan enterprise as to be ranked among the various professionsfrom which we might freely choose-doctor, lawler, soldier,or stockbroker.On the contrary it was more like a calling. ("Fiction is the only religion I have," he told a Nru York TimesSunday Magazine reviewer.)It was one way for men and wornen to make their smb at immonality, heal the conflicted human heart, transcendthe idiociesof daily life (yet help us at the sametime seehow heroism can residein ordinary living), and celebratethe Good. Sometimesit seemedasif Gardner was interestedin nothing shon of fiaion worthy of winning a writer lasting fame (glory) basedon-and here is the trick-hard-won achievement. When pushed to the wall about his preferences,it seemedhe approaed of nothirg less,and in our conferencesand conversationshe pushed me gently, then sornetimesroughly, to imagineharderand with greater precisionof detail, write with fairnessfor everycharacterin my book, and hold in contempt any sentenceI composedthat fell below the level of the best sentenceI'd everwritten. He wasa teacherwho could fill you to orarflowing with confidence.He wasalsocapableof wounding you in rhe most painful way by pulling the coversoff your conceits and holding them up-like a puppy by its ears(his image)-before you. 'A Writer's View of ContemporaryAmericanFictionl' which In nicely caregorizesfictiond visionsin terms of their relationshipto religion, Gardner identifies himself as a "troubled Christian onhodox writerl' Can anyonewho knew him doubt that he sawsomethingakin to sdvation in an? Late one spring afternoon I droveto his farmhouse to pick up one of my chapters.He sat done in the house that dry ar the long, mead hall-sizetable in his dining room, drinking whiskey from a Mason jar and editing a home movie, a western, his family and friends had written and performed. On the table nearbywere recenr reviews of lason and Medeia.Many of them were negative.One reviewerhad calledGardner a"clever studentl' l knew thesenotices

rNrRoDUCrloN

/

angeredand disappointedhim. Timidly, I noddedtoward the reviews, askedhim what he thought, and he replied quietly, hardly looking up from his editing machine,"They just try to keep you from getting to heaven." All this was heady stuff for me; it was preciselythe kick-in-thefanny, challengingwake-upcdl that I'd been hungering for a teacher ro give me. Unbeknownst to him, I took notes on even his casual remarksabout fiction. I readhis three-decker,architectonicnovel Tbe SuntigbtDialogusswith a pencil in my fist, flagging every linguistic device,srraregy,and techniqueI did not know. I orderedall his earlier works of criticism.And sincethe melodicsubstructureof his bestProse fascinatedrne, I copiedout in longhandthe first chapterof Th Wrerkage of Agatbon a work he felt disappointedwith, but by transcribingeach onto a notepad I discoveredthat, as I turned from of his senrences one pagero anorher,I couldfttl how his next sentencehad to flow, what metricd beatsit neededto have,even if I had no idea what its conrent might be. Slowly, I beganto see.Gradually, a picture of man and method beganto emerge.By degrees,the musicallogosof his fiction becamesomethingI was able to intuit and feel from within, &s well as the greateranistic gameplan behind his challenginghimself from book to book, story to story, by selectingdifferent classicalor contemporary literary forms (or severalcombined) to serve as the ground, the generalshapeor mold for his stories-a mold he could reconfigpreas he wrote, and at the sametime use to stay in touch with other writers, living and dead,who'd also used that form. At dinner one eveningI heardhis wife, Joan,joke about the archaic languageGardnerdisplayedin lasonand Medeia;she said it was there becauseshe'dchidedhim about not having any "big words" in his novels.So Gardnertook his m4gniryinggl*s and wdked thnrugh every word in Tbe CompaaEdition of tbe Oxford Englisb Diaionary before revisinghis updateof the classicstory.We laughed,but her anecdote hauntedme for days.I thought if Gardner had gone to such trouble (a task I now believeevery writer needsto perform), then perhapsI should do the samewith a Christmaspresentmy parentshad given ffie, the 2 ,129-pageWebster's New TwmtietbcenturyDiaionar!.lt took me five months to plough through it, night after night, during my first year in the philosophy Ph.D. program at SUNY-Stony Brook, and the exerciseproved invaluable.

xiv/

o N w R T T E R SA N D w R r r r N G

So y€s, I painstakingly studied Gardner, testing my regimen and secular,post-Christian"religious" faith in the disciplineof fiction against his own (and dways I fell shon). If he recommendeda book, I bought then pored over it, regardless of the century or culture that produced it. I'm convinced no one else could have gorren me-a philosophy student then oriented toward Marxism and, in fiction, roward protest literature-interested in Morte dAnbur, Geoffrey Chaucer,longinus, the Wakefield pageantcycle,Fulgentius,Beoutulf,orCaedmonicpoerry. But he did, becausehe, like his fellow post-sixties"experimenral" writers, had found a way to make the practiceof fiction interesting again after decadesof naturalism.Not that they couldn't wrire in the great tradition of American naturalism-they did, now and then, just to show they could, to show that naturdism was bur oneof the innumerable ways a story could be told and the universe imagined and interpreted. "I believethat the an of the thirties, fonies, and fifties wils fundamentdly a mistake," Gardner told Joe David Bellamy in a 1973 interview, "that it made assumptionsthat were untrue about aft, basicallywrong assumptionsthat went wrong in the Middle Ages, too. . It seemsto me that we are a play out of the seventeenthcentury. Seventeenth-cenrurycivilization is us In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuriesall the genresbreak down. It becomesimpossible to write a straight romance, or a straight anphing. And everybody who is anybody suns form-jumping." He creditedhimself and other New Fictionistsrightly for developing fresh strategiesfor solving the problem of viewpoint, openingour fiction to excitingnew (and sometimesold) ontologies,and for unseding a door to "fabulation" closedsincethe mid-nineteenthcentury. Inside that room of fictiond possibilitieswas a tale- and yarn-tellingtradition still closeto the roo$ of ord storytelling,where one could find philosophicd insight in fairy tales, folktales, and myths' storiesabout fantastic creatures-golemsand grendels-we arenot likely to bump into at the corner supermarket,but in the New Fiction we could. For in experimentalistswere the universeof the mind (and the college-based interestedin nothing if not mind, perception,epistemology),FrankenRip Van Winkle and stein'smonsterandJ.F.K., quarks and Pegasus, Chairman Mao all existedside by side as phenomenalobjects for connone more "red" than another in our dreamsor between sciousness, the coversof a book. In what Gardner cdled "the vivid and continuous

INTRoDUCTIoN / xv

dream" that is art, eachcould be a meaning dramatized,dlowed to live, and lead us ro laughter and tears and learning as powerfully as did the ghost and flesh in the Middle English poem "The Debate of Body and Soul." Here, in shon, ws a post-I960s"school" of writers who found L way of freeingthe imagination, but in Gardner's caseit involved a rerurn to ancestraluaditions and forms. Perhapsnow we take for grantedthis "rum" in American storynellingfrom sod-busting"realisml' what with televisionoffering us a seriesabout a family of dinosaurs, Holllvood dishing up films about coneheadsand charactersbased on video games,and literary writers like Valerie Manin retelling the in Jekyll and Hyde story from the viewpoint ofJekyll's housekeeper her superbpsychologicalthriller Mary Reilly.But thiny years Lgo,at the momenr Gardnerwas fusing redism and fantasyin his midwestern farmhouse,JoannaRussin the Eastwas just then looking at medieval literature in rerms of its lessonsfor the "New Wave" of speculative '70s, and replacingsci-fi'searlier relifiction that emergedin the early of physicsand chemistrywith an interest anceon the "hard" sciences fields as biol oW and anthropology such from research latest in the (her friend SamuelR. Delany was looking at theoriesof languagegames and much, much more); and in the West, IshmaelReedwas studying Egyptian myrhs and taking Saturday-morningcanoons asa model for '60s, the mammt called editing his novels.As in the politics of the for innovation,throwing out nets in every direction-pop culture, high culture,Third World culture,science-in the hope that aswriters they could haul to the surfacesomething to propel fiction's evolution. However, Gardner differs in many imponant respectsfrom these other innovators."Newness" for its own sakedid not appealto him. And in contrast,for example,to Russ(whose essaysinclude a defense of man-hating) and Reed (who once called Western cultural forms "diseas€d"),he was dissadsfiedwith pyrotechnicsand novelty if their purposeturned out to be nothing more than politicd or religiousPropaganda;if character-which is at the core of his aesthetics-suffered; if canoon strategies,for dl their fun, completely abandonedfidelity to mimesis,and lost the authorid generositythat comes only from minutely rendereddemilsof setting and socialgesture;if, in the end, he felr rhe novelty of the New Fiction replacedconvincing models of mord behaviorwith eventsand emotions that slyly and subversively

xvi/

o N w R T T E R SA N D W R T T I N G

'A promoted something unhealthy for humankind. healthy life is a life of faithi' he told Bellamy, "an unhedthy, sick, and dangerouslife is a life of unfaithl' Nevenheless,I writer could not preachhis faith in a $ory. It had to be concretized,the idea incarnated-made flesh-in (tbisness'). specific people, places,and things deliveredwith baeceinias Real an was not, he said,in the sermonwe hear in church on Sun dry morning, but instead in "rhe archesand the lightl' looking back over the collected piecesin On Writen and Writing, we seethat during his spectacularcareermuch of Gardner'senergy was inrrestedin defining, erraluating,and trying to correct-in his criticism and stories-the products of the New Fiction school, of which he was a leading figure. At times he was guilty (as he admits) of its self-conscious excesses that distractus from the "fictional dream,"but he was alwaysstrugglingto usethe positivecontributions of this period to createa lastingwork wonhy of the best in Dickens, Melville, and Tolstoy. It is dso true that as he scrappedwith his brothers and sisters in the movement for the New, he was revisingand refining his theory that the processof fiction itself is moral and life-affirmative.But just a moment. Is this really a "theo ry"? And is it really "morality" that Gardner means?It's clear from his criticism that he was firmly opposed to "rnoralizingJ' Apparently, he was not intractably Christian,insofar as he said a finely done work could make him believein the value of a Buddhist vision. I think, just maybe,we are better off seeinghis interconnecting essaysin this book as presentinga credible description of what happenswhen writers write well. And rather than usingthe inflamrn atory word "moral," we might be more accurateif we say fiction, one that did not that what Gardner wanted was a responsible insult the intelligenceof readersasthoughtful and educatedashimself. '.All my life," he wrote his fianc6eSusanThornton, whom he was on September 18, four days after his fatal accident,"l've marry ro I was never lived flat-out. As a motorcycle racer,chemist,writer cautiousl' This was hardly somethingGardner neededto tell us. We could seeit in everything he did. While he helped those of us fonunare enough to study with him believewe could distinguishourselves as arrisrs,provided we were willing to sweat enough, be unsatisfied enough, rewrire enough, none of us believedwe could match bis breakneck schedule.I cannot speakfor his New Fiction contemporaries, but I know for a fact that Gardner could write for seventy-two-hour

INTRoDUcTtoN / xvii

without sleep;composean introduction to one of his collecstretches tions of poetry and ponions of TlteArt of Fiaion whrle recuperating in a hospital bed from an operation for colon cancer.Some critics believeGardner'sincredibledrive,his "fire in the bellyi'dated back to his reensand the accidentaldeathof his younger brother, a tragedy he blamedhimselffor and dramatizedin his story "Redemptionl' As to the rrurh of this childhood "woundl' I cannot say.But I do know he was a writer who boastedhe could read in twenty-sevenancient by the time he earnedhis Ph.D. at agetwentyand medierallanguages late fonies he polished up his Greek in order to his that in and five, providehis srudentsat the BreadloafWriters Conferencewith his own '70s to lectureand translationsof Homer. He traveledto Japanin the rerurned with sixteenstoriesby Kikuo ltaya-an eighty-five-year-old writer hardly known in his homeland,which Gardner translatedwith Nobuko Tsukui, introducedwith a memorableessaycalled "Meditational Fictionl' and publishedunderthe title Tmgu CbiA with Southern Illinois University Press. Week afrer week on the pagesof the Sunday New YorkTimesBook Rniru, and in other nationd forums for literary discourse,he attempted ro separatenovelisticwheat from the chaff, genuine fiction from fakery. However,Gardnerwasnot Sv€n to writing puff pieces,reviewsI would call no better than extensionsof the blurbs and promotional copy in Always his intention wasto understand,to imaginethe pressreleases. variousalternativesan author had at his or her disposalfor solving problemson the levelof the sentenceor for a book's orerdl structural design, to analyzewhat constructionsin the stories of writers he admired-Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Marguerite Young,John Cheever,LarryWoiwode-worked, and which onesdid not. Only in his reviewsdo we find a consummateteacherand technicianexamining the works of his peersas he would an assignmentturned in by one of his studentsin a collegewriting class.Often the effect is shocking-he saidtbat aboutJohn UpdikeP-but it is a testamentto Gardnerls professionalismthat publicity and public acclaim never blinded him to the basicquestioneveryreviewerand critic must ask' What exactly do we have here?(As an analogue,consider the equally courageous reviewsof black fiaion by lvtacArthur fellow StanleyCrouch.) In principle, it seems,very little contemporaryfiction worked perfectly for Gardner;like an eldercraftsmandisappointedby his finestachievements,

x v i i i/

oN wRTTERS AND wRrTrNG

he regardedeven the rnost lauded literature by othersas being in need of some repair. He lectured, read,and taught acrossAmerica and abroadfor twenty years. His studentsincluded the famous (Raymond Carver took his first classat Chico State)and scoresof aspiringwriters who mailed him manuscripts-perfectstrangerswhose work he correced with the same meticulous, line-by-lineediting he brought to his own fiction. What could prompt a busy man to behavethis way?An incident he enjoyed relating revealssomefiing abour the demonsthat drove him. After one of his readings,a woman approachedhim and said, "You know, I think I like your stories,but I'm not sureI like lnul' He did not hesitatebefore he replied, "That's all right, I'm a better person when I write," meaningthat no matter how pigheaded,stupid,or imperfect a writer might be in his persond life (and cenainly the stories of how badly many outstandingwriters have lived are legion), what he did on the pageoffered an opportunity-perhaps the only chance for some-to speakwith clarity and precision,work in a spirit of love and compassion,and revisehis thoughts and feelingsto the point where they could be most helpful and do no harm. In an unpublished1976 prefaceto the writing exercisesthat now appearin TbeArt of Fiaion, he wrote that a sane,moral writer never forgemthat his audienceis, at leastidedly, asnoble and generous and tolerant as himself, so that to turn characters into cartoons, to treat his charactersas innately inferior to himself, to forget their reasonsfor being as they are, to treat them as brutes, is disgraceful. . If you write, eventhrough the mouth of a sympatheticallyobserrcdcharacter,something Tolstoy,Socrates,orJesuswould not write-think twice. You live in a world in which it's possibleto buy flavored,edible panties(strawberry,lemon-lime-), a world where the word "asshole" passesfor elevateddiction. Think about it. Seventeenyears later we are demanding that record companiesplace rating labelson "gansta'lrap music filled with obscenities,the abuseof womeh, and callsfor killing police offic€rs; and televisionand motion pictures must now contend with ^ groundswell of public backlash againstthe graruitous,make-believeviolence that some feel is related

INTRoDUcTIoN / xix

to the $reersof urban America turning into combat zones.If Gardner had lived, the currenr hand-wringingo\rerdepictionsof violence and cruelty, and the sensethat moral demandsapply evento make-believe, mighr haveprompted him to say,"I told you so," and rePeathis oftstatedbelief that "even bad aft is powerfull' To put this simply,Gardner'senetW,his self-punishingschedules, his devotion to all good fiction whereverhe found n, sbamcdthose of us who watchedhim work, and still had the audacityto call ourselrres writers.Just the same,he laboredwith self-doubts.In a 1977 Atlantic interview,he said,"I'm one of the really greatwriters; I haven't proved that yet, but I feel that ir's comingJ' Did it come?More specifictlly, did any of the New Fiction novelistscreateworks that have become parr of the language,the culture?As I grow older and find myself less .nrot .lled by py.technics and more appreciativeof spirited storynelling and old-fashionedpage-rurners,I wonder how variouscharactersand tales havedown through the centuriesbecomecommon coin in our culture. Melville, of course,languishedfor yearsbefore being rediscovered,as did Tnra Neale Hurston; and surely there is often more than a little media hyp., literary and academicfashioo, politics, and the impafi of Hollyvood involvedwhen an author's effons become a householdword. Be thar as it may, the rare eventdoesoccur when a seriouswriter createssomerhingthat becomesemblematic for some sector of our experience.In "More Smog from the Dark SatanicMillsi' Gardner praisesPar Lagerkvisr's TbeHoly l^andfor compressingthe complexity and difficulty of modern life "into a few stark and massivesymbols in which all our experienceand all human history arelockedl' To my €Ie, rhis er€nr ariseswhen a writer-traditiond or experimental,literary or pulp-stumbles consciouslyor unconsciously,by geniusor dumb luck, upon an archetypalcharacter(Raskolnikov,lolita, Candide,Huck Finn) or an imaginativesituation (asin Fowles'sTbeCollcaoaDickey's or a flexible concept that organizesa welter of complex Delioerance) feelingsand ideas(Ellison'sInaisibleMan, Heller's Catcb2z,Haley's Roots').Insomecasesthis naming, this dramatizing,crystallizesan exPerience we all know but until the creation occurs have not found a way to utrer. Or it may be a fictiond situation or premise so fenile (Malory's Morte dArtlnr, Goethe's Faust,Defoe's RobinsonCrusu) and intriguing that other writers feel compelledto keepretellingit, updating ir for their sge,going it one better, as Gardner himself did with the

) ( x/

oN WRTTERS AND WRITTNG

Beowulf legend,Did the New Fiction of the early '70s body fonh its "King lrar," its Oliaer Twist, its great white whale? Elevenyears after Gardner's death the jury is still our, asperhapsit mu$ be, though I think it safe to say that the intenseinterestin Gardner's work in the decadeafter his death, the effon findly to take measureof the man, suggestshappily that his devotion to good writing will result in longevity for his books on writing craft, for Grmdel asan example of the New Fiction's principles at their besr,and, one hopes,for his shon and long fiction as well. Gardner would havebeen sixty this year.Readersborn roo late to remember the post-I960s debatesand battlesover fiction's purpose might find it difficult to feel the passionor the reasonfor fiercepositiontaking that cracklesdong the surfaceof Gardner'sbook reviews.These are mnre than reviews. They are brief position papers,extensionsof his ongoing thoughts about art's meaning; but a few readersmight ask, *hy all the fuss?After all, by the mid-l980s-when the concept of "moral" fiction was no longer tied so tightly to Gardner himself: few, if any, major American novelismquestioned in their interviews and public statementsthe significanceof a moral vision for fiction, evenif they had distancedthemselvesfrom Gardner when he was alive, which many did after he published On Moral Fiaion. For mo$ authors today moral responsibilityin their productsis a giam, though asdways the definition of what defines "moral" variesfrom writer to writer, as it should. But it was Gardner who servedas our point man, our "trip wire" in the task of clearing awayland mines planted by less faithful novelistsand critics dong the path where traditional ethical concerns and anistic creation meet. Funhermore, if three decadesago during the heyday of the New Fiction, writers were arguing about technique,today the battlefield of aestheticdebatehas shifted to "multiculturalism," to denunciations of English departmentsfor marginalizingwomen and writers of color, and to a dismissalof the very canon of "dead white male writers" Gardner's scholarshipwas basedupon. Oh /€s, he died too soon by ten years,long before we had finishedwith him. We neededhis intimare knowledg. of the classics,his great love of fine storytelling regardlessof the culture or racethat produced it, and his compelling argumenrsagainsteasy an and proselytizingin these yearsthat have seen English depanments politicized and torn apart from within at so many major American universities.

INTRoDUCTIoN / xxi 'Amber (Get) Waves(Your) Moreover, we neededthe author of of (Plastic)Grain Oncle Sam),"who wasone ofJimmy Caner'sfarorite writers, when rhe Grand Old Pany of his parentscavedin to the relig ious right and Pat Buchananduring the 1992 presidentialcamPaign, retreatingfrom politics proper to cultural warfare in the form of appeds to "family ralues"and the priority of "characterl'Aren't thesemattersvaluesand culturd vision-that resideat the hean of what one might call "Gardner country"PWe wonder: Where might he harrepositioned himself in respectto Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souzl, and RushLimbaugh(who could easilybe a Gardner concoction,one of his "eamestbabbling . . . shon-leged, or€rweight, rwitching cartoon creadons")?How might he haverespondedto our presentcontroversy o\cr abonion (theneis one ans\Mern Mickebson'sGlnsts),homosexuality (he tries ro understandhow one man can lora another in Frily's Buik), or Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" speech(our First t dy mlght do well to read Oaober Ligbt)?BecauseGardner was that speciesof poet-philosopheron whom nothing in the social world was lost, we can find hints in his huge ncuarefor thesequestionsand usethem to that are consistentwith to presentdangers,guesses constructresponses his position at the time of his death-but, sadly,that is the very best we will be able to do. As his former student and friend, I thankfully add On Writersand Writingro my burgeoningshelfof books by and aboutJohn Gardner. I haveno idea what words appearon his headstonein upstateNew York, no ideaif the rnan'sfiercespirit liveson, but for yearsI've entertained the thought that theselines by Itdian poet Jacoponeda lbdi might be fitting for how most of us would like to rememberhis furious and illuminating passageamong us. La guerra e terminata: de la airtu battaglia, de la mente traaaglia cosanulla contmde. Tbe'uar is oaer. In tbe banle of airan, tbe straggleof spirit, all is Peace,

cHnnlES JOHNSON Seattle,199t

"Bxttleby": Art andSocial Commitment

l u " B A R T L E B yI ' M n N L o o K S A T M A N , A R T I S T looks at anist, and God looks at C'od. To understandthat the narrator is at least as right as Banleby, both on the surfaceand on symbolic levels,is to understandthe remarkableinterpenetration of form and content in the story. Most Melville readershave noticed that on one level,Banleby can representthe honest anistt he is a "scrivener" who refusesto "copyJ' as Melville himself refusedto copy-that is, as he refusedto knock out more sdeableSouth Seasromances.But if Banleby is the anist, he is the anist manqui' his is a vision not of life but of death;"the man of silence,"he createsnothing.A better kind of anist is the lawyer,who, havingseenredity through Banleby's eyes,hasturned to literature.Nor is he the slick writer: "If I pleased," he says,"[Il could relatedivershistories,at which good-naturedgentlemen might smile,and sentimentalsoulsmight weepl' That is, popular fiction. The phrase"If I pleased"is significrrlt: "please" is the narrator's substitution,later,for Banleby'sinfectious"preferl' Like Banleby, the narrator doeswhat he prefersto do-but within certain reasonable limits. The readermay weep or smile at Banleby's story but the narrator's chief reasonfor choosing it is that he is seiiously concerned with "literaturel' Closereadingrevealsthat the story he tells is indeed a highly organizedliterary work, a story that is asmuch the narrator's

2 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

as it is Banleby's,ending with the narrator'sachierremenr of rhat depth of understandingnecessaryto the telling of the srory. An important pan of what the narrator at last understandsis the conflict between the individual and society.The individual feelscertain preferences which, taken together,establishhis personalidentity; society makes simulmneously necessaryand unreasonabledemands which modif individual identity. Thus the individual'sview of himself and the view others haveof him can becomerwo quite different things seParatedby a substantialwall (communicationis difficult); thus, roo, the socidizedman'sidentity and his view of his identity can be walled aPart (self-knowledgeis difficult). And man's dilemma cannot be resolved,for if one insistson one's o\rynpreferences and therebyafltrms one's identity, one finds oneself,like Banleby,wdled off from society and communion with other ffi€n; and on the other hand, if one gives in to the necessarylaws of socialacdon,one finds oneself,like Banleby's employer, wdled off from activeobedienceto the higher laws of self and, in a sense,reality. Wall Streetis the prison in which all men live. The conflict between the rule of individud preferenceand the necessarylaws of social action takesvariousforms in "BanlebyJ' Conflicts arise between individud and social impulseswithin each of the first three scriveners,Tirrkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, and also between individual traits in the scrivenersand the necessaryrequirementsof their employer,whose commitment is perforcesocial,for he must do his job well to survive.But for the action of the story the most important conflicts are those rooted in the relationshipof the lawyer and Banleby, that is, the conflicts betweenemployerand employee,between the lawyer's kindly nature and his recognitionof the reasonableness of society'sharsh demands, and between Banleby and the world. In many ways the lawyer and Banleby differ. The lawyer is a successful,essentially practical man with highly developedfeelingsfor socialposition (he mentions coyly that he was "not unemployed" by John Jacob Astor), the value of his money (the of{ice of Master in Chanceryis "pleasantly remunerative"),"common usageand common sense,"and above all, as he tells us John Jacob Astor has obseryed, "prudence" and "method." Banleby, on the other hand, is merely a clerk with an obscurepast, a man little concernedwith practic.lity in the ordinary sense,and apparentlyquite uninterestedin socialposi' tion, money, or usageand sense.He is totdly lacking in prudence-

"BARTLEBY",

ART

AND

SOCIAL

COMMITMENT

/

t

he couns dismissdat everyturn-and for method he relieson "preferencel'often preference"at present."The narratorat first cannotunderstandBanleby,for good reason,and Banleby prefersnot to understand the narratoror the societythe narrator represents.At the sametime, the two charactersare in some respectssimilar. Early in the story the narratortells us, "I am a man who, from his youth upwards,hasbeen filled with a profound conviction that the easiestway of life is the best"; and Bartleby sharesthe narrator'sprofound conviction: what he cannot shareis the narrator's opinion that the easiestway must be socially acceptable,or even "reasonable."The narrator is dso like Banleby in that he doesnot seek"public applause";but Banleby goes funher, he doesnot aroid public censure.Finally, the narrator is decorous and "eminently safe";so is Banlebyt the narrator is positivethat Banleby would not copy in shinsleeves or on Sunday,and the narrator "singular has confidencein his honestyJ' Perhapspanly becausethe narratorand Banleby areboth different and similar, the conflict betweenthem triggers a conflia within the narrator'smind. He knows that as employer he has the authority to make demandsof a scrivener,whateverthe scrivener'spreference,for if employerscannot function as employers,society cannot work; but despite his knowledg., the narrator cannot bring himself to force Banleby to obey or get out. When Banleby first refusesto comply with a request,the narrator merely thinks, "This is very strange What had one bestdo?" and, being pressedby business,goeson with his work. When Banleby refusesto comply with another request,the narrator is shakenand for a moment doubts the assumptionbehind employer-employeerelations. When Banleby usesit as a modusnperandi, the narrator'sopinion that "the easiestway of life is the be$" conflicts with his equ"lly firm opinion that the laws of socid action are of necessityright; and in his momentary uncertainty the narraror turns to his office, a miniature society,for a ruling. Even their ruling is not much help, howerrer,for to act on it would be to becomeinrolrred in unpleasantness, and this the narratorwould prefer to avoid in farror of some easierway-if any is to be found. Once again he avoidsthe issue,in the socially approvedway, by turning his mind to his work. Banelby'sunconventionalinsistenceon his preferences,and his indifferenceto the demandsof his social sefting, the office, leads the narrator to wonder about him, that is, to want to understandhim.

4 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRtrrNG

He watches Banleby narrowly and finds him more enigmatic than before. Banleby never seemsto leave, he existson ginger nuts, and in the miniature socioy of the office his corner remainsa "hermitage!' Judg*ent cannot account for the man, and though imagination provides "delicious self-approvd," it too fails to provide understanding. The conflict in the narrator's mind between acceptanceof Banleby as enigmatic eccentric,on one hand, and insistenceon Banleby's position as employee, on the other, leadsto no action while the narrator is in a charitable mood; but when he is not, he feelsa need to force Bartleby into revealinghimself actively, not just passively-that is, to make himself vulnerable by showing "some Lngry spark answerable to my ownl' The narrator's goading excitesthe other scriveners,but it cannot reach Banleby. At last, for the sakeof keepingpeacein the office, and dso becausesome of Banleby's preferencescoincide with the preferencesof society("his steadiness,his freedomfrom dl dissipation, his incessantindustry"), the narrator comesto acceptBanleby, and the narrator's internd conflict is temporarily resolved. When the narraror learns that Banleby liras at the office, the internal conflict reawakens.As he looks through Banleby's things, the narrator's judgment hurls him onto the truth' Banleby is "the victim of innate and incurabledisorder,"in a word, he is mad. Common sense demands that he be gotten rid ol for, as the narrator sees,the practicd fact is that "pity is not seldom painJ' and one cannot work well (as one must in rhis world) when one is suffering.The narrator girres his scrineverone last chance' he asksBanleby to tell him about his pasr;if Banleby will answerlike a sensibleman, the narrator will keep him on. As he asksit, the narrator insists,sincerelyenough, "I feel friendly to\Mardsyou." And the effect is interesting,Banleby hesitates a "considerabletime" before answeri.g, and for the first time his composure breaks-his lips tremble. "At presmt" he says(and he is using the phrase"at present" for the first time), "l preferto Su. no answer." It seemsthat the narrator has cracked the wall beween them; but if so, he does not know it at the time. The narrator's common sense goesdeep and now, when he is on the thresholdof his scritrener'ssecnet self, self-delusionsavesthe narrator from what, ashe rightly sees,can' nor help Banleby and can only hun himself. Misinterpreting what has happened, he feels "neftled" and says,"Not only did there seernto lurk in [Banleby's mannerl a cenain calm disdain,but his perverseness

..BARTLEBY".

ART

AND

SOCIAL

COMMITMENT

/

'

seemedungrareful,consideringthe undeniablegood usageand indulgencehe had receivedfrom mel' Evenso, common senseis not quite triumphant, "I srrangelyfelt somethingsuperstitiousknocking at my hean, and forbiddingme to carry out my purpose[of {iring Banl.byl, and denouncingme for a villain if I daredto breatheone bitter word againstthis forlornestof mankindl' Insteadof sensiblydismissingthe mad scriraner,the narratorchoosesmercy,not justice,and humbly b.S Banleby ro promiseto be a litde reasonable"in aday or twol' Bartleby's 'At answer,of course,is as delightfully mad as the request' Present I would prefernor ro be a little reasonablei'And Banleby, or the will of the individual,wins. Indeed,individudism is doingvery well: Everyone in the office is saying "prefer" these days. Socid dicta become waiting upon the individud's mste ("If [Banlebyl polite suggestions would but preferto mke a quan of good ale every day.. i'); legd etiquetre becomesa matter of individud choice (the narrator is asked what color paperhe prefersfor a cenaindocument).Banleby'ssuccess is completewhen, preferringto do no more copying, and preferringto remain in the office, he getsthe narrator to prefer to put up with him. In voluntarily choosingto acceptBanleby as "the predestinedpurposeof my life;' the narrator makesa choicewhich, unfortunately,he is not free to make.From the point of view of society,the choice is (ike Colt's choiceto murder Adams-a choiceColt odd, unacceptable would not havemade,the narrator says,if the two of them had not been alone). Banleby is such an oddity in the office that at last the narrator must choosebetweenBanleby and his own professionalreputation. As the saneman must, the narrator choosessociety and denies Banleby' he movesout of the office.When moving out provesinsufficient-for sociay holds him accountable-the narrator reluaandy goes the whole route, he would not have acted with the cruel common senseof the landlord, but preferringto choosethe inevitable,he gives the testimonyrequestedin the landlord'snote. The betrayedBanleby pronouncesthe judgment: "I know youl' Evennow the narrator feels friendly toward Banleby, and cenainly he cannot be blamed for his action; D€veftheless, betrayalis betrayal,and both of them know it. The sequel providesus with an insight into the background of Banleby'sderangementand providesthe narrator with belatedunderstanding of his scrivener.As the narrator understandsthe matter, and we have no reasonto doubt his interpretation, Banleby's former

6 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

occuPation asdead-letterclerk heightenedthe natural pallid hopelessnessof Banleby's characterby giving him a queer and terrible vision of life. The narrator thinks, asBanleby must hara thou$t before him, "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?" ktters senr on missionsof pardon, hope, good tidings-errands of life-end in pointless flames;and the dead-letterclerk seesno other kind of mail (if, in fact, there is any other kind). What he knows about letters he comesro know of man. The busdeof activity, scrirrening,clerking, bar-tending, bill-collecting,traveling-all rumble at last againstthe solid wall, death. Banleby prefersnot to share the delusionsof society.For him, the easiestway of life is the best becausewhether one spendsone's rime "not unemPloyed" by John Jacob Astor or spendsit "sitting upon a banisteri'one dies.He is not "luny," asGinger Nut thinks, but mad. Estrangedfrom the ordinary view of life (he does nor even read the papers),Banleby perceivesreality; thus whereasthe narraror, when he looks out his windows, seesar one end a wall "deficient in what landscapepainterscall'life"' and at the other end "a huge, square cistern," Banleby sees,respectively,death and the grara. Except at that moment when he is rempred to feel affection for the man who feels friendly toward him, there is within Banleby no conflict at dl. He is dead already,as the narrator's recurring adjective, "cedaverousi'suggests.Whatever the exigenciesof the moment, he cannot be made to forget the wdls enclosinglife. He has wdked for some time in the yard "not accessibleto common prisoners,"for the yard in the Tombs is life itselfi "The surroundingwalls, of amazing thickness,kept off dl sounds behind them. The Egyptian characrer of the masonrywerghedupon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The hean of the eternd pyramids,it seemed, wherein, by some strangernagic,through the clefts,grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung." But though Banleby suffersno conflict within, he is engagedin a conflict more basicthan that in which the narrator is inrolrred.The narnatorwishesto aroid unpleasantness-andif possible, to do so without lossof self-respect.Banleby wishesto shapehis own destiny,at leastwithin the little spacebetweenthe walls of binh and death. The narrator, when he has "looked a little into 'Edwardson the 'Priestley Will; and on Necessityi" slidesinto the persuasionthat his troubles havebeen predestinedfrom eternity, and he choosesto accept them, voluntarily relinquishing his will to "an dl-wise Providence."

"BARTLEBY",

ART

AND

SOCIAL

COMMITMENT

/

7

But Banleby insistson freedom.When the narratorsuggests that he take a clerkshipin a dry-goodsstore,he answers,"There is too much confinementabout thatl' The narrator'sr€action'"*hy, you keepyourself confinedall the time!" missesthe point, for confinement,if one choosesconfinement,is freeagency,and circlingthe world, if required of one, is not. Melville makesthe point dramatically.When Banleby will neithertour Europewith someyoung man nor live in the narrator's home,the namatorfleesfrom Banleby,the landlordand the tenan$ who may againbesiegethe law office. He runs from the building, up Wall Street toward Broadway,catchesa bus, surrendershis business to Nippers,and turns to still wilder flrgh,, driving about in his rockaway for days.In his restless flight he is lessfreethan the man on the banister. But in the end, no individud, not evenBanleby, can be free. The freedomof eachindividual cunailsthe freedomof someother, aspoor Colt's freedom cunails the freedomof Adams (murdered men have no preferences), and asBanleby's freedomcunails that of the narraror. Thus the limits imposedupon freedomby the laws of Nature are narrowed by the lawsof society:Banleby must be jailed. Insidethe prison, "individuals"; outside,"functionaries."Betrayedby the narrator and the societyhe represents, confinedin a smallerprison and, ashe says, knowing where he is, Banleby hasonly one freedomleft, he may prefer not to live. And he does. Melville suggests in rarious waysthat the conflict betweenBanleby and the world (and the conflict within the narrator'smind) is one berweenimqgnation and judgment,or reason.Judpent supporrssociety, ethicallaw is the law of reason;imaginatiotr,on the other hand, supPorts higher values,those central to poetry and religion: mortl law is the law of imagination. Ethical law, always prohibitive, guarantees equal rights to all membersof the group, but moral law, alwaysaffirmative, points to the absolute,without respecrto the needsof the grouP.Thus ethical law demandsthat scrivenersproofread their copy; but the narmtor says,"I cannot creditthat the metdesomepoet, Byron, would havecontentedlysat down with Banleby to o€mine a law document of, sayfive hundred pages.. ." And when the narrator seesthat Banleby is mad and mu$ be dismissed, that is, when common sense bids the narrator'ssoul be rid of the man, the narraror cannot bring himself to go to Trinity Church. Reasonand imaginarion also divide the narrator'smind: each time Banleby's srubborn preferencesforce

8 /

oN wRITERSAND WRITING

the narrator into thought, the narrator thinks in two ways, by imagination (when he seesin poetic or religiousterms)and by reason(when he works out logicd deductions after studying facts);and the results of the rwo ways of thinking differ sharply. Reasontells the narrator that Banleby existson ginger nuts but somehow does not become hot and spicy; "imagrnationJ'explaining"what provesto be impossi' ble to be solvedby his judgmentj' tells the narrator that Banleby is a "poor fellow" who "meansno mischief" and "intendsno insolencel' When the narrator examinesBanleby's belongngs,imaginationleads him closeto an understandingof Banleby the individual:ashe detects, through empathy,the lonelinessof Banleby, he seesthat he and Banleby are "both sonsof Adam," and he beginsto suffer "sad fancyings-the chimeras,doubtless,of a sick and silly brainl' He adds,"Presentiments of strange discoverieshovered round me. The scrivener'sPale form appearedro me laid out, among uncaring strangers,in its shivering winding sheetl' Rearcn,howe\€r, leadsthe narratorin a different direc' tion. He seesthat the man is mad (a socid judgment)and that, after giving Banleby afain chanceto prorc himself sane,he must fire him. Throughout the story the narrator'sgenerousimpulses,aswell ashis artempt at self-justificationwhen common sensefails to drive out the senseof guilt, take religiousform' by leapsof faith, or imagination, he understandsBanleby, and when he is consideringdoing harm to Banleby for the sakeof his own reputadon, he consoleshimself with words like "charity" *d "love," dlowing himself to belierrethat what he plans is after all for Bartleby's good, not his own. (The narrator is self-deluded,nor hypocriticd, for ashe tells the story now he understandsand, usually, acknowledgesthe mistakeshe made at the time of his Banleby rroubles. Mistakes he does not acknowledgeopenly he treatsin comic terms, ashe treatshis ethicd perversionof the moral injunction "that ye love one anotherl') If the narraror's interpretation of Banleby's madnessis correct, imagination, presenringr metaphor which relatesdeadlettersand rnen, is the basisof Banleby's plight. In other words, he is a man who has seen a vision and, holding true to his vision, can no longer oPerate in the ordinary world. In a sense,he is a queerson of fanatic,operating on the basisof a religion of his own. Obviously the conflicts in "BartlebyJ' togetherwith the gerrnsof symbolic extension of meaning, are rooted in character; and the

"BARTLEBY"'

ART

AND

SOCIAL

COMMITMENT

/

9

legitim^cy of the conflicts,whether they are seenasconflictsbetween the individud and societyor betweenwill and necessity,is equally clear. Thus the story is not a melodrama(between,say, the stupid reviewerof Pierreand the pure, heroic author) but an honest fictional representation of a dilemmawhich, in ordin.ry life, cannot be resolrad. In the end the narratorunderstands.learning that Banleby was a deadBanleby'svision,he seesby ^ leapof imaglnation lemerclerk,he achie\res exactlywhat Banleby must haveseen-dead letters,deadmen, limited human freedom. This vision is the terrible outcome foreshadowed 'And I trembledto think that my contact with the scrivener earlier' had alreadyand seriouslyaffectedme in a mentd wuy.And what further and deeperaberrationmight it not yet produce?"From the beginning the narrator hasbeenimaginative-in fact, like Banleby, hasbeen grven to "fancyings" and "chimeras"; but unlike Banleby, he also judgment.When he needsto, he can control his fancies.Unpossesses like Banleby,he creates:he originally createdhis praaice, he hascreated "recondite documents,"and he is now creatinga work of art. Reason must impose order upon the chaosof imagination. Symbolismin "Banleby" supponsthis view of scriraneras visionary and narrator ascreator.The religion of ordi nary scrivenersis the routine of the law office or the will of the lawyer: the narrator speaks of Tirrkey as the "most reverentialof men," valueshis "morning servicesl'end cannotget him to give up his afternoon"derotions"; and the narrator tells us that Tirrkey eatsginger nuts as though they were "wafers." Banleby is another maner' his arrival is an "advent," there is nothing "ordinarily human about himi' he is full of "quiet mysteries," and when the narrator leavesBanleby alone in the office Banleby stands"like the last pillar of a ruined templel' He dies at last among "murderersand thievesl'And whereasBanleby is Christ-like,the narrator isJehovah-like:the voice behind the story like the voice behind Tbe Confidntce-Man,is mythical, for the speakerhere is God, the story of his reluctant changefrom the legalistic,tribal deity of the Old Testamentto the Crodof Love andJusticein the New Testament. As Melville treats the material, Christ is not a son of C'od but (as the Old GstamentJehovahseeshim) an "incubus," thus not a revelation sent by God to man but rather a nightmarecreaturewho drives (as,on the literal level,Banleby drivesthe God into self-knowledge lawyer to self-knowledge).

l0 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

The narrator andJehovahare linked in numerousways.The narrator is officially "Master" in Chancery.Like Jehorah, he keepsout of the public eye and works "in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat." The narrator'sfirst scrivener,Turk y, is the miliant archangelMichael. His nickname is possibly meant to suggestnot only the red-necked, irasciblefowl emblematic of thanksgivingbut also the terrible Tirrk. He has a face which "beams," "blazes," and "flames" like the sun, and he considershimself, rather insolently,the narraror's"right-hand manl'He useshis ruler as a sword and is in chargeof rhe narraror's forces,marshallingand deploying "columns" (the narrarorspeakslater of his "column of clerks"), and charging"the foel' His "inflamed" ways are always "worse on Saturdays" (the Sabbath).The second scrivener,Nippers (pincers)i is syrnbolicdly linked with Lucifer. He is a "whiskered, sallow,and, upon the whole, piratical-lookingyoung man" who suffersfrom "ambition" aswell as indigestion.He is impatient with the duties of a mere copyist, and his ambition is evinced by "an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs,such as the original drawing up of legd documentsl' (The Devil is famous for making pacts: consider poor Faust.) His indigestion (spleen)is "betokened in an occasionalnenroustestinessand grinning irritability, malediccausingthe teeth to audibly grind together. . . , unnecessary tions, hissed,rather than spoken,in the heat [infernofof business.. ]' 'Among the manifestaHe hashis own kingdom, for the narrator says, tions of his diseasedambition was a fondnesshe had for receivingvisits finm cenain ambiguous-lookingfellows in seedycoats,whom he called his clients."He is "considerableof a ward-politiciani' occasiondlydoes "a licle businessat the Justices'couns," and is "not unknown on the stepsof the Tombs." As gods and would-be godscontrol willful rnen, so Nippers jerks his desk about asif it were "a perversertoluntaryagent and vexinghiml' The third scrivener,Ginger Nut (Raphael,perhapsfor Milron rhe messengerand sociableangel),is officid cake(or "wafer") and apple (forbidden fruitP) purveyor for the establishment. Much of the humor in "Banleby" dependsupon the reader'sperceiving the symbolic level, for comic effect arisesout the tendency of surfaceand symbolic levelsto infect one another: the narrator,an ordinary man, is comic when he behaveslike God, and C'od is comic when he behaveslike ffion; and other tensionsbetweensurfaceand syrnbol (Turkey-Michael, Nippers-Lucifer) work in the sameway.

"BARTLEBY",

ART

AND

SOCIAL

COMMITMENT

/

ll

folding doors(throu$ which, presumably,we seedarkly) Grnund-glass 'According to my humor;' dividethe narrator'spremisesinto rwo parts. the narraror says,rather pleasedwith himself, "I threw open these doors, or closedthem." He also takespleasurein his cleverdisposition of Banleby' Bartlebysits insidethe doors (all others are outside) but sits behind a screen"which might entirely isolateBanleby from my sight, though not removehim from my voice." Puns frequently contribute to this humor. The words "original" and "genius" work as they do in Tbe Confidmce-Man.And when the narrator becomes resignedto Banleby he says,"One prirne thing was this-bs uasalways tbere.. :' (Melville'sitalics).When the scrivener'sbeing "alwaysthere" provesa not unmixed blessing,the narrator so/s: And as the idea came upon me of his possiblyturning out a long.lired ffian, and k*p occupying my chambers,and denying my authority; and perplexingmy visitors; and scanddizing my professionalrepuntion; and castinga generalgloom over the premises;keepingsoul and body togetherto the last upon his savins (for doubtlesshe spent but half a dime a day),and in the end perhapsoutlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy.. . I resolvedto gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerableincubus. Ere revolving any complicated project, however, adapted to this end, I first simply suggestedto Banleby the propriety of his permanentdeparture.. . But, having taken three days to meditateupon it, he apprisedme, that his original determination remainedthe same;in short, that he still preferred to abide with me. (The funniest barrageof puns in the story is keepingsoul and bodytogetherto tbe lastupon bis sauings.) But the effect of the symbolic level is not always-and is neverentirely-comic. When the narrator abandons his office to Nippers at the time of Banleby's arrest,one is more distressedthan amused.One is moved, too, by the rich final line of 'Ah, the story: Banleby! Ah, humanity!" A man who behaveslike God may be queerly admirable.The narrator puffs up his chest like God, but he is also capableof infinite compassion,he is dedicated

12/

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

to the spirit of the law (he will not get rid of Banleby by laying an essentiallyfalse chargeon him), and he can survive. The lawyer-turned-anistis creative,like C'od, becausehe hasjudgment. He has imagination like "the mettlesomepoet, Byronl' but unlike Byron (Melville seemsto suggest)the lawyer hasthe fudgment to seethat the commitment of an is to man. One reasonfor the socid commitment of an, as we have seen,is that society cannot operate without voluntary or inroluntary diminution of the individual will. But Melville offers, in "Banleby," another reasonas well. The final 'Ah, line of the story is both an equadonand an opposition' Banleby! Ah, humanity!" Man lives on a walled-up streetwhere the practice of law flourishesand jusdce is operativeonly in the mind. If justice is to be introduced into the ordinary world, if man is to receiverecompensefor being stoppedin mid-action by dry lightning (like the narrator's man from Virginia), justice must come either as a Christian afterlife or as a transmutationof purely conceptualexperience-that is, as ert. The first seemsno longer cenain: the office of Master in Chancery is now defunct, "a [damnedl prematureact]' We mu$ find some other pleasantremuneration.The betrayedBanleby getsjustice and mercy at last, though; for Banleby, whose freedom was limited in life by the inescapabilityof death, is now transmogri{iedto eternal life in an. Before Banleby, the office was governedby law; but the reconditedocument at hand is a Nerr Ttstament of sorts,at once ahical and moral. It insistsupon law in this world, but it alsoprovidesjustice. Though life must of necessitybe characterizedby limited freedom, voluntary self-diminution,there will be, after life, an. The anist rolls the stone away-that is the narrator's creativeact-and man escapes from the lbmbs.

NOTE 1. For sugestions concerningthe names"Nippers" and "Ginger Nut" I am indebted to E. M. Glenn of Chico State College.

An Invective Against MereFiction

l . \ s E V E R Y O N EK N o w s , T H E w H o L E T E N dency of modern life and thought is againstthe absolute.Metaphysics is out, "alternatiraconceptud systems"are in. Kings are out, pluralism is in. Relativity is all. But howeveruseful relativism may be as a wuy of running daily life-keeping fascistsout of power, keepingtea panies civilized-it hasnothing to do with an. Relativismdeniesthose finalities toward which man's spirit hasdways groped. To admit that there are no findities is to put the spirit out of business;to saythat finalities are a matter of personal assenionis to make the spirit's business insignificant. Despitethe vogueof relativism,good paintersand composerscontinue to make absoluteaffirmations,but they do so in spite of their critics, their hrppy, horn-swoggl.d audiences,and the richly rewarded hacks who call themselvespaintersor composers.As for literature, the two most imponant of the establishednovelistsin America are that greatgosip SaulBellow, with his "persond visioni' and that master of illusion, prank$er,puzzler,Madimir Nabokov. Both are solid writers, but neither is so rnrlgaror obsoleteasto admit his fiction (asChekhov said) "tells the truthl' The fact is that, despitetheir protesurions,Bellow and Nabokov do tell the truth, insofarasthey are significantwritersBellow clumsily, Nabokov with careful craftsmanship.

l3

1 4/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

To put it anotherway, writers work out in wordstheir intuitionstheir private cenainties-of how things are. Good writers have right and significant intuitions, and they presenttheir intuitions intact by meansof masterfultechnique.To deny the possibilityof absoluteintuition is either to scrapthe an of fiction or to look patronizinglyon the fool who works at it. Ultimately, the critic or publisher'sabnegation of the absoluteturns weak but seriouswriters into hacksand promotes the publication of books by natural-born bus drivers. I am not really sayingthat only one book should havebeen published this season-Ommsetter'sLtuk. I approveof books on chess, stories about boys and dogs, and one or two other things. Whar I mean I must say by examples.Before I do that, though, I musr add one truism more. In the absoluteworld of fictiond truth, rhe novelist speaksof what might be, In Cold Blood notwithstanding-speaks of people and eventsabout whom the reader is not likely to feel any violent urge to disagree,though sometimeshe ought to. The critic, on the other hand, declaimsthe truth about an actu.lity, a book, waving the old flrg of Absolute Taste in the face of dl common sense.To the relativist'srhetoricalquestion "Who is to judge?"the critic leaps up, red beard flying, b*grg his crutches,screarning,"Me!" laughter. Gntative applause.If the man has any brains, any dignity, he soon learnsto speakof demonstrableslike Form, asif constructionin a novel were far more important than what the norrelis constmcted to do. Or he learns to speakof PersonalVision, becomingsideshowbarker for freaks.Sincenovelistsare people too, the critic learnsto make careful distinctions betweenthe work and the man who worked it out, as if a man who thinls and feels like Capote couldhavewritten like Graham Greene this time, unfonunately, he didn't. What is important to notice here is that the capitulating critic is right. Art is not all that imponant, or an) Maymost art. Nevenheless,it may be observed of clowns, especidly red-bearded,bespectacled clowns who bangtheir crutches-they persist. Now to the examplesand what I mean about Fiction and Information and Escapeand Thuth. My object, I should explain at once, is to comment on ercr)nhing in this enomous hodgepodgesack of books I've been sent by the editors of Tlte Swtbern Rruiewand make of the hodge-podgea cleandernonstrationof what distinguishes{ictiond truth from mere fiction.

AN

INVECTIVE

AGAINST

MERE FICTION

/

I'

When PeterFaeckepublished TbeFirehugsin his native Germanyhe wasthen rwenty-three-he was "hailed by leadinglite rary critics," accordingto rhe jacket,"rs a writer of stanling originality and Proven anistic achierrementl'The tde, told backwardsand inside-out,concerns (l) town guilt, (2) a man in searchof lineage,(3) racial conflict and guilr (Jewsand Germans,not whites and Negroes),(4) an idiot, (5) an (6) sawmills,(7) arson. Faulkner all-knowing detective-lawyer-uncle, reheated,a thick and bitter brew. From an absolutist'spoint of view, Faeckeis a hack. Usudly the panderingof writers and publishersdoesnot come to ourright fraud, however.One finds, for instance,young writers who are devoudysincere,like Marilyn Hoff (Dink's Blues)and Gene Horowitz (HomeIs WbereYouStartFrom). Miss Hoff haswritten a college novel that soundslike a collegegrrl's letter home, full of ellipsesand girlish opinions about civil rights and free will and imagination, in the obscenepopulu magazinestyle' "The next d^y wasFriday,November 22. When rr happened[-y itdicsl I was grabbinglunch in the snack barl' Shockof recognition?Book dso hassymbols.Horowitz's bookmuch betterwritten-is about the generations,how the youngercan't learn from the older, how no two people can communicate,and so on. Horowitz is good at renderingscenesfrom New YorkJewish life, and asa sociologlcdstudy his novel is interesting.The trouble is that sociology is not, itself, interesting. It deals with the moment, as Kierkegatrdwould say.It providesmereinformation. Horowitzwdlows in trivid detail, havingneither the barbaricwisdom of Melville, who scornedsuch stuff, nor the philosophicalinsight of Tolstoy (or, in a smaller waf, PeterThylor), who can make gossipsignificant.Perhaps becausehis experienceis limited, perhapsbecausehe has been taken in by fashionablenonsense,Horowitz's aftemptsat unirrersdizingcome to nothing' howeverpopular it may be to assertthat eachgeneration mu$ learn on its own, the assenionis fdse. If a secondgeneration can't learn from a first, the reasonis that the secondgenerationhas a basicand uninterestingfault' it lacksthe ability to empathizeor think and thus understand.Great writers deal with problemswhich conftrrnt a hedthy, intelligent man, however grotesquethe fictiond representative; smdl writers deal with social or physiologicaltraps. (Captain AhrU rnay be mad, but he's a pieceof Melville, by no meansa fool, a weakling, or merely ^ victim of social conditions.) Marilyn Hoff

16/

oN wRrrERS AND wRtrrNG

got publishedbecausethe racial questionsells.Mr. Horowitz got published becausedienation is in. Neither writer hasclarified rhe human situation, though both make a youthful, feebleattempt. Both harc been encouragedto market simplemindedopinions and undisciplinedtalent. The panderingof gno\ryn-upwriters is more troublesome.Take,for instance,Margaret [,ane (A Nigbt at Sea).A love rriangle-husband, wife, mistress.Husband and wife go to the old symbolic seaand ruminate arnong the usual poetic-soundingnauticd fittings for two hundred pages.Wife decidesshe should kill hersell the Christian thing ro do. Takespills while piloting the boat, despitethe argumen$ of common senseand a ghostly voice. Boat is wrecked, husband dies, and wife finds that life is, for mysterious reasons,wonh living after all. The writing is professiond,and the andysisof charactersis subtle,so that the immonality of the argumenthaseffect.Infidelity is justified because we ought to be "free," ought to "fulfill outselves,"accordingto Miss ["ane.And aseveryoneknows, nothing in this world is really satisfying but sex. Or take Willard Modey (bt Noon Be Fair): a sad storyannoyingly well told, in its slick way-of American exploitation. It used to be that in beautiful, natural Mexico girls fornicated for free on the beach,but then carnethe gringos,payingthe girls, on one hand, preachingto them, otr the other. Now Mexico is diny and ronen and guilt-ridden and capitalist,like America. Motley, like Miss Lane,makes money on fashionablelies, in this casethe lie that Americansarebasicdly hypocritesand fools and e\reryother country in the world is nicer. Motley is wrong, s wrong as any Bircher,and his publisher(Pumam) should be rounced. One might say the same of the Tlident Press, publishersof Don Ti'acy'smaudlin and would-be sensationdBazzaris, except that a book so s(tremely clumsy can haveno effect whatever. The probably unwitting social and moral thesisis absurd, the technique embarrassing. I am of coursenot sayingthat every book mu$ be significant,but only that a man who thinks he is significant-thinl$ himself an ani$had better be right. Helen Maclnnes's Tbe Double Image,'a tale of intrigue and espionage,is good entenainment,though not an and never meant to be. Ale,xanderFullenon's Lionbear?is now and then moderately enrerraining,though hardly as excitingas Fullenon thinks, unlessthe style is pure desperation.Even the writers of entenainmentshaveto be trivially honest, that is to say, convincing. Maclnnes usually is,

AN INVECTIvE AGAINsT MEREFIcTIoN /

17

Fullenon isn'r, but the imperfectionof his craft is not bothersome. One doesnot judge a lemon drop by the samestandardsone usesin judging a lifeboat. On the other hand, the mereintent to be amusingand insignificant for the entertainer.ConsiderJeanStafford's of success is no guarantee A Motber in History(not a work of fiction but a handy example).It ro write unimponantly of imponant matters-the assassinais tasteless Miss Stafford'sorigtion of a President,the backgroundof an assassin. inal object was seriousenough,howeverunpretentious:to seekan in' tuitive, feminine understandingof Osvald's mother. But Miss Stafford hassold out to the snobbish,complacent,chatteringladies'magazines. 'Accustomedasshewasto public speaking,Mrs. Oswald For instance: did not seemto be addressingme specificrllybut, rather,a largecongregation. . . Taking advantageof my anonymity in this quiet crowd and of the fact that her back wasturned, I looked around the room in the snoopyway women do when they arein other women'shouses.. ." A mornent later Miss Stafford speaksof "a writing deskwhere orderly pilesof paperswere laid out to which ry Paul Pry eyewould be bound to stray'' Throughout her narratire,Miss Stafford superciliouslycdls attentionto Mrs. Osvald's grammar,her pronunciation,her rmlgarity. Mrs. Oswdd is straightout of FlanneryO'Connor, but at leasther demonicstupidity is honest.Miss Stafford,who usedto write serious fiction, has taught herselfto be what longinus calls "frigid"-emotionally trivid. I have an ulterior motive for draggingin Jean Stafford. I want to make a distinctionbetweenart and entertainment,one in which "fiction" in the old sensehasno place.I havesaidthat greatwriters avoid meresocialor physiologicaltrapsand that entenainers-that is, writers of spy stories,animal stories,amusinginterviews,and other books to escepewith-are successful if they amusewithout offendirg our sense of what is fitting. Thesewere convenientsimplifications.C'ood writers do dealwith trivid problemsand trivial people.When they do, howercr, they recognizethe triviality of their materid and force the readerperhapsfor the first time-to recognizeit too. Mere enteftainment, then, providesescapefrom the way things4r€; entertainingart clarifies. Entenainment fails when considerationsinside or outside the work forcethe readerto musesoberlyon tuth-not the truth of fact, but the truth of human values.Entenainingaft, on the other hand, fails

18/

oN wRrrERs AND wRtrrNG

whenever it turns into pure entertainment (shooting in the wrong direction) or wheneverit falls into error (a shot in the right direcdon, but a miss). From a technical point of view, both entertainment and art require craftsmanship,but since style is one of the chief devices for liberadng truth, it should be obvious that the richer the language, the worse the entertainment.Or to put the thing neutrally,entenainment requirescleverness,an richness.Needlessto say,neither art nor entertainment very often get what they require. It is also hardly necessaryto mention that most books are neither an nor entertainment but a mixture of the two-Bellow's Herzog,for instance:part vision, pan praffle. Nevenheless,the distinaion is right and useful,and books which violate the distinction are unsatisfing, like musicfrom a French horn that leaks air on cenain notes. Entenaining an does get its due in Anthony Burgess,even in his relatively slight first novel, A Visionof Banlments, belatedlypublished last winter. The comedy is lighter than that in Burgess'slater books, but the anistic focus is the same.Characterswho are not trivial, or wouldn't be if the world were put together right, find themselvesentangledin the trividity of the world-in this case,the world of milimry system.The central characteris a seriouscornposerwhose noble but inept attempts to managewhere a Tiuth-man doesnot fit throw comic light on both the impossibleided (which we all the more earnestly affirm) and the social redities which keep the ided out of reach.Not that the tde is a melodrarna.The army is all too eagerto be a friend of art, education, and all that: it joyfully makeslists, sendsout directives, studies the appropriateand inappropriateregulations;but it is as hard for military systemto adapt to art asfor an to adapt to milinry system. The hero's name is Ennis, his story L burlesqueof Virgil's epic. No empire hasbeenfounded yet when the book ends,but Ennis is still at it, laboring like the insectsin Burgess'ssplendidfinal Paragraph. The languagetn A Visionof Banlcmcntsis not as ingenious as in the later Burgessnovels,but it is sufficient,often very funny, rich in images which are at once clerrerand grimly aPProPriate. And pure entenainment,of a sort lessformulaic than the usualsPy srory or animal story getsits due and then some inSofiSoap,the first of William Elsschot'sTbreeNweb, superblyranslatedby A. Brothenon. SofrS*p is the srory of a wise swindler named Boorman, managing director of Tbe World Pwieat of Financl, Tiadeand CammercaIndustry,

A N I N v E c T I V E A G A I N s T M E R EF I c T I O N /

19

a publicationwith no subscribers.Most of the story An and Science, consistsof Boorman'shallDostoyevskean,half:Dickenseantalk about is ^ device for extoning money from other the world. His Reaieut swindlers(the whole world), and the novelisticexcusefor the talk is that Boorman is breakingin a new managingdirector. What rnakes the book delightful is that, though Boorman believesall the world to be crooked,Boorman is no whining cynic. He has enormousadmiration for crooks' "Look, you do it like thisi'and he flicked open a thick directory and read out: Wabington H oul- I I 0O rmms- elcaritity- batbroqms- lifi s Telepbone 16t0t, 16t06, 16307, 16308, 16t09, 16310, ''You can seeat once that the WashingtonHotel is someThey word the adranisements thing for rhe WorldFcuial so that the innocent readerhasvisionsof some immenselabyrinth where he'd get lost without a guide.Then those phone numbers.They could just aswell ashaveput one-six-three-ofive, a hyphen,and ten, but with eachnumber printed separately you can hear a chorus of phonesjangling as you read the advenisement.They know a trick or two!" Sofr Soop "exposes"everything under the sun-from politicians to funerd directorsto unions to fat, sick ladies,and the inventiveness of the thing is amazing.Tbe Leg, the secondof the Tltree Noaels,is shoner and almostasfunny. Boorman growsremorsefuland struggles to atone for his earlierswindling of a fat lady who now has a wooden l.g. To no avail,of course.The swindled shdl inherit the eanh. The third novel is sadlydisappointing-a moral tale, full of heavy-handed symbolismand dl the virtuous emotion Elsschotpoked fun at so cleverly in his earlier pieces.What has gone wrong here is interesting, or at any rate suppoftsmy thesison art vs. entenainment.The longing and disillusionmentwhich characterizeall of Elsschot'swork can make excellententenainment,for there Elsschotmock-soberly takes patent illusion ashis clown-hero'spremiseof reality and doesnot claim to sayhow things really are. But when, in an attempt at aft, Elsschot describesthe human situation asa sadcaseof longing and disillusionment, he mistakesa half-truth for truth, and the result is one more whimpering modernnoral. At the sametime, the rary clerarnesswhich

zo /

oN wRtrERs AND wRtrtNG

makesthe earlier short novels delightful is hollow and out of place here,while the attempt at richnessintroducedby symbols(mainly the sea)fails becausethe symbols are easy and awkwardly introduced. I object on thesesamestylistic groundsto Heather RossMiller's Tenantsof tbeHouseand, more $renuously,John Nathan'stranslation of Yukio Mishima s TlreSailor Wlw Fellfram Grarewitb tbe Sea,which is probably no better in Japanese.Miss Miller's widely acclaimedstyle consistsof "poetic" diction (housesare "dwellinp"), high-falutin' sentencesdesignedto intensify everydaysituations,and trite bits of irony. By high-falutin'I mean, "But it didn't turn out that way. The vision that burned under the carbidelampsof the CarolinafarmersasJohn Murdoch stood in their kitchensand tdked of his church,his Mission, burned in the lamp of Destiny with a different blazestruck by another matchI' As for trite irony, take the chapter-opener,to be found in a hundred ladies'novels,"summer cameto Johnsboroin spiteof the warl' One might point to numerous instancesof such sentimental writing in Miss Miller's novel, and I am temptedto do it if only from distressat the high praise her style has generdly been grven. But I won'r. Three things should be said in her favor. Though she writes with a gilded shovel,she does not trade in patently moronic ideasor gossipfor its own sake.Second,her symbolsare more or lessoriginal and somerimesinreresting.And third, the novelis infinitely benerthan its dust jacker-a picture of Poe'sMiss Usher, with a greenfaceand stormy blue hair. As for Mishima's novel, the dust jacket is excellent.The prose,if one can isolateit from what it carries,is lean and spare,classical,like all Mishima's writing. The trouble is, there arebrutally obviousstock symbols, intended ironicdly, in pan, but nevenhelessPun/eyorsof un' truth. The novelis about the seaand the land, youthful ambitionand middle-ageddisillusionmentand compromise.The plot is assPareand classicalas the prose:and the dangerin a strictly classicalplot which ends unhappily is that the doom must be inevitableas the plot and must be, ar the sametime, significantenough to justify the tonure the readermust endure.Mishima tellsof a sailorwho once believedand secretlybelievesyer-that he is set apan from the restof mankind and will somedayachievesome son of glory. He becomesthe idol of a group of schoolboyswho havethe samevagueyearningfor the extra,ardinaryand the same conviction of persond superiority.The boys for unconvincing reasonstrain themselvesin the heanlessness

AN INVEcTIVE AGAINST MEREFtcTIoN / 2l

of a Nietzscheansuperman.For instance,in one powerfully upsetting scene,they murder and cur up a kitten. When the schoolboysdiscover befuddled,gende, that their hero is an ordinary man, compassionate, him exactly as to destroy like any common landsman,they resolve they destroyedthe kitten. The novel ends with the sailor drinking druggedrea,mumbling of his dream of glory about to be liquidated' "Still imrnersedin his drerffi, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory asenyone knows, is bitter stuffl' We haveheard before that glory is bitter-heard it so often we need to questionthe opinion. Mishima'sdivisionof humanity into landsmenand seamen,compromisersor wrongheadeddory seekers,is melodramatic,and the pious melodramais completely unrelieved.Every characterwho figures in the story srandson one side or the other of the neat dichotomlt an actresswho pitifully missesthe Oscarsyear after fear; a lady unwillingly compromisingin her double role as land-rooted mother and mistressro a sailor; and on the other side,the sentimentalsailor, the murderousboys.But therearr rn this world somewho succeed,some who, asW. H. Gasssays,"know how to bel' As a psychologicalthriller Mishima's rde might be successful(though psycholory for its own sakeis no more interestingthan sociology);but when accidentd psychologicallimitations are elevatedto cosmic veritiesby an awesome rumbling of syrnbolism,the resultis fdsehood and thus unsatisfying drama.In Mishima too, one may aswell add, sexhasmuch to answer for. The murderoussor, Noboru, getshis greatvision of the mysterious glory which is his supposedDestiny from peepingwhile his mother and the sailor make love. And as for the sailor' To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Thingr like her lulls and storms,or her caprice,or the beauty of her breastre{lectingthe setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you're in a ship that mountsthe seaand ridesher and yet is constantlydeniedher. It's the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can't quenchyour thirst. Nature surroundsa sailorwith all theseelementsso like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That's where the problem begins,right there-I'm sure of it. Captain Ahab, I think, would spit.

22 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

If entertainmentprovidesa moral holiday,whereasan tellsthe truth about human values,one must make up a third categoryfor works which, fictional or not, deal frankly with mere fact. Both Frans Coenen'sTheHouseon tbc Canal,translatedbyJamesBrockway,and J. Van Oudshoorn'sAlimation, translatedby N.C. Cleg, published together in the Classicsof Dutch and Flemish Literature series,one essenti.lly non-fictiond, the other a work of fiction, are successful accountsof non-universalfact, TbeHouseon tbeCanal is the chronicle of a real house and the family which actudly lived there. The book is a sociological-historical piece,interestingbecauseit is Dutch, wellresearched,and gossipy;it is legitimare,as Gene Horowirz's book is not, becauseCoenen abstainsfrom mord comment where there is none to be made. Alicnation is a grueling psychologicd analysis,a painstakingclinical record of mental breakdown as seenfrom inside. The book has an effect much like one comrnon effect of what I have called xrt: the readeris torn to bits. But the murder of the readerhas no broad philosophicd implications.If the madnessof the centralcharacter has its basisin puritanism, the caseis not presentedas anphing more than a specid case.One readsin the way one readsabout the emotiond problemsof Siamesetwins. An excellentbook, for its kind; neither art nor entertainmentbut an illustration of what the Saezttrtc Amnican could be if scientistslet loose. A book of information. Findly, as I said at the $an, great literary anists give right answers Such to the right questionsand do so with masterful craftsrnanship. writers are rare, and a glanceLt the writers who have come closest shows *hy. Take M"y Sanon frrst-Mrs, Stnms Hears tbe Mermaids Singing. Miss Sanon is a careful craftsmanwith considerableintelligence,but she is shallow. Her novel concernsan old lady poetesspassionately dedicatedto "getting down" the truth, to understanding,and so fonh. Unfonunarely, the lady we are supposedto adrnireis a posturing,selfpitying phony. She talks to herselfin the stagymanner of an elderly lesbian(which she is), "Old thing, it's high time you pulled yourself 'Thapped by lifei Hilary mutteredl' And Miss together!" Or again, " Sarton, for understandablereasons,can't seethrough her. Tivo interviewers (lovers, ro make a plo$ are on their way to ask Mrs. Stevens about her life and work, and half the time while she waits for them Mrs. Stevensworries about the Meaning of Life, half the time ddlies

AN INVEcTIVE AGAINsT MEREFIcTIoN / 2t in (we are supposedto believe)characteristicfeminine distress,"This room, roo, gatheredtogethera huge complexof living and harmonized it, all focusedon the small intimate glimpseof the seacut through scrub and brush, framed in French windows at the end. But would they disdainthe floweredchintz on the sofaasold-fashioned?Would they registerthe two Impressionistpaintingsas not quite first class?" Besidesa room which is redly a poem she has the fond memory of a dead husbandnamed Adrian, his mother, named Margaret (who usedto bring one perfectrosein a glass),and a preciousyoung homo' sexud friend namedMar (fussynamesall). To Mar Mrs. Stevensshows her poems,with the following tiresomeresult' It wassalutaryto pit the new poemsagainstsomeoneso young and intransigent-so ignoranttoo-who would havenone of her hardwonvinuosity, who forced her back and back to the essencewho brought out the crude, origind person.They fought bitterly, sometimesover a singleword. Often shewas in a ragewhen he left but the rage shot adrenalin through her, gaveher the strengthto begin a poem again,tear it apan, make it harder and $ronger so she could hurl it at Mar the next d^y in triumph, She had not imaginedthat she would be so fenilized by a human being again. And there areothers,a brilliant castof fops, mostly guy.Mrs. Stevens teachespeoplethat "We haveto dareto be ourselvesl'Onewonders if such people ougbtto be themselves.Great writing requiresa great personto do the writing. Miss Sanon leavesus with {ine craftsmanship and a trivial view of man and-the real subjectof the novel-poetry. John Updike't Of tbeFarm is not much better.Again, the craftsmanship is impressive,but the people, like Updike in his present$age, arehypersensitive whiners. Every expen line tremulously whispersthat the world is very sad' "Now in cool air I kissedher anciher face felt feverish.Fall, which cornesearlier inland, was presentnot so much as the scent of fallen fruit in the orchard as a lavendertinge in the dusk, a senseof expiration. The meadow wore a strip of mist where a little rivulet, hardly a creek,chokedby weedsand watercress,trickled and breathed.A bat like a speckof pain jerked this way and that in the membranousviolet betweenthe treetopsJ'The characters-an ad

24 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

man, his mother, his wife and stepson-spend three daystelling grim stories,quarrelling,feebly patchingup, and, aboveall, watching each other, scrutinizing emotions. Everybody is jealousof everybody,and listening to their conversationis like listening to cross young lovers who'd be better off home in bed. The book is not mere sociology or psychology,however.It has a clear and driving mord, a kind of affirmation by default: vicious and self-centered peopleharreto be moral to keep from killing each other. In shon, the limitation of the novel is that its mordity is grounded-as the Sanreanepigraphwarns uson a squinting and cynical vision, that is, a mistake.This streakin Updike has not dways been quite so obvious, and one hopeshe will get pa$ it, whatever the cause. Stylistically, ElizabethJane Howard's Aftn lulius rings truer than M"y Sanon's book, and the andysis of charactersis for the mo$ pan nearly as convincing asUpdike's. Miss Howard's adrrantageis that she is wiser, emotionally hedthier than the other two writers. She too enjoys scrutinizingmotives,nuancesof meaningin common speech, psychologicalinterplay; but Miss Howard and her charactersare not all inconveniencedat having been born. Take the characterDaniel, for instance,at this point a $ranger listeningto a lady's suddenoutpouring of grief and indignation' He listened,and nodded-more to show that he was listening than to indicate agreementor even understanding.He understood that she was not h"ppy, all right, and of course, if peoplefelt like that, they spentnearly all their time trying to find the reasonsfor it, and he knew that he wasn't there to find the reasonsfor her, just to provide comfort-a little ignoranr warmth in this awful life of hers,jam-crammedwith ideasand disasterand with no man to account for it or take h.l mind off herself. When she had no more to say she asked him what he thought. He thought. The story is a kind of dlegory in which three dissimilarwomen achieve their moral identity by meansof what for thern amoun$ to a private m)'rh-:lulius, killed at Dunkirk. The proseis smooth and serviceable, and the controlling more cleverthan rich, not painfully self-conscious;

AN tNvEcTIvE AGAINsT MEREFICTION / 2t

idea is worth the writer's trouble. What limits this pleasingnovel is that, dlegory or no, the book is merely a ladies'book, Miss Howard merely a ladies'norelist. If we readfor escape,the serioustheme distracts us from the pleasantchatter,the pretty scenes,the touching sentimerts; once we are caught by the emergingidea, the gossipydetail stirs a tingle of impatienceand we wish to get on to what counts. The distinctionI havemade betweenart and entertainmentis borrowed from Graham Greene,and it would be ungrateful to useit against is a fine him. Put it this way, then. Relativelyspeaking, Tbe Comediaas norrel,especidlyfor readingon a train. Greenehimself hasprovidedthe standard.Near the start of the book the narrator saysin passing,"I tried to reada norrel,but the heavyforeseeablepro$€ss of its characters down the uninterestingcorridors of power mademe drowsy,and when the book fell upon the deck, I did not bother to retrieveitl' The novel but Brown is readinghassomethings in common with TbeCamediaas, no uninterestingcorriGreene'sbook hasnothing heavily foreseeable, dors. TbeComedians rs panly informational (Totalitarianismin Haiti), panly entenainment(a well-plottedthriller). It also makesa casualpass at aft, that is, Tiuth-telling, but here asdmost dways in Greene,Tiuth rideseasyand managesnot to be distracting-for two reasons.First, for all that hasbeenmadeof it, Greene'sThuth is-and hasalwaysbeencomfonableand familiar, a pieceof the plot. It hasfar lessto do with the Catholic'sproblem (asGreenehimselfhasinsisted)than with the ordinary human problem,that of mainoining faith in and commitment to those absolutevalues-justice, freedom,loyalty-which for Greene seemincreasinglyremote from actudity. Greene'sthesisis one that warms the heart, like sad,pretty girls and well-describedexotic landscapesand amusingminor characters-a pair of derroutvegetarians,for instance(asin this book). Second,Greene'sform and manner are insistentlypopular.When seriousan borrows a popular formula, the very mannerforcesone to recognizethat the formula is for once being taken seriously.ConsiderFaulkner.An odd or striking technique,one which forcesthe readeragain and again awayfrom the formula to its inner meaning,is wonhless if that rneaningis trifling or thoroughly familiar, and Greene is right to adopt the form he does. But if the anist'svision is significantand exceptiondit demandsunique CI(pression. On the other hand, Crawford Power's TbeEncounter,which after fifteen yearshasnow appearedas an Avon paperback,is a seriousand

26 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

original work of an held back from the first rank by Power's choice of conventional technique.Even so trifling a thing as the writer's way of beginning and seperatingchapterscan limit the effea of a novel. The book opensin mediasres,with a pieceof conversation-a beginning which requiresincredibleskill to bring off. It is one of the two stock openinp of spy stories,ladies'norcls, and who-doneits, the other being in mediasra description.Power'shandlingof chapterand episode, sometimesthe individud sentenceas well, cdl up the sameunlucky associations.The whole effect of the conventiond and popular technique-broken only in FatherCawder'smeditations-runs counterto the main force of the novel, rrtr impressirreexploration of the idea of goodness.Power'scentrd character,Father Cawder, is a Christian in the old-fashionedsense,a humiliator of the flesh,an uncompromising serviantof C'od. He is an embodiment of goodnessof acenain kind-as is almo$ every characterin the novel. And his goodness,like that of the people around hirn, is both admirableand deadly.The centrd encounter is between Fafier Cawder and an acrobat named Diamond, who at first seemsCawder'sopposite in errerywa/: a sensualist,apparently uncommitted, frndly a murderer.But in fact Diamond is Cawder and Cawder Diamond. No one in the norrelis normative. The norm emerges as an impossible ideal at the imaginary center of the circle of charactem-an ided of human love aswise asC'od's.FatherCawder is no more capableof such love than is any other man. His tragedy is that he will not be satisfiedwith mere forgrveness,confession.He ends brooding on the im Lgegven him by his alter €go, the plunge into death and the divine radiance;but that death he cannot choose. Breaking off from his prayer of forgveness,he becomes,in Power's brilliant close, a grim parody of the saintly manyrs of his faith, still throu$monifring the fleshbut dso turning-as imageryhassuggested out-to

stone. Before I can turn to what seemto me the rwo most imponant norcls published in the last few months-the last two novelsin my stack-I mu$ add to what I hara said dready one funher observation about what makes art. Excellent craftsmanshipis the limit of an intelligent and wise man-Graham Greeneamong entertainers,Anthony Burges among what I am calling anists. The great anist, the "genius," to use an old-fashionedword, is the man who seesmore connecions between things than an ordinary man can see and has, moreover, a peculiar

\ N r N V E c r t v E A G A I N s TM E R EF t c r t o N / 2 7 for hismedium."Style" is asinadequate uncningfeeling andabsolunly this feelingfor the writer'smediumas "church" would to describe be to describea cathedrd.(Panof the differencebetweena church anda cathedrdis that the manwho livesin a cathedralis a bishop.) Somemen,beyonddl doubt,harawordsbubblingin the holy wells one snatches wherethe re$ of us havemereblood. In desperation like "magicallanguagel'Fraudulentwriterslike at ludicrousphrases stealtheir mqsc from somebodygood.Badwriters,only Herr Faecke dimly awareof the mysterytrump up a style.(Strangeto say,all bad writerscomeup with the samestyle,thoughits elementsmay be differendydistributedfrom wrircrto writer.)Intelligpntwriterslike Buryess constructa style in his laterworks(andNabokov,too) painstakingly and pump into it anificialflaroringin the form of puns,anagrarts, andothermateridnot organicdlyrelatedto thethingbeingsaid.(Joyce engaged in this,but with a proprietyhisimitatorsmis: up to Finrugans WakeJoyce's booksaretdesof theanisttold by the anist;the linguistic comparable tricla arethe tracesor signsof thespeaker, to-and directly suggested by-the linguisticmennerof the Holy Ghost as patristic understoodhim.) exegetes Only rwo noralsin thisgnoupaneextraordinaryfor breadthof mind and verbalgenius.One is MargueriteYoungs Miss Madntosb,My Darling; the other is William Gass'sfirst norcl, Ommsmer's Lrck. Miss Youngestablishes at once(p. 4) the centralquestionof her enormousepicof mind' What was the organizationof illusion, of memoryl Who knew even his own divided hean? Who knew dl heans as his own? Among beingsstrangeto each other, those divided by the long roaringsof time, of space,those who harrener€r met or, when they meet, have not recognizedas their ovyn the other hean and that heart'sweaknesses, harc turned stonily away,would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishingthe mo$ secret relationships, deep cdling to deep, illuminations of the eternd darkness,recognitionsin the night world of voyagerdreams, all barriersdissolving,dl soulsasone and united?E*ry hean is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

28 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

The book is too big and too leisurely to read or judge in the usud way-a vastcity of associations,classicaland modern, in which floating spirits interpenetrateand external realitiesof time and placebreak down to become a stanling m)'th of the archetypalhuman life. One recalls,for many reasons,theJoyceanarchetyp€s,Father,Mother, Son, Daughter, Poet. It is directly to Joyce,I think, that Miss Youngis speaking, and she is saying No. No to the Aristotelean view of life as ^ conflict of generation, corruption, and re-creadon;no to the Joycean theory of history and, abora all, no to the theory of love asconstraint. Like Joyce, Miss Young knows what tales are wonh telling-she has carloadsof them, as doesJoyce-and likeJoyceshetellsher taleswith ht$ly conscious,highly anificid style.The greatdifference,from which all funher differencessprout, is that Miss Young is a thoroughgoing Platonist-a stanling thing to encounterin our time. Thus while both boldly seizeastheir theme "EverlnhingJ' the word meansmore (quantitatively) to Joyce than to Miss Young. Joyceoffers a metaphysicd explanationof the alphabet;Miss Young is not interestedin the dphabet as such but only in the fact that spellings,right or wrong, reflect some rernovefrom the ldea. Joyce is interestedin panicular responsibilities of specific kinp and statesmenaswell asthe genericidea Kingship (the crown and scepter,hat and cane),and he relatestheseto the responsibilitiesof the father, son, and poet. Miss Youngleapsat once to Kingship as love, with hats and cane-likeobjects(alsocloals, capes, robes)funcdoning as Freudiansymbols.Her allusiw style alludesdways to the same eternd forms in their infinite disguises;her symbols dl center in the sameidea. And so,whereasthe length of FinnegansWake is justified by the density of the book, its analysesof panicularsplaces,occupadons,institutions, rituds-the bloated length of Mks Maclntosb is an effect, simply, of system.The manifestationsof recurrent embodiments of the ldea might, in one sense,be broken off at any point, they dramatize a vision which is just as clear and possibly even as convincing in the abstract.The book lacks the emotive power of compression,in shon; but I am not sure the idea admits of compression.If so, Platonism pushedto its limit is not anistic"lly viable. And if this is true, I must nervously report, Platonism is false. The trouble with Platonism as a basisfor an is that the realm of forrns is a museum, and the world where forrns find their expression is a junk shop. It is impossiblefor a thoroughgoing Platonist to love

AN INvEcTIVE AGAINsT MEREFIcTIoN / 29

or respe$ the gew-gawsof actualityt he seesthe actual as curious garmentsfrom an old rrunk, and since people and placesare all dim emblems,signs-and signs,moreo\€r, which he underrepresentations, rt*dr beforehand-he very naturdly slidesinto finding greatestinterest in the signswhich are most grotesque. We had passed,on this journey, many curious piecesof rural architecture,an enormous coffee urn with its lid opened againstthe sky, a wigwam nightclub where, under a denuded oak, a melancholy buffdo was tethered, incongruous as the fadedwashingon the line. We had passeda windmill, a leaning tower, Noah's Ark, the old woman who lived in a shoe, but thesewere miles back, and there were now no buildings but thoseof the amorphousdistance,litde, low-roofed houses, smdl as ruined birds' nests,a child's face at some near window, the individuality blotted out by the watery greynessof the Middle Wesr, the train as small as a toy train crossing a toy bridge. not the leastof which At the sametime, Platonismhasits advantages, fancy: is the freedom it givesto Poetic There had beentheseseasof silk spun by manyred cocoons, silks so delicarethat they might be drawn for miles through a wedding ring like cloudsthrough the gold hoop of the abwhich might havebeen enclosedinside senrmoon, gossamers that casketwhich was a nut's shell, laceswhich seemedto melt, to disolra at a touch, ribbons crumbling into fog and bands of silk disintegratinginto dust and silks flowing into water as if warer were their counterpaft and moon-stained satinswith torn skins and white rosetteswhich might have been lying for years under the dust or in the waters of a grave-many bridal govvnsand no bride's slippers-for this bride had lost her slipperslong ago-m any flounces, ruffles, skins, underskins-bridd gowns of dl vintagesand perhaps of that vintagewhich neverwas on eafth, porous silks so thin that the leasttouch might causethem to fall into nothingness as snow might fall into a crucible of burning gold where a long-hairedangel walked with folded wings and eyeswhich staredat Mr. Spitzer.

30 /

oN WRITERS AND wRrrrNG

Miss Maclntosb,My Darling presenrsthe world as a glittering moonlit ruin, a dresm; as death ("for were we not already dead, w€ who breathed and wdked about, our breath like frozen plumes upon the winter air, our eyeballscracking in the cold?"). Miss Young has put the best yearsof her creative lifetime into this book, and her craftsmanship, even genius, is impressive.But the book is fiction. Ommsetur'sltuk, on the other hand, is tnre. It is an imperfea book, finally unsatisfying,but the work of an extraordinary mind. Whereas Miss Young s poetry is necessarilyincantatory all roices becomingone voice, and whereasher imagery is necessarilyantique-shopimagery Gass'slanguageand imagery come from panicular, red people and placesclosely observed-observedwith intenselove but dso with that comic detachmentwhich comesfiom the knowledgethat all men Lre, like oneself,slightly ridiculous. It is a poetry madeup of real people's turns of speech, Now folks today we're going to auction off Missus Pimber's things. I think you dl knew Missus Pimber and you know she had some preffy nice things. This is going to be a real fine sale and we have a real fine d^y for it. It may get hot, though, later on, so we want to keepthings moving right dong. And no$' I'm going to begin the salewith the things back here by the barn. You've dl had a chanceto look at everything so let's bid right out for thesefine thingsand keepthings moving right along. .

And poetry made up of the red world's images, The fire and the lamp made pairs of crossingshadows,one steadyand firm, one leaping and vague.Her shadowspoued the wdl and disappeared,drawn magicdly back beneathher chair assherocked,then daning fonh to climb the wdl rapidly again He found himself marking the height.Incrediblyswift, it bent itself up from the floor, passingthe picture, the long head reaching a mar in the paper and coveringa clusterof leaveswhile the lengtheningfinid that followed behind struck a rose..

AN INVEcTIVE AGAINsT MEREFIcTIoN /

3l

Gass'shandling of languageis unerring. And as a fictional strategist he is one of the best sinceFaulkner.Stripped to its thematic bones, Luck is a book about mind. The apparenthero, Brackett Omensetter's Omensetter,is a men who seemsto have escapedthat bane of our He knows river currents,can whistle consciousness. human existence, joy and no sign of "desirein the ordiwith like the birds, makeslove narysensel'The apparentvillain, ReirerendJethroFurber, a grotesque, and both hatesand envies tiny, spiderlikeman, is pure consciousness ancientbattle of intellecis the them between Omenserrer.The battle tual vs. "natural man," reasonvs. faith, intellectualcontrol vs. "luck," but in Gass'snovel the battle has a wide field, within the individual hean, within a rown, within a nation, within all civilization. The truth is that man must be conscious,at those times when it maners;ffiust make moral choices,when it matt€fs; must sometimes rise our of his material nature into mind, Jethro Furber is right and But it is dso true that to know "how BrackettOmensefferself-deluded. to be" one must love and must harresome measureof faith (in Gass's universeof Chance,a willingnessto tru$ one'sluck); and in this arena the intellectualis alwaysa ridiculous creature.He is a "liar" in the sensethat reesoncan support nearly anphing, if it lacls what the natural the cenainty of the hean; and the intellectual is, as man possesses, Jethro Furber rightly callshimself, "a diny old man," for his very distancefrom his materid nature makeshim lust after it. On the other hand, the appealingnatural man is wrong about himself, fot he does and his pretenseto himself and others that he consciousness, possess does not makeshim dangerous. For dramaticdevelopmentof this idea, Gasstakestwo greatAmerican archetypes-the heany frontiersman(Omensetter)and the hell-fire puritanpreacher(Furber).In the lirst secion of his norrel,"The Thiumph of IsrabestisTottl' he shrewdlyloads the dice-as they have always beenloaded-for Omensetter:IsrabestisTott is a thoroughly likeable old man who admiresOmensetter,hatesFurber (asthe sectionends, Tott is squashingspiders).As local historian, Tott is the consciousness of the rown of Gilean ('.And how would [the boyl learn his history now?Imaginegrowing up in a world where only generalsand geniuses, empiresand companies,had histories,not your own town or grandfather, house of Samantha-none of the things you'd loved"). But though he understandstown consciousness-hisown town's history

32/

oN wRrrERs AND wRITTNG

and geography-he doesnot understandeither individual human conor the history (or geographyeither) of the World. "Cats sciousness know how to live . . . Cats beat us at it bad. Now BrackettOmensetter, though-" In his role asindividual, Tott is himselfa natural man. The norrel'ssecondsection,"The love and Sorrow of Henry Pimber]' on the surfacesupponsbut on a deeperlevel underminesthe initidly favorableview of Omensemer.Henry Pimber, who hasaffinitiesboth with narureand with mind-lockjaw once made him outwardly a stone, inwardly ,jangle of consciousness-loves Omensetterand looks upon him "almost asa personalsaviorl' (Omensefteris a realnamebut also ironically suggests"the one who setsthe omens," a god. Omensener is a New Testamentfigure of faith and love; he contrastswith the Old Testamentfigure of reasonand justice,Jethro.) In the end, because Pimber cannot qualify as a naturd man (he lacks taith in Pimber's luck and Omensefter'slove)-and becausethe loving but panly unconscious Omenseffer fails to realizePimber needshim-Pimber sinks toward despair and suicide. Still we view Omenseffer favorably; the fault seemsPimber's.The third section,the bulk of the novel,concerns Gass'scomitragic hero-and-villain,Furber: a lying, schemingpreacher who lusts after women and writes outlandish diny versesbut also fully developed, preaches-and thinks-brilliandy. He is consciousness fully educated,but uncommitted: I rlocker and despiserof the world of and of himself, an at once comic and dead seriousrepresentative the archayp. poet-priest.Gass'stheme becomesfully explicit the morning Furber preacheson the Creation story making it a parablefor our everlastinghuman desirefor simplicity, a return to an animal-likeSBt€: God created always by division, taking the lesserpart, transformingit into its opposite,and raisingit abovethe rest. So should we changeour wor$ into our best. Furber snappedhis fingers.There was a good one. That was the kind of thing they liked. Should he sayit again?But he was losing the thread. There is everywherein nature a paniality for the earlier condition, and an instinctiveurge to return to it. To succumb to this urge is to succumbto the wish of the Prince of Darkness,whose aim is to defeat,if posible, the purposeof God's creation.

A N I N V E C T I V EA G A T N S TM E R E F I C T I O N /

t,

But Furber himself cannot belierait, the words arc mere words, a clerrcr descanton his text. "Like a waterstrider,Furber rode a thin film of sensel'Yet Furber is right, ashe understandsat last. Omensetter allows his own child to die of pneumonia-trusting to nature, Omensefter says;but Orcutt, the M.D. who should havebeencdled, seesthrough him: "You and your damn fool theories." Recognizinghis mistake, Omensetterbecomesremorseful;and Furber becomesmore like what is best in Omensetter.In his find gesture,Furber shows himself the one man in the novelwho fully understands"the secret-how to bel' Gassis dways dead right in his choice of which charactersto use, how ro treat each character,which sceneto put first; he's dead right roo in his handling of minor structural devicesfor the larger poetic rhphm of the novel. For instance,Omensetter'svisit to Furber, late in the novel, is verbdly (and convincingly)pardlel to Furber's earlier visit to Omensetter'sbestfriend-to whom Furber hissedmonstrous and ridiculous lies about Omensefter.The recognition inherent in the devicegivespoetic force to a more imponant recognition, for it is in Omensetter'svisit to Furber that we come to seewhat could only be suspectedbefore,that Omensettertoo is doomed to consciousness and lying. He readsbooks sometimes,he tells Furber, but not in the winter, "bad for the eyes." Or praisethe novel this way. Omensmer's Ltuk aroids every mistake I'rc had a chanceto mention while discusing other norels in this review. Gass'snovel is "informational"; life in rural Ohio a while sgo, the progressof madness,the hatred of the world inherent in puritanism (from Plotinus forwar$; but here everyline functions,and the meaning found in the materialis there.The noral is funny in places,mouing in places,but nowhere merely entenaining. And Gassstealsfrom no one. The suggestionof one reviewer that Gassis a "jejune Joyce" is mere impudence.When Gas usescomic nonsenselanguap it is strictly that; it has nothing to do with FinnegansWake,And when Furber alludesto Empedocleshe makeshis allusionby fundamentallydifferent principles from those in, say, Ulysscs.One might point to Samuel Beckett, for equally striking and origind comitragic vision as well as for similar delight in the absurdity of reixon uncheckedby commitffi€Itt; but in Omensettcr's Luk one finds only a few heelprin$ to signd Beckett'shaving passedthrough. Beckettmay harregven Gasshis ideas of the world ascircusor musichall, but Gasshashis own experiences of circusesand musichallsand his own ideas,differentfrom Beckett's,

34/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

on what makesthose placesreal. Sooner say Gassis "influenced" by the comic strip and animatedcanoon. Furber, Omenserter,Totr, and the rest are straight out of Al Crpp exceprthat they are convincingly human and not involved in paltry satire.And Gass'ssettings-a chair rocking in a firelit noorn,two men pacingbeforea forge,a snolv-correred mountain in a shadow of birds-are the settingsof a Disney movie come to ltfe, as Disney settingsnever do. Gass'ssymbols (weather,a man skipping stones, a hanging man pecked by birds) are dso strikingly origind and are at the sametime so firmly imbeddedin the action that their force comes in the reader'sblood, not merely inro his head. Needlessto say, glven Gass'scontrol of style and structure, nothing in the plotting and nothing in the treatment inadvenendy cdl up associationwith e kind of writing the book is not. The novel'sfaults are not failuresof truth but failuresof discipline. Gassdwells too long on Furber's thought. The firsr rwo sections,absolutely flawless,set up a dramatic action which jerks ro a srop with the introduction of Furber in meditation; and when the action gets moving againit lacks its old power becauseFurber'sthought hasmade the theme and symbols too explicit. In a great novel, action reveds its inner meaning like a $ray, maybe dangerousmongrel raken in off the $reet , ln Omtnsetter'sLuck the action becomestoo obviously the vehicleof ideas.Gassis right when he establishes connecions poetically, without comment-for instance,the dissimilarreacions of Omenseffer and Furber to weather-but wrong when, for instance,he againand againcommentsauthorially on Furber'sidea-spinningas"lyingJ' forcing into the reader'shead the relationship betweenthe intellectualand the viciousgossip.Not that Furber should not think. The readermust seeFurber's mind at work-panly for the sheerpleasureof it, panly so that he can draw conclusionsabout the action-but the conclusions must be the reader'sif drama is not to be reducedto syllogism.The mistake in the Furber section is merely technicd, however.It limits the power of the book, not the intelligenceor truth. Gasshaswritten perfect shon storiesand one of the best shon novelseverproducedby an American. He has everything it takes to produce a great novel. Findly this. All of the popular lies I have shook my finger at throughout this essay-about Americans,about inevitabledienation, about sexand fulfillment, about longing and disillusionment,eventhe lie about an asopinion, Tiuth asthat which soundsgood-are reveded n Ommscttsr\hck (asIsrabestisToa says)"as plain as a cow in a fieldl'

ilIoreSmog from the Mills DarkSatanic

NE OF THE INCONVENIENCES OF LIVING

in one'sown time is that the filtering hasnot yet been done: /ou have to hunt down the occasional first-rate contemporary book through great grayheapsof trash. Not that trash is a bad thing. The money a publishermakeson fashionablebad writers makespossiblethe publication of seriouswriters who eventuallyprovegreat. What is troublesome is not so much the trash as the imitation seriousfiction which obscuresrhe realthing, the sickly stuff editorsbloat to lifesize in their helpful i.tt n to reviewers,who frequently echo (perhapsin good faith) the grandiosephrasesof the hint-shee$. I assumeit's not redly a, capitalistplot. Evento a city man I wouldn't sell a dead hog and pretend it was only asleepfor a minute, but perhapseditors don't read the novels they print. It's an affractive theory. They buy the novel from an agent who has never read it either, he just "represents" it, the way a number cen representtwo sick fish or two chickenhouses, and to get them to buy it the agentthrows in someother norrel,cheaper than it would hara beenotherwise,by som@nelikeJohn Hersey,who s safe.The editor grvesthe manuscript to a grrl from Radcliffe, who fxes the spelling and changesthe parts that aren't clear to her, and then somebodyelsewho s readtwenty-firc pageswrites the jacka blurb

3'

,6 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

which vaguely alludes to "outrageous humor" or "delicate insight" and the "deeper symbolic intent." How pleasantit would be to be able to believesuch theories! But the world, aswe know, is no romance.Editors, evenagentsand jacket blurb writers, are ashonest asthey know how to be. The reasontrivial contemporary fiction so frequently gets mixed up with better work is that nearly everyoneinvolved with it, from the writer to the lady who forgot to send back the rejection slip from her reading club, is serious-mindedand righteouslycommitted to what are cdled the exciting new ideasof our time-in other words,to nonsense.C'ood writing may not be deadbut merely in hiding, asusual,blockedout by smog from the dark satanicmills. People harrealwaysknown about themesand symbolsand tensions, and people have always recognizedthat fiction has something to do with truth; but once, having strcng churcheswhere intransigeanceand systemwere the main pan of the entenainment,most people let fiction go about its business.Now fiction rnust be studied;it must support both ingenioustheoriesof how fiction works and popular theories of reality. Sincewhat fiction doesis absurdlyobvious and regular,not fit to suppon more than five full professors,it is madeto do something else. Or, at best, what it does incidentally,with the side of its foot, is turned into a marvel and broken down to its constituent pans and analyzedand yodeled over asthough it were somethingof unspeakable imponance, like taxes.(How elsecan one explain the rage for empty pyrotechnics, for instance Tbe Sot-WeedFaaor?) Wha- true fiction does is celebrate,not preach.Which is why it tells the truth. For example,it takestwo sensibleideas-the idea that a man should be responsibleand the ideathat a man should be himself, free, nor, as we say,uptight-and it embodiesthese awkwardly conflicdng ideasin, say,two people whom it fully respects(or elsefinds equally absurd,like us) and it puts thesetwo people in a place and watchesthem acr. Not for the purposeof proving one of the people a fool or a devil our of hell but becauseit is the nature and moreover the joy ofthe novelistsimply to watch irnponffit, familiar things from inside. An clearsthe head of small opinions, not becauseeverything is relative, in view of an, but becausesome things are beautiful and need to be affirmed. An celebrates,compassionatell'suspendingits mord outrage for the moment.

MoRE SMoc FRoM THE DARK SATANIc MILLS /

t7

This is a fairly simplemindedthing for an to do, and one can hardly blame collegeprofessors,who are seriouspeoplewith promotions and familiesro think about, for objecting.No wonder Chaucer'sWife of and Othello a lesson Bath becomesa lessonagainstconcupiscence, like obscenity,is fun. The fact againstromantic pride. Righteousness, remains,fiction is moral as the universeis rnoral' in books as in life, killing peopleindiscriminatelywill probably bring you to a bad end; but unlike the universeas fondly * we conceiveit, fiction is mord by accident. Writers havebeendenyingthis for centuries.Nevenheless,the only boring charactersin Dickensare the pillars of decency.The only stick figure in Anna Karmina rs lrvin, whom Tolstoy admiresfor his noble wooden head.In lesserwriters, suchasFaulknerat his worst-because pantingafter unrealityis better than scorningthe clowns who can't see arethe stark embodimentsof evil. it-the peoplewho ca$ no shado\Ms What the greatestwriters haveunderstood,and not just fitfully, is that peopleare understandablywhat they are, better or worse, imperfect when measurcdagainstthe ided and thereforecomic or ffaglc or both. They leavethe righteousmoralizingto critics.fb put this another way, what the best fiction does is make powerful affirmations of familiar truths. The trivial fiction which time filters out is that which either makeswrong affirmationsor elsemakesaffirmationsin a squeakylittle roice. Powerful aftirmation comesfrom strong intellect and strong emotion supportedby adequatetechnique.Affirmation and righteousness are as far aptrt aslove and hate or aft and criticism. Now to criticism. Of the three greatuniversity doctrinesat work in modern fiction, the leastoffensiveis that a book is good or bad insofar as it is "well made"; the next in order is that fiction ought properly to teach right behavior,chastisingsin; and the rnost offensiveis that human beings are all mere clowns and tramps. tivid books may sometimesbe overratedbecausethey "worki' that is, becausethe syrnbolsall click together neatly (assymbolsin Melville and Shakespeare do not); but the truth is, greatart doeswork, up to a point. It has to do with the structure of the human mind. What makesmost modern fiction a howling bore is the vasthean-warminggoodnessdiscoveredin vipers and toads, and the mechanicalwhine of self-pity. For an excellentcaseof mechanicalneatnessand righteousness, consider John Knowles's little sermon Indian Summer. Like errcrynhing

38/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

Knowles haswritten, despitehis protestations,the book is a carefully constructedlittle machine.It concernsa pan-Indian young American hero by the name of, symbolicallyenough,Kin-solving(hyphenation mine), first name "Cleet," representingwhat he clings by. Where he lives, a town in Connecticut,there usedto be grearsailingships-men of war and brigantines-but now the town has become puritanicd, well-off, and dreary and Kinsolving longs for freedom. The escape he wants is the modern equiralent of seventeenth-cenrury New World sailing: tlt Alaskan freight airline. Every detail in the book is as near as this equation. There is a theater symbol, elaboratelytinkered (one of a hundred entrapmentsymbols),and the title of the novel works, like Anacin, three ways. The last section of the book, called "The Heiri' treats how Kinsolving, true heir of the American spirit, in Knowles's opinion, rapesthe wife of his anugonist,aboning her child and thus killing the falsepretenderto our heritage.(fhe medicaldetails '.And area,trifle obscure. they finishedtogether,"Knowles saysof the rape-a pieceof sexualsentimentalitywonhy of Norman Mailer himself-but somehow,much as the lady enjoyed it, she is shockedinto abonion by the rape.) One need not $renuously object to this syrnbolicpatness,though it's obvious and therefore dull. What is objectionableis the simpleminded mordity of the thing. It is the "new moralityl' of course,but just as foolish as the old one. The concernof the book is man'sconflicting urps toward freedom, on one hand, and security, on the other. All Knowles's detailsfall around thesetwo values.The town is made up qf purianicd Protesants and puritanical Irish Catholics (security by superstition);Kinsolving belierresin living by his feelingsand expectsto go to a Hrppy Hunting Ground where throughout eternity you experienceall the livesof all the peoplewho harreerer lirad. FreeKinsolving lorcs Nature, dangerous or riot; secureWetherfiord,Connecticut,fearsit, evenwhen it's harmless.Free Kinsolving is like a lion; the peopleof Wetherfiordare like mice. The people of Wetherford take careof each other; Kinsolving does not bother to write to his adoring younger brother, who somehow hides from Mr. Knowles his grief. Kinsolving (we are told) believes in love; the Wetherfiord people incline to believein rivalry and hate. Free people have deep and resonantvoices(somehow this includes Kansaspeople and Eskimos);the prerailing tone of Wefierfiord voices

MoRE sMoc FRoM THE DARK sATANlc MILLS /

t9

is flat. One more oppositionof this sort and I will quit. One night Mr. Kinsolving goesout naked to roll in the grassand, becausehe freely feels like it, does something in the grasswhich I think I will not spell our. A window opens and he hides in some bushes.The that what she caught poor ii*i .d Wetherfordsoul looking out belierres a glimpseof was-a nun. concernwith securitycan be debilitating' It's true that an excessive can even, as Knowles says,turn into insanity. And it is true that the ourmoded American dreamof securitythrough wedth and power is wrongheaded:ro securitycomes.But in the passionof his preaching Knowles has nor bothered to look closely at his people or even at his hoked-upsymbols.It may be true that there are rich men whose solemotivation is hatredof others and of their naturd selrtes,but one needssome kind of fictiond proof, not mere irsenion. And it may be true that the green-eyednaturd stareof a one-quafter Indian boy can shatterthe nervesof a Rooserrelt"brain-truster"-but if so,Knowles missesthe reason.Peoplewho sure, whoeverthey are,are unnerving, nor just becausethey're uncivil. Naturd creatut€s,asdl Indians know, look awa! when they meanto be friendly. \Vhen a bobcat looks stnaight ar you, leave.Take another case.Once in Wetherfiordthey burned a witch. Kinsolving thinks much on this, but Knowles forgetsit when the rape scenecomes.Kinsolving'svengeanceon the scaPegoat-not the husbandhe hatesbut the wife-is an obvious pardlel to witchburnirg * Knowles himself describesit, and burning, accordingto the newspapers,is a common abdominal sensationin casesof rape.Knowles either missesor avoidsthe parallel,either becauseit would undercut the melodramaticopposition of good and evil asKnowles understands them or becausehe doesnot understandthat symbolic systemsin good fiction are nor dlegoricd plantinp to instruct the readerbut doublecheckswhich help the writer to be sureof what he thinks. Only wice rn Indian Summer does Knowles fdl into writing like a novelist. He has a splendidscenein Kansas,in which Kinsolving takesup a croPdusterbiplane and behavrsgloriously like himself-doing stupid things, nearly killing himself,and smashingall the countryside;clumsily realizing it's stupid and dangerousbut delighting in it anpvay, making comicdly soberbut ridiculousobsen'ationsto himself which Knowles, in the ecstasyof honest inspiration, dlows to stand. The other fine moment in the novel is one in which Kinsolving first meetshis brother

40 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

Charley after four years. The little brother has grown huge, both brothers feel shy and awkward; then the little brother smiles,and to Kinsolving it is like findingJonah safeinside the whale, "He was still dive inside after dl, and Cleet immediately caught Charley around the shoulders in relief. . I' But again Knowles has missedthe force of his symbolism (it slippedin by accident,no doubt). It mey be that, trapped inside their Wetherfiordhousesand religionsand conventions, the other charactersare still dirc too, if Knowles would stop ranting and look. The recent seasonI am discussitrgp-duced the usualquota of brainlesssermonslike Knowles's. There is a thing by William M. Hardy, Tbelubjub Bird, which is supposedto be devastatinglyfunny but dso profound, a book on the raceproblem which, asthe jacketsays,"le$ no one off the hook." It is not funny, and the things on the hook are cardboard. There is another book by Ronald L. Fair, Tlte Hog Butcber,which is, like his overratedearlier novel, &o interestingcontribution to sociology but a bad novel. It draws heavily on the tradition of pulpit rhetoric and makesthe same easydistinction between the righteous and the ungodly. For example' Before long, moving v'ansarc coming into the neighborhood every week [moving out the whitesf . They didn't dl want to mo\€, but this thing they call Americanism takesguts to praaice and they are gudes. This thing they cdl Americanism was only applicablewhen they were in line to receivepackages of food. This thing they cdl Americanismonly worked when it was applied to someoneelse.This lie they call democracy, this insidious myth they cdl fair play,this vicious thing cdled the-American-way-of-lifewas not meant for the black man. And rather than live with the black man, rather than live . wirh their fellow Americans,they ran, ffid, without knowing it, without caring, they turned over anotherusedsectionof the city to the black massesand at the sametime increased their own burden with a heavier mongage. One sympathizeswith Fair's anger,and his sermon is not irresponsible, like Knowles's; bur the book lacksthe total cornpassionand clearheadednessof an.

MoRE SMoc FRoM THE DARK sATANIC MILLs / 4l

The only really disgustingbook in the stack I have for review is Thomas Bledsoe'sMeanwbih Backat tbeHenbwse.A celebrationof sex which goesout of its way for gratuitousslime, hooked to a thoroughly slick plot, a great roar of symbols,and what looks like it must have beenintended(but wasn't)asan obsceneburlesqueof the catastrophe in Greek tragic theater.The only thing interestingabout the book is that ir is pan of our intellectud climate.Sensation,especiallygenitourinary sensation,has replacedGod, and with God dead the universe becomesabsurd,so that holy lorars end up murderedin their already bloody bed. Not that Bledsoeunderstandsall this. When an idea becomesfaddishenough, Lfryfool can muddle through a demonstration. The idea in questionis the one I describedearlier as the worst of the three gr€atuniversirydoctrinesat work in modern fiction-the idea that all men are clownsand tramps,that is, witlessand valuelesscreaturesof sensationwho imitate the gesturesof human beingsand pick the molderingdumpsof history.(This is not really SamuelBeckett's position;it comesfrom an oversimplificationof Beckett.)It is the idea, I am glad to say,which Nadine C'ordimer attacks in ercry clean-cut line she writes. Perfectedstyle like Miss Gordimer's is the objective refutationof the whiner's thesis'it is an aftirmation that absolutevalues are still there, if only as conceptsin the stylist's mind, and can be reached.ln Tbel-ateBourgeoisWorldMiss Gordimer tells of the breakdown of idealismto the hammeringsof brute experience.(The values Miss Gordimer finds breaking down are in fact distonions of traditional values,or valuesmisunderstood.The best comment is another novel on African problems,David Caut e's Tbe Declineof tbe West-to which we will return.)Mur Van Den Sandt,the realhero of the novel, dead from before the opening page,was an idedist who, by the accident of his beingborn with only ordinary intelligenceand forcefulness, could not succeedin the thingshe nevenhelessbravelyattempted.His wife lies awakeat the closeof the novel trying to decidewhether or not shewill do, in a relativelytrivial way, exactly what her late husband did. If shechoosesnot to, we understandthe reasonsand sympathize; nevenheless,the affirmation of what one ought to do, even if it is absurd,is clear.The one greattrouble with the noral is that it is slighter than a buttercup-simplified Jane Austen with occasionalbedroom scenesintroduced,sceneswhich are neither funny nor thrilling, merely there, like self-conscious little proofs that Miss Gordimer knows.

+2 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRITTNG

Another moderatelygood book, beefierthan Miss Gordimer'sbut equally imperfect, is Paul West's Alley laggffi. West's novel mocks the whining absurdistclichi by pushing it to its last logical extremity and there exploding it. West's epigraphssum up the argument.The secondof them readsin pan, "but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop-pail,give him glory tool' If human beingsare limited, none is more limited than Alley Jaggers,plasterer,squashed by routine and poveny, saddledwith an irritable mother and a fat, brainlesswife (whom we acceptin the end as lovable).If brute sensation has replacedGod, Alley Jaggersis high priest (he makesa huge, fat idol, in fact). The novel is a tour de force of wallowing obscenitycopulation with an unwilling partner in a bathtub, later with a dead woman-and of frustratedspiritual affirmation: I tortuously and lovindy con$nrcted glider smashedin an instant, a painstakinglyfashioned wE o, o vast,inarreligioussign which can get no funher than PRAISE ticulate love which turns to black-comic murder. In Alley Jaggers's world it is impossibleto rise out of substance,but the peoplestruggle to deff and escapetheir limitations (for instanceby baking nerrenheless a mean old woman's teeth in an oven), and when they are pushed back once and for all into the slirneof their existence,they "give him dory" from there. West's language,like the world he creates,is insistentlyobsceneyet poetic. Like Alley himself, West transmutesugly redity into defiant, evenjoyful, aft.There area few brilliant scenes, for instancethe one in which Alley makes love to the girl he's just killed-the girl he could not quite make it with while she lived. But much as I like Alley Jaggerl I do not think it is of more than passinginterest. In the first place,insofar as West's answerto the faddish whine that we're limited is legitimate, there is no good reason that the noralist should shacklehimself to the brute sensationsor brutish world. West has done the best that can be valuesof Alley Jaggers's done with his material; the trouble is that, holy or not, obscenityand ' brutishnessare tiresome.The claim that human life is a $ream of dogis a claim not wonh ans\Mersickj' to born)w one of West'sexpressions, which shows that he novel, ing. West has answeredit in novel after isn'r really concerned with answering anything, I've merely imputed that to him for the sakeof my argument. The truth is simply that West is more artracredto the beauty in slime than to beauty anyrvhere else.Thar's fair enough; every writer has his favorite milieu, and to

MoRE sMoG FRoM THE DARK SATANIc MILLS / 43

fake an interesrone doesn'tfeel is death. But to grant the legitimacy of West'sconcernis not to sayit will be of permanentinterestto other people. Dickens roo was interestedin the obsceneand brutish, but not exclusively.Moreover, West's intenseconcern with substancein anyform-stained waterpip.r, sawdust,feces,plaster,the noisespeople make,polite and otherwise(includinglanguageindifferent to sense)imposesone seriousae$hedclimitation on his ficion: profluencege$ lost in the clutter of unvarieddetail.Compare the work of any spare writer-Pir Lagerkvist, to take an extreme example-or any writer as much concernedwith the processof reality as with the richness, or, finally, ^truly poeticwriter like William Gass,who makesa rich variety of detailsdanceand sing-and you will seeat once what I mean. In West there's no tension, Do suspense,and getting through every single puragraphword-for-word requiresa certain triviality of mind. What is basicallywrong with all the novels I have talked about so far is exactly rhis-they are trivial. Some becausethey are badly thoughr our (Knowles and Bledsoe,notably), some becausethey are thoughr out more or lesscarefully * far as they go but don't go very far. Janet Frame'sA Stateof Siege,a ladies' book, in other words not of the seriousfiction in the first place,turns out to be representative whole lot. An entertainment;mor€ specific"lly,a psychologicalhorror story which at least to some extent succeedsin what it setsout to do, which is scareyou. Curiously enough, the materid Miss Frame usesfor building her effect is the samemodern set of concernswhich informs the novelsof Knowles, Bledsoe,Gordimer, and West-the replacementof tradidond vdues with sensualismand the ideaof freedom. Miss Frame writes as if the whole modern question were easy and obvious-which it is. Drop out of all human commitments, 8ccording to Miss Frame, and all reality, outside and inside, will rise up and kill you. (Miss Gordimer's view is close,but shehaslessgood to say of traditiond vdues.) Miss Frame works out her thriller with ladies'book facility.The novel is awful, but I should like to talk about it for the sakeof my point. The central character,a spinsternamed Mdfred, is at last freed by the death of her mother to do what she pleaseswith what is left of her life. Up to now she'staught an and has painted picturesof the sort peoplelike, repressingher o\Mnwish in order to satisfythe needs and demandsof her friends and family. The man she once more or

44 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

lessloved was killed long ago in the war, and the emotion she felt for him she has rnanagedto transfer to a feeling for Nature-trees, flowers,weather. Freeof dl commitmentsnow, belatedlygranredthe total independenceshe has long desired,Mdfred joyfully movesto a tropical island. He r joy is dampenedwhen shelearnshow isolated her cottageis, and it is shatteredwhen a storm comesup and a $range, insistent knocking begins,now at her front door, now in back, and between knocks a paddingof my$erious footsteps,an occasionalbit of laughter. She lies in the dark terrified, clinging to senseby all the age-olddevicesof man-self-consciousand tortuous analysisof what the situation may mean,laboredrecollections,snatches of poetry phone cdls (on an unconnectedphone)to the police.A rock smashes through her window, possiblya rock with a note wrappedaroundit (her perceptions arefar from trusrwonhy), and Mdfred diesof, apparently,a hean attack. She is found clinging to the rock. Obviously, the novel "works" in that every detail has its neat thematic function. Mdfred's conventionallandscapepainting (what she really wants to do is symbolic painting) reflectsthat excessively self-abnegatingregardfor traditional values,her "duty" to friends and relatives,which stirs Malfred toward rebellion and the longng for freedom. But if through distonion traditional valuescan haveharmful effect, they can also saveone's sanity, even one's life. Immersion in sensation-the beauty of Nature-saves Malfred frorn excessivegrief when her beloved dies, but pushedto an extremein Mdfred's trade of friends and relations for a coftage in the tropics, it de*roys. It is the cult of sensationin modern life which producesthe savageryof the unknown knockers at the door. What happensto Malfred is in a,way not worse than what happensto those who, unconstrainedby social checksand urged on by the violence of Nature (a windstorm), lay siegeto Malfred's houseand mind. The rock in the deadwoman's hand is red, and she is not the first to be murderedby terror in this house.The people who threw the rock-the cluessuggestchildrenhave been reduced by freedom and sensationto willful killers. If mechanicalneatnessand sound doctrine were the guaranteeof great fiction, Miss Frame'snovel would be a major achievement.It is in facr just another book for ladies to scarethemselveswith. The charactersand situationsare stock, the action long-windedand predictable. An ideal book for serial publication in some magazinewhich

M o R E S M O GF R O M T H E D A R K S A T A N I C M I L L S / 4 '

carries,say,babycaretips from Dr. Spock and essayson SUICIDE'THE wARNINGSIGNAIJ.My point is not that ladies' books should be outlawedby the Rderal C'orernment-though why peoplereadthem when they could be watching Bullwinkle Moose or Star Thek is not clear to me. My point is that the brilliant style of Nadine C'ordimer and the wildman's eye and ear of Paul West have not yet hooked onto ny greatand significantintuitions but only to the stuff which makes plots for ladies'books.That's no crime, of course.Readerswho compulsiraly readercrythqg in srght-the jokes on the back of cerealboxes, the patentnumberson wdlpaper seams-will be gratefulto them for providing somethingbetter than the usual run. But anyone looking for really good fiction will be disappointedas usual. Really good fiction has a stayingpower that comesfrom its ability to jar, turn on, move the whole intellectual and emotiond history of the reader.If the readeris a house,the really good book is a jubilant party that spreadsthrough every room of it, or else a fire, not just a routine visit from the mailman. This is not simply a matter of controlled complexity,and it is cenainly not solely a product of perfeaed craft. MobyDick is one of the power touchstones,a book nobody has as yet been able to work out as a logical systern. Bleak Houseis surely one of the worst-written books in English-a seriousdefect, God knows-but once you haveread it you are stuck with it for life. To havethis totel effect on the reader,a book must be as wise as the readeris in his bestmoments,strippedof pettines, prejudice,and obsession; it must urgently suppon the highest affirmations the reader is capableof making, penetrating-at least by implication-every nook and crannyof his mord experieoc€;and finally it must hare the weight of a reality which the reader,at least while he is reading,does not notice to be anylesssubsmntialthan the world of fire engines,tables, and yellow house cats where he lives. At leastin theory all this can be done in a relativelysimple parable or in a book thousandsof pageslong. Consider Plr Lagerkvist'sTbe Holy Land, pan of aseriesof allegoricaltalesbut one which can stand alone. lagerkvist is one of the better novelistsnow alive,a man whose supremelydisciplinedan is impossibleto imitate or eventranslatethough Naomi Wdford has done an excellentjob of translation. In the Lagerkvistworld all the complexity and difficulty of modern life is charged,as if by some crushingforce from outer space-or i$ if by

+6 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

abandonment by outer space-into a few stark and massivesymbols in which all our experienceand all human history are locked. His image of the world is like Beckett's except lagerkvist's ruined and blasted planer is dignified and somber. All that could be discernedin that barrenlandscapewere the ruins of some mighty pillars which, ancientand half-eroded, stood out againstthe tempestuoussky. Thesecould offer but linle shelterfrom the night chill and the freshwind, but since there was no other place to make for, they set off towards them. With the blind man's hand in his, lbbias the pilgrim apprcachedthe ruined building which nose,raragedand abandoned, on that limitlessshorewhere nothing gre\il but thisdes and tall, parchedgrass.. It is a world in which the traditional logic of eventsis dead;ooe goes on with the old gesturesbecausethey are dl one hasand becausethe mind clingsto what it is, and righdy. Blind old Giovanni hasa locket. Some shepherdsask about it and Tobias tries to explain, "Well, nothing very remarkablein itself, perhaps.But it can hold somethingvery precious-something the wearercannot bear to lose. Therefore one wears it at bne's breast,close

.

,T"Tt*,

fromit." andcan'tendureto be'paned

"What doesit hold, then?" lbbias delayedanswering.

::$ffi:::""beasecre'[ "fr's his only possession, and I've oftennoticedthat he's afraidof losingit. I don't believehe couldlive without itl'

it'semPtY?" l'tlll:ush 'How $range. . . How can it be so preciouswhen it's

empry-when it doesn't contain what it ought to contain?"

MORE

SMOG

FROM

THE

DARK

SATANIC

MILLS

/

47

"We don't understand.Can't you explain it to usP" "Not everything can be explained.It just is so."

:"T.'Ifi ,".il;lTf:ruffifi#: ffi:iilH

m1't chest, but they askedno more questions. "Yes,yes;' one of them whisperedsoftly. "That's true. There aremany thingsthat can'tbe explained,but just aresol'

When the locket is removed,Gioranni doesindeed die, with a sense of peaceand comfon. This is not somethingwhich can be explained (as a suggestion,for instance,that our characteristichuman clinging is delusion,we would be happier if we let everything go); the idea and the imageare indivisible. lf a man has a locket he ought to keep it; that "just is so"; and when he losesit he is relieved,that is also so. In Lagerkvist,in other words, archetypalrealitiesof feeling wdk and nlk and lie strewn and broken in the grass,demanding notice betweenvalueshasgrown obscure,perhaps and assent.The cnnnectioa becauseGod, who usedto be the controller of connections,has died and heavenhas burnt out and cooled to ashes;but the ralues of the hean, which meaninglessly live on, arenot to be denied.ln TbeHoly l^andl-agerkvistdoesmore than simply reheatthe old values,however; he finds a new way of seeing.Panly by criminal intent, panly by chance, every man has a share in the indifferent cruelty of a universegone adrift. Meaningful death is an atonementand sacrifice,repaymentand gift, a return of energy to its source.Christ's death was a voluntary sacrifice,the deathof the two thievesa repayment;the three together are the figure of every meaningfuldeath. ('And yet-and yet. There the three crossesstood, all together:there was no denying it. Not just a solitaryone-not just his. And not just the crimind's crcsses. No. . :') If God is dead-no one in Lagerkvist'sworld knows for sure-there is not enoughenergyleft in the world to overwhelm the meaningless plaguesthat strike the herds. (The sacrificeof an evil vulture and a cooperativelamb turns out to be in vain.) But each man can give up with his life what feebleenergyhe has.All this is of coursepure event in Tbe Holy l-and; pure vision. Tobias,wearing the dead Giovanni's locket, talks with the girl whose death long ago he did nothing to prevent, knowing his effon would be futile'

48 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

"There's nothing it it [the locked. It looks asif there ought to be, but there'snothingl' "No, there'snothing. . ." She closedit again. And gently, gently, she took it from him, lifting the worn chain from his neck and putting it about her owr; she hung the locket at her own breast. At that moment it began to shine like the most beautiful jewel. And Tobiasdies.Allegory which we so often hear dismissedastrifling and insubstantid, is one of the ways in which significant intuitions can be seized.To the extent that allegory is poetic logic rather than some bottle of sugarcoatedtruths, it has staying power. But I mu$ add, at the risk of seemingimpossibleto please,that Tbe Holy l-and is not a perfectly satisfying example.It is excessively spare, and shon. I-,agerkvistis indifferent to what psychologistscall "Thresholdl'Powerful ashis imagesare,he doesnot sit on them long enough to allow their effect to come through. Lagerkvist is like a stand-up comic who movestoo quickly from joke to joke to give his audiencefull experienceof the humor. One of the most difficult problems a first-rate novelist has to solve is that of balancingmovement and static detail. Black comedy,too, can haveat leastsomemeasureof stayingpower if it's worked right. The term may be rague, but I use it in a specific sense.Black comedy occurswhen what ought to be sadturns out to be grimly funny, affirming through irony what could not otherwise be affirmed. I will Su. an example from SamuelBeckett. [n Watt rhe title characterlongs to believein the existenceof Mr. Not but knows betrer. Without redly expectingsuccess,he trudgesto the houseof, he hopes, Mr. Not, getscloser and closerto the man, but, knowing his Wiftgensrein, does not presumeto think he has found Mr. Not. Wart's disappointmentand frustration ought to be pathetic, but we laugh. Wan has been turned into a robot by system,as all men are in Becketr'sview. The humor is exactly where it would be for Bergson el(ceprthat the contrastingfluidity or flexibility which makesmechanical behavior funny is remo\€d, in Beckett,to the redm of impossibleideals. When we fail to rry for the ideal we are ridiculous; trying, we rise to the absurd. Atley Jaggersis black cornedy with a new twist' West goes beyond affirmation of Alley's aftempt at flight to affirmation of

MoRE sMoc FRoM THE DARK SATANIc MILLS / 49

where he was in the first place.(If we tell the truth, the new twist complacency.)In Anthony Burgess,on the other is a degeneration: hand, the blackcomedyis straight.BurgessquotesEliot's remarksthat "The worst that can be saidof most of our malefactors,from sntesmen to thieves,is that they arenot man enoughto be damned:' If we knew for surethat somegod existswho damnsand saves,then a novel full of peoplecomicdly unableto make up their minds or get off their hind ends and assertthemselveslor heavenor hell would be satire. The same novel without the absolutebaseis black comedy. Sp Noaelis that kind Burgess'sTiemorof Intent: An Escbatological of book. Poor Hillier, Burgess'scentrd character,knows well enough what the absoluteissueis. Commenting on his friend Roper,an English scientistwho has defectedto Russia,Hillier sa/s: Here, in brief, is the peril of being a scientistbrought uP on a fierceand brain-filling religion. He starts,in his late teens, by thinking that his new scepticalrationalism(blissit was in thar dawn to be alive)makesnonsenseof Adam and Eve and transubstantiationand the Day ofJudgment. And then, too late, he discoversthat the doctrinesdon't redly count; what countsis the willingnessand ability to take evil seriouslyand to explain it. Hillier thinks of his missionto trick and bring back Roper, violating Roper'smisguidedbut noble idedism, ashis last morrein the thoroughly diny game of spy and counterspy.After this he will break out and rurn honest.But Hillier is only a man; he cannot resistthe force of truth drugsadrninisteredto him, and, once having assistedthe enemy, howeverunwilling, he cannot escape.Limited in a thousand ways by their tragicomichumanity, Burgess'scharacterscan get no fanher than the tremor of their noble intent. What ought to be becomesincreasingly urgent as it becomesincreasinglyremote. What makesBurgessa good novelist is that the absoluteethic he proposesis clear,inclusirre,and convincing, and that the people inrolrad in the complexproblemsBurgesssetsup are more or lessconvincing human beings,howerar grotesgue,whose excusesfor failing to measure up are as vdid as our own and must therefore be overwhelmed by a shockof blind assenionby the reader,a kind of despairinglaughter,

t0 /

oN wRlrERS AND wRrrrNG

a revolt. Infernd complicationsobstrucr the ends the spirit reaches for-such complications as Freudian ambiralence of emotion and motive, the distractionsof physicd human need,the doubtful mordity of availablemeans.A typical dilemma, "Knowirg C-d meansalsoknowing His opposite.You can'r get away from the great oppositionl' "That's Manicheestufl isn'r it? I'm quite looking fonvard to doing Mediaeval!" The first statement,which is true, is immediately cur down by a flip statementwhich cannot be answeredexceptby r torruous scholastic argumenton onhodox and hereticsidesof a body of doarine which is itself museum stuff. Laugh and grind your teeth and let it go. Anthony Burgessis a good writer, as everyoneknows, but not a greatone. One reasonfor this is that Burgess'scharacrersdo not fighr toward the impossiblewith the samedernonic intensity as those of, say, Lagerkvist, and they are not ils cruelly broken when they fall. This is why among writers of black comedy (in which classLagerkvist has not recently made a bid), there is still only Becketr ar the firsr rank. Burges's basiclimitation, however,is one he shareswith dl blackcomic writers-which is *hy I have granted black comedy only a measure of staying power. Black comedy is narrowly pessimistic. Burgess,like Beckett,would say "Faw!" to this. An argumentwhich is unanswerable.Still, the Faw is wrong; some things just are so. kt me explain. The implicit argumentof black comediansis that if men do at times achievesomethinglike the ideal, it's by luck. (Hillier might not have had the bad luck to be given truth serum and thus might by chr.nce haveescaped.) Sinceluck cannotbe countedon, a redistic and unsentimental depictionof life must focuson what happenswhen the meaninglessvariableis ruled out. We assentunder duress.No one wants to be thought sentimentalor, in his pleasureat his own good luck, indifferentto the patentbad luck of others.All the same,in the universe luck hu nol been ruled out. As a ma$er of fact, the odds in favor of luck are mysteriouslyhigh, and there are those who maintain that as centuriespassand social injustice is diminished they rise by leaps and bounds.All men who havenot been totally crushedby bad luck

MoRE sMoc FRoM THE DARK sATANIc MILLS /

tl

know in their blood and bonesthat having children is worth the risk. When they are told that life is ultimately nonsensethey assentbut . close off a corner of the mind, which whispers,Neaertbeless Black comedy is the reflectionof a degradedand beatensocietycruelly oppressedlreland (BrendanBehan),cynical old France,or any crowdedand brutalizedbig city-consider thoseNew York and london of life in their toilet bowls. Black writers who find the glowing essence comedy does not reflect deep suffering(considerthe concentration camp writers) but only spiritud poverty and despair,that is, neurosis. too narrow and too thickly hedgedto allow Black comedy is a passage flow-that water of, C'od the flow of what must somehowshamelessly or no God, grace. I am not expressirg touching, Derely persond preferencefor spiri" tually uplifting books but a fact of experience,one which has proved to modern fiction. Given proper soil and watering, an embarrassment thri"res.Sometimes,grventhe worst soil possible, human consciousness no water wharever,it endures.A thoroughly dark view of life is the view of a blighted spirit nor to be trusted.This is merely to say that a man whose family has died in a house$ruck by lightning may not be a perfect judge of storms. We blush at Victorian optimism and open sentiment,and we avoid such things by undercutting dl we say,by enclosing each statement with qudificationslike briar hedgesand with apologes for having sunk to the awful indignity of speakingin the first place.Mind chokeshean. It's no worse than the heart's choking of brain-the kind of thing farored by the tumedon of Cdifomia, with all their ulk of "hypocrisy" and "love"-but it isn't enough. The most powerful fiction is that which finds away of expressingopenly and without distonion or limpnessof mind the highest human affirmations. Elie Wiesel's The Gatesof tbe Forest,though not a great book, has power. It has the power of honest, hard-won thought and emotion which oversimplifiesnothing of ny imponance. It is a novel impossible to criticize just iN a truly just and kind man, whaterrerhis faults, is impossibleto criticize,becauseto do so would be shamefuland crass. I know the argumentsof psychologistswho prove no man just and kind exceptfor miserablereasons.I answer-knowing I am hardly the first-that here is where anists and sciends$part. The neasonan exists at all is that some things cannot be demonstrated,can only be felt

t2 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

and celebrated.The test of such things is not scientificbut emotional. Read Wiesel and all Beckett's brilliance turns to a tasteless joke, a child purposely faning at a wedding or funeral. Black comedy is overwhelmingly convincing in isolation; at the {irst breath from a writer who believesin the holiness of life, it withers away to dust. To say that Wiesel's power is inherent in the subject matter-Nazi atrocity, the madnessof theJewish survivors-is true but nor to the point. Finding an adequatesubjectand understandirgit is the norclist'sonly business. Better technique would make Wiesel's novel a good ded rnore forceful than it is, since bad writing robs the story of the reader'sfull attention; but the clariry and force of a very good writer's ideasand emotions can surmount some limitations of technique.To say this is of course to deny categorically the doctrine that ideasand emotions cannot be discoveredor releaseda(cept through technique. It is to insist again,with no proof exceptan apped to the experienceof reading cenain books, that great fiction beginsin the characterof the writer, the poet as poem. No amount of factud information, or technicd ability, or skill at introducing people and places,or ear for rhetoric, or eye for the absurd, or headfor wide philosophy can substitutefor a truly good rnan's saneand profound affirmation. But the aftirmation gainsimmeasurably when dl the re$ is present.The best book I haveread lately, and the only one besideslagerkvist's, which hasa chanceof surviving the cenrury on its orffn merits, is David Caute's Thc Dedineof tbe West.Caute too has faults (it is not true that all norals hara faults' some "faults" work), notably a tendency to bank on the symbols in an essentially redistic norrel,a bad habit of splitting elementsof didogue ("You ou$tl' she said, staring at the pond, "to go back to the states"),a tendency ro explain roo much on an easypsychologicalbasis.But Caute'svinues are impressive.Like such writers as Tolstoy, he makeshistory LPPear to make sense.He can deal convincingly with an amazingvariety of times and places,psychesand events.He knows more than most People, nor only about history (his profesiond concern)but about philosophy, &tt, and practicd politics as well. If his technique is mediocre senrenceby senrence-full of mannerism, never poetic-his control of larger srrucures-the manipulation of multiple plots, the significant juxtaposition of scenes-is enviable.He is one of those novelistswho can make one believethat the novelisthas person"lly experiencedall

MoRE sMoc FRoM THE DARK SATANICMtLLs /

t3

hasexperienced-Frenchmen,Englishthat everyone of his characters and more. It all soundslike passionAmericans, men, Nazis,Africans, ate aurobiography,rhough one knows it can't be. One recallsPlato's remarkson the mysteriousomniscienceof Homer, or Tolstoy'sremarks to Dostoyevsky'"You think you know what that horse is thinking, Fyodor. The differencebetweenus is, I know!' (I may havemade that up.) Above all, I think, what Caute achievesin TlteDeclineof tbe West is a vision of the ideal made actud, a vision meticulouslyfigured out. Caute knows about absurditybut alsoabout determinationand luck. 'lb He movesthe readercloserto the way it is, to the terrible and holy. pur all this another way, he has studiedwith a scholar'scare and an anisr'sintuition the doctrinesof our ege,and he hasseenthrough them and beyondthem. What he hasto sayabout masterand subjectraces is applicableanywhereat any time-he makesthat very clear-and the valueswhich control the war againstthe West and within it, that is, will governthe spiritual history of the persond faith and self-sacrifice, world when all racial wars are over. They are the essenceof history. The Achilles' heel of Tlte Decliruof tbe Westis-alas-its openness of sentiment.Pan of the time one thinks of Hemingway'ssendmentality through understatement-flat descriptionsof gruelling torrure, objective,almostscientificdescriptionsof passion;but more often one thinks, unfairly,of soapopera.A singleexamplemay at least suggest the weaknessof the whole book' "l have servedmy country loyally for twenty-six years, through peaceand war. I took pan in the Ethiopian campaign againstthe ltalians, sir, and I was mentioned in dispatches, twice, by Colonel Grang€r,who-" 'What is the relevanceof dl this?" A tremor passeddown his spine;suddenlythe world whose rules and codeshe had servedand respectedthroughout a lifetime had turned its back on him, had becomedeaf.Everyone was the same,yet strangelynot the same,impercepdblytransformed as if by some invisible ray or gas. Despitethe half-heanedironic detachment,Caute'ssob of sympathy for wretchedDeedescornesthrough and pu$ one off. The white man's inability to obtain justice here exactlybdances-and echoesthrough

t+ /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrtNG

verbd repedtion-the situation of a central Negro figure earlier.Style openly and frankly reinforcesthis pathetic reversd-the piling up of appositiond extensionsof feeling expressedin opening clauses("had turned its back on him, had becomedeaf"), and loaded suggestions of psychologicalstate("suddenlyJ'"strangelyJ'"imperceptibly").The dramatic situation justifies the emotion; nevertheless, it does sound like something from Dr. Kildare. What is one to do?Deny true emotion becauseit soundssilly? Yet errenapparentsillinessis distracting. No wonder we retreetto mask,to irony, to constipatedsoul. Knowing Nietzsche and Freud, knowing what ludicrous figuresthey cut who speakwith more sincerity than self-consciousness, we are turned into mutes. Caute has the courageto speakout anyway,but we sensethe strain. This is one great technical problem which modern {iction has iN yet found no way to break through. Melville for the most part leers and insinuatesand brays,Joyce subtly assesses with icy Jesuiticeyes, and Faulkner howls or rapidly whispers,defiantly paradinghis huge emotion; and feeling, the hean of the novelist'sbusiness,sits waiting for the right incanution, newous and bored.

$lritchcruft in Bullet Park \Y/

V Y H E N I N 1 9 6 9 J o H N C H E E V E RT U R N E D from the lovableWapshotsto the weird creatureswho inhabit Bullet Park, most reviewersattackedor dismissedhim. They were, it seems to me, dead wrong. The Wapshot books, though well made, were minor. Bullet Park, illusive,mysteriouslybuilt, was major-in fact, a magnificentwork of fiction. One reasonthe book hasbeenmisunderstoodis that it lacks a sirnNo man who thinks seriouslyabout the enormous old ple message. questionscan reducehis thought to a warning sign like BRIDGEOUT. Another reasonis that Cheeveris right about evil' it comes quietly, unannouncedby thunder or screechingbats-comes like the novel's well-dressedman getting casuallyoff a train ten minutes before dark. Talking of the oldest and darkestevil, Cheever speakssoftly, gently, as if casually.Suspenseis not something he fails to achievein Bulla Park, but somahing he hasaroided.The norrelmo\resasif purposelessly, like its bland-minded,not very likable protagonist,and from time to time gives a nervous start at the blow of a distant at(e. Cheerrer's subjectis chance-but more than that. Chanceis a rahicle that carriesthe book into darker country. The opening lines present a setting-a train station-designedto suggestthe whole human condition in this mysterious,chance-filleduniverse.A temporary planet

t6 /

o N w R T T E R SA N D w R I T T N G

whosearchitecture,like that of the station,is "oddly informd, gloomy but unserious";a placeof isolationwhere chanceseemsto rule even an. "Paint me a small railroad smtion then," the novel begins-as if anyother settingwould do aswell. (But' "The settingseemsin some way to be at the hean of the matter," saysCheever,sly. An, like life, may stan with chance,but chanceshroudssomethingdarker.) The harmless-lookingman who stepsfrom the train meetsa real esmteagent named Hazzard-"for who elsewill know the exa$ age, usefulness, vdue and well-beingof the housesin townl' By chance, dayslater, the harmless-lookingman will be standingon the platform with Eliot Nailles, the novel'shero, when anotherman is suckedto his death by an expresstrain. The strangerhas nothing to do with the accident;he's buried, at the time, in his newspaper. But the skin crawls. We learn later that by ^ seriesof accidentsthe strangerhas become,unbeknownst to himself, a center of demonic malevolence. We've beentold repeatedlythat the universeis gloomy and frightening, random. Brute existenceprecedesessenceand also sometimes follows it, as it does in Nailles's good Christian mother, reducedby senility to a human doll in a nursinghome. Ah, y€s,ah, woe, we are tugged by cosmic strings, dolls all! Or are we? Cheeverreconsiders the ideaof chance,rememberingpsychicand psychologicdphenomena, the claims of good and bad witches.What emergesis a world where hope does exist (magic is real and can cure or kill), a world in a way e\rengrimmer than Beckett'sbecauseherelove and sacrificeare redities, like hope, but realities in flux, perpetu"lly threatened,perishing. The novel saysyes-and-noto existentialists,who can account for all but the paragnost.Cheever,in other words, seesthe mind in its totdity-sees not only the fashionableexistentialdarknessbut the light which givesnothingnessdefinition. Panly older than consciousness, for the sakeof this wholenessof vision, Cheeverin BulletPark aban' doned the fact-boundnovel of verisimilitude,which is by nature impotent to dramatizethe mind's old secrets,and turned to dependence on aoice,secretof the willing suspensionof disbeliefthat normally carriesthe fantasy or tale. Cheever'svoice-compassionate,troubled, humorous-controls the acrion, repearedlycalling attention to itself in phraseslike "at the time of which I'm writingJ' Where his voice fadesout, charactervoices come in. Without explanationor apoloW, he shifts,early in the novel,

w I T c H C R A F T I N B t I L L E T P A R K/ t 7

adolescent, to the cry of an unnamedand never-again-to-be-heard-of ^ cry againstsuburbanhypocrisy.("Oh damn them dl, thought the adolescentl')L,ater,telling how Eliot Nailles nearly murderedhis son, Cheevershiftsto Nailles'sown voice asNailles goesover the incident in his mind. With similar abruptnesshe introduces the voices-or, sometimes,centersof consciousness-ofNailles's wife, neighbors,L zodiac-trappedFrench teacher, a Negro swami and the harmlesslooking strang€r,mad Paul Hammer. Hammer decidesto murder Nailles-at first Eliot, later his son, Tony. The decisionis without explicit motivation, basedmainly on "rhe mysreriousbinding power of nomenclature."Cheevercould harte explainedthe whole thing, black masc as psychosis(the magrc of names),and would havedone so in a Wapshot book. But how do you rmder a rhing so strange?Insteadof explaining,he insens Hammer's journal. With a madman'sobjectivity,Hammer sketchesthe story of his life. The coldnessof tone (errcnwhen the sceneis comic), the flat description of his enfeebledquest for relationship,his survival by flight into symbolism (yellow rooms, a dream-casde,piecesof string) explains magicdly what the fact-boundnovel would turn to the dry unreality of a casestudy.The motive for the projectedmurder is coincidence-a correspondenceof names,two piecesof string. We learn that Paul Hammer has murderedbefore,without knowing it himself, to get a yellow room. But the renderedproof of his demonic nature is his roice, a quiet stovelidon terror and rage. As in dl first-ratenovels,the form of Bulla Park grows out of its subject.More here than in his earlier writings, Cheeverdependson poetic (which is to say,magical)devices-rhphm, imagisticrepetition, echo.Insteadof conrrentionalplot, an accretionof accidents.Far below consciousness, the bestpeoplein Bullet Park are mirror imagesof the worst: they live by magrc, correspondence. On the levelof consciousness, Nailles livesby sugary,foolish opinions and declareshis life "wonderful"-but he cannot ride his commuter train exceptdruged. Out of touch with his son, go\crned panly by ethicd clichis and panly by the normal frustration of the blindruled in other words by chance-he throws out his son'sbelovedTV and startsthe child on the way to rnentalillness.By the chancecombination of his middle-class values,his son'sslight willfulness,an argu-

tB /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

ment with his wife, and an accidenal meeringwirh black-jacketedboys whose faceshe cannot see,Nailles tries-in what could passfor inexplicable rage-to murder his son on a miniature golf course.(The mechanisticunirarsewrit small.The symbolismof placeis dways grrm n Bulbt Park ) Though N"illes's putter misseshis son s skull, the blackmagic selfsh ragein his aaacklearasthe son psychologicallycrippled-in fact, dying of murdered will-savable only by swami. An accidentd meetingwith a man in a bar and" a chanceecho when Nailles returns home makesNailles distrust his faithful wife-faithful because,by accident,her would-be seducerswere confoundedby, respectively,a fire, a cold, an attack of indigestion. In shon, Nailles, a tragicomicfool, is simply lucky,By accidentsof his childhood,he is in touch with Nature, he cuts down diseasedelms with a comicdly typical suburbanchainsawand shoots, in his undershons,a cenruryold snappingtunle (naked man againsrthe dinosaur).Hammer, by accidentsof childhood and bastardy,is cut off from Nature and himself. Nailles's blessingis that he is married to a good woman and has a son, whereasHammer is married to a bitch and is childless.Nailles's luck means that he's faintly in touch with the higher magic of the universe-the magic of love, creative force-whereas Hammer is in touch only with lower magic, correspondence. Magicd coincidence,echo, repetition. When imagesrecur or correspondencesappear,they are causes,benevolentor harmful. From his psychic,wholly self-centeredmother, Hammer getshis witchy ideaof drugging and immolating some innocent victim to "wake up" drugged America. When Rutuola, the gentle swami, makesmagic, the result is ritual. Both are attemptsto draw in the power of the universe.Both work, sometimes.Both ereuuzy. ("I know it's crazl' Tony says,raised from despair by the swami's chant of l-oae,I-ooe,I-oue,"but I do feel much better.") Benerolent witchcraft, ritud, assurnesthat the unir€rsecontainssome good and that men in groups can reach harmony with it. (Rain or shine, Nailles driras with his windshield wipers on, becausethat's his silly congregation'ssignof faith in the resurrection.)Malerolent witchcraft, on the other hand, assumescosmic forcesaftendantto the will of the witch. Neither sidewins decisively.(Selflessmen contain selfishness,and errenHammer has impulsestoward love.)The mainly benerolent have their marginal advantagebecausein times of crisisthey tend

rvrrcHcRAFT tN BULLET PARK/ t9

ro work together.Out of lonely arrogance,Hammer spills his plan to the swami, and from love the swami warns Nailles. But though Tony is rescued-Nailles rising to that strangetrance' statein which nothing can go wrong (a dazzhnepieceof writing)not redeemed.Naillesat the start is merelysalvaged, Nailles'sexisrence calledhis drab life "wonderful." When Rutuola brought Tony from despair,"everythingwas as wonderful as it had beenl' Now, when the murder hasbeenblocked,with the help of that ridiculouschainsaw, Cheevercloses,"Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles-drugged-wenr off to work and everlnhingwasaswonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been." There, it may be, is the underlying reasonthat reviewerswere annoyed by Bullet Park The novel is bleak, full of danger and offense, like a poisonedapple in the playpen.Good and evil are red, but are effectsof mindlesschance-or heanlessgrace.The demonology of Calvin, or Cotton Mather. Disturbing or not, the book towers high abovethe many recentnor€ls that wail and feed on Sanre. A religious book, affirmation out of ashes.Bullet Park is a novel to pore over, movearoundin, live with. The imagerepetitions,the starkand subtle that createthe book's ambiguousmeaning,its uneasy correspondences courageand compassion,sink in and in, like a curativespell.

Alice in Vonderland

O Y C r C A R o r O n T E s - w H o s E N o V E LW o w derland reveds how deeply lewis Carroll has influenced her-has a passagein her shon story "In the Region of lce" where a nun who teachesliterature,Sisterlrene, speakswith her friend of a brilliant mad student. Since the exchangesaysthings that ought to be said about kwis Carroll, let me begin with it and double back to it later.

$ili ,n'',1,i:ilri:il ;;":::}ffi i:fffi:*L,:: had been forced to teach grade-schoolarithmetic for the last four years.That mrght hara beenwhy shesaid,a little sharply, "You don't think ideasare red?" Sisterlrene acquiescedwith a smile,but of courseshedid not think so: ooly reality is red. Both of the two latestproductsof the kwis Carroll industry began as noble intuitions. One comesoff badly, the other well. The ideaof Aspeasof Alice was to assemblea "comprehensive" selectionof essays and poemson Carroll's Alice books, from the first delightfully obtuse rerriewsto the mo$ recentopinions, saneand otherwise.What splendid writers a man could include' W. H. Auden, Viryinia Woolf, Alexander Woolcott, Walter de la Mare, Horace Gregory Allen Thte, Roben

ALICE IN WONDERLAND /

6l

Graves,Harry lrvin. . . All theseand more Roben Phillips includes (not dl areup ro standardwhen writing about Carroll, but nelrermind); then he drowns the readerin a great quoP of inanity. The book is handsomelydesigned-plenty of white sPace,lovely paperthat can accommodateboth the type and the drawingsby Carroll and SirJohn Gnniel. Also includedaresomeof Carroll's photographs of the real Alice, plus photographsof Carroll and Sir John. But the readercan tell frorn the front matter what a pudgy book this will Pro\E in the end: a ponderouslyclevertitle, a dedicationpagetoo embarrassing to quore and a foreword that begins(with violins and Frenchhorns)' the "She hassurvivedthe Victorian Lge,severalwars and depressions, Ag. of Anxiety, and when last seen. . I' One feelsone has stumbled on a book about Alice by the Water Babies. Mr. Phillips's assumptionis that the generd readerneed not be burdenedwith the more difficult philosophicaland mathematicalessays on Carroll, much lessthose arrestingbut heavy studiesby specialists in linguistics.(He doesinclude A. L. Thylor's famous pieceon chess and theology-superb on chess.)On the other hand, he believesthe their foolgenerd readerwill want-though Phillips himself confesses ishness-KennethBurke'spieceon how the Alice books are really all about bowel movements,dong with over a hundred pagesof Freudian and Jungian, not to mention psychedelic,fanmsy. Carroll'spleasurein the companyof well-manneredlitde girls prorcs ominous,of course.As for the meaningof the books,Alice is a penis; or Alice is Carroll's oral trauma; or Alice is Christ Our lord in drag' 'As he wasdeserted,denied,taunted in His royal robes,crowned with thorns and humiliated,madeto drink the bitter vinegarof man'sscorn 'King of the Jewsl so she is desenedby and lifted up on the crossas her sleepingcompanions,mocked by the powerful, crowned with a wry heavy,trght goldencnown,madeto drink'sand [rnixed]with cideri 'wool [mixedfwith wine'; stsrvedat her own triumphal banquet]' Such I suppose, thingsmay amuseup to a point and ought to be represented, though not at any length. They prove what the Alice books everywhere say,that rigidity of system is insanity. Heavy concentrationon the roots and symptomsof Carroll's benign or mderolent lunacy(he was,of course,anything but mad) is perverse for two reasons'it's insidiousevenif we laugh at it, sinceit taints the mind; and it's out of date.It's a fact that Carroll liked little girls, and

62 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

one in panicular. He told them storiesand frequently had tea alone with them in his college rooms. With self-righteousgrown-upsand boisterouslittle boys,he stammered.This is merely to saythat he loved the opennessand innocence most commonly seen, in nineteenthcentury England,in upper-class femde children,and that he could not coPeemotiondly with harsherqudities-in other words,that Carroll, though a fine and gentle man (granted, he had two or three farnous untrums), was mdadjusted, harmlesslyneurotic. To go any funher than that is plain unbalanced. The psychoanalpicd readingson which Mr. Phillips wasresa founh of his colleaion are demonstrablybasedon doubtful, or an) ilay boring, suppositions(as eldestchild in a large family, Carroll may havefelt rejected),systematicerrors (all lakes in fiction representbinh waters) and falsehoods(the joke, popular with his students,thar Carroll was so paranoidhe sent off the rnanuscriptsof his Sylaieand Brano in shuffled strips,and sent by separatepost a code for reassembling the mess-a joke no one believeduntil the Freudiansand Mr. Phillips). Carroll's studenm,by the way, liked him, and one can easilysee why. He solemnly drew cartoons as he lectured, and passedthem around to the classat the end of the period. The purposeof his "Syrbolic logic" was to make hard matter teachable,and his enlivening approach is now standardin logic classes,"No kitten wirhout a tail will play with a gorilla. . I'When psychoanalystscan write so well and so sensibly,they may speak again. (Did you know, by the wa/, that drum majoreffes are penises?) But the defenseof Carroll againstidiots has been presentedmany times, by W. H. Auden among others. Virginia lVoolf got the hean of the matter: unlike most people, Carroll never lost touch with his childhood-a point so obvious that its implications are sometimes overlooked. The naughty, bossy, seemingly irrational (but in fact insanely rigid) Wonderland charactersare the essenceof childhood in one of its aspects,and so is Alice, minding her mannerslike a good little glrl and trying to make senseof a crazy universebristling with commandsand admonitionsthat seemto make-and indeeddo make-no sense.The discoveryof nonsense,savageryand childishness at the core of things-the discoverythat ends both Alice in Wonderland and Tltrougb tbe LookingGlass-signalsthe child's emergence into adulthood.

ALtcE IN woND ERLAND /

63

All of which (and more) is explainedin the best essayMr. Phillips 'Alice'sJourneyto the End of the NightJ' included,Donald Rackin's a piece that heroicallylabors up on dripping wings from the slough of essaysa la Freud and Jung, hoversa moment, then crumples in L sad deliquium ro be swdlowed by mumblings on Lewis Carroll as Acidhead. Donald J. Grry's textbook in the Nonon Critical Edition seriesis more satisfyirg: outhoritatirre,illustrated,annotated texts of the Alice books and "The Huntin gofthe Snark;' with a rich and sensibleselec' tion from Carroll'sdiariesand letters,documentsby peoplewho knew him, and criticd essays-awiseand balancedselectionof essays,though one that rnight profit from expansion.Gray includesinvaluablecommenrson Carrcll's work asa photographer,mathematicianand logician. In mathematicsand logic, as elsewhere,Carroll shows e, quirky mind in which intuition and intellect war, and intuition wins hands down-with sometirnescomic results.He was not in fact a very good mathematician. His consciousopinion was that ideasare red. As his "New Theory of Parallels"shows,he doggedlyfollowed the old school of thought, in which mathematicsshould be basedon self-evidendytnre acioms-atl opinion Wonderlandwould laugh at, as would any of those modern mathematicianswho pretend to derive inspiration from Carroll. As for Carroll the logician,R. B. Braithwaitesums up superbly when he says,in an esseythat should cenainly haveappearedin Phillips's book, that Carroll's mind "was permeatedby an admirable logic which he and explicit criticism. It is was unable to bring to full consciousness 'symbolic [oS.' so superficial. . . and his casual this that makeshis puzzlesso profoundl' Braithwaite'sessayshould be studiedhard by all writers on Carroll, becauseit hints at somethingcentral.It is true, as C'eorgePitcher shows (in an essayGray includes),that Carroll profoundly influenced Lldwig Wittgenstein; and true, asMichael Holquist shows(dso in Gray), that Carroll has influenced modern writers from the surrealiststo RobbeGrilla and Nabokov (who translatedAlie in Wondnhnd rnto Rusian). Carroll did seemto write, as Holquist says,a strikingly *odern "depersondized" fiction that "could be perceivedonly as what it was, and not some other thingl' As Walter Kerr (not included) once pointed out, Carroll reachedmodern absurdismbefore anyone else.

64 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

But the tnrth, all the same,is that none of the things awedmoderns say about Carroll would strike kwis Carroll astrue. He was the kind of geniusthat has baffled professorssincePlato wrore rhe "Ionl' He worked as great artists always do, pace the Professionof English, by Pure feel-as he put it himself, "in a dream," or asJamesJoyce said, "by faithl' It nercr occurredto him that Humpty Dumpty was (or was not) a linguistic nomindist, much lss that "The Hunting of the Snark" wes a formdist manifesto.The puzzlesand garnesin the Alice books, righdy celebratedby modern thinkers, were to Irwis Carroll's conscious mind mere jokes, imitations of reality as seen by children. The ringinglast line of Holquist's essay,'A Booju* Is a Boojum," that is, fictional creaturewith no red-life referent,is thrilling but probably fdse. Though a Snark may be anphing from a snake-sharkto a snipe and spark ("you may serveit with greens,and it's handy for striking a light"), o boojum, as Edmund Epsteinhasexplainedto me, is a scay Ooo!) gargantuancircuselephantnamedJumbo whose wife was-that's right- "Alice." To the end, that strangely beautiful child was Carroll's muse. His pure and holy love for her, iilrd hers for him, freed his whole being as other pretty little grrls freed his tongue. She made him a genius, gavethe timid arithmetic teacher the courageto look straight at the red and overwhelm it with puns. Nothing could be lessmodern-or more constant in art. If we cringe at the thought that an is love, or hunt for nasty explanationsin the po$y, the whole history of mankind has been in vain. Or put it this wa/: As the greatestphotographerof children in the nineteenth century (his finest pictureswere of Alice), Carroll worked totally by intuition' he took the picture when his set-upfelt right. And as the greatestchildren's writer who ever lived, he did the same. It was Alice who made Carroll's set-up feel right. On the day of that famous picnic when Carroll spun out his story for Alice Liddell and her sisters,the classicistDuckwonh looked over his shoulderfrom rowing and said in pure amilzement, "Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?" Carroll answeredthat it was. And it was.

TbeBreast ..BETTER THE BANAL THAN THE APOCA. lypticl' Prof. David Alan Kepeshsays-the centralcharacterin Philip Roth's new novella, Tln Breast.For reasonsnot dtogether clear to his doctors-"the assault(somesay)of a rolcanic secretionfrom the pitu'mammogenic'fluid"-K.pesh has turned into an enormous itary of breasr,round at one end like a watermelon, at the other end a nipple that can hear and talk and feel sexud stimulation but never reach orgasm,foreverhowling "more!" Perhapsit's a dream,Kepeshhopes. Perhapsmadness,an effectof having taught too much Swift, Ifufke and C'ogol. But it's not; the transformationis real. So the professorrants and reasons,or tells banal jokes to himself and those who visit him. One of his visitors is his brave, banal father, who comes once a week and, "seatedin a chair that is drawn up close to my nipple," reports the dull adventuresof people who were once guestsat the Kepeshes's Jewish hotel in the Catskills. Another is his loyal, banal mistress,Claire. She has a nice grrl's distastefor sexualexperiment, but when she learns that his nurse'swashing him exclteshim, her question and his answerparody and celebratethe bedroom conversation of all good, banal lovers. "Would you like me to do what she does?" "Would you-do it?"

66 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

The noblest and most band of dl the professor'svisitors is his psychiatrist, Dr. Klinger, a stubborn clinger to reality, who for yearshas been doggedlyridding Kepeshof neurotic arroganceand self-pity,plainmindedly, proving to him againand again that his troubles-even this recent transformation-are mere matters of fact, things to be taken for what they are, no more, so that now, going over his once exciting traumas,Kepesh, "citadel of sanityJ'can sigh, "My life's drama has all the apped of some tenth-Sade readercontaining Maupassanr's'The Necklace' and 'The llck of Roaring Campl " Boring, /es, but a fine achievernent,that acceptance,that ability to tolerate and even affirm the ordinary. Nofiing could be funher from the ideds of, say,Heidegger and Sartre, whose guilt-laden,mad notions hartedone so much in this cenrury to make life and literature really boring. Sensibly,cilsu"lly, Roth playsthe existentialistjive for laughs.Early in his ordeal, Kepesh complains'

In the midst of the incredible,the irredeemablyordinary appearsto remind me of the level at which most of one's life is usudly lirred.Really,it is the silliness,the trividity, the meaninglessnessof experiencethat one missesmost in a statelike this; for asidefrom the mon$rous physicalfact, there is of coursethe intellectud responsibilityI seemto havedeveloped to the uniquenessand enormity of my misfonune. What does it mean? How has it come to passand why? In the entire history of the human race, why David Alan Kepesh?

With a little help from his friendsKepeshcomesoff it. [n the end he, though an odd form of life, achievesthe ordinary knows the foolishnessof his supposedresponsibilityto askgrandiosequestions,romantic evasionsof Rilke's admonition ("which is not necessarilyaselevated a sentiment aswe all mrght once haveliked to believe") that you must changeyour life, changeit in the direction of the mundane,the banally committed, the merely honest.Good point. More and more novelists are coming to it. The 1970smay yet turn out. The highest value in fiction (aseveryonehas always known except novelty freaksand, of course,the criticism industry) is moral stability,

r H E B R E A S T/ 6 7

the ability to celebratereality without distorting or evadingit, though admittedlythat'sworthless,impossiblein fact, without masterfultechnique and the ability to invent the right vehicle-realistic or, asin Tbe fabulous.The truth of what you sayis what really mafters,and Breast, the only imporranceof techniqueis that when you say it badly you as in suchearlierRoth haven'tsaidit. Sloppinessand self-indulgence, norrelsu WIrn Sln Wa M and Pornry\ Cornpkint, debasethe vision, of invention, asin some making it seerneither falseor silly.Feebleness of his early stories,limits the vision to, at best,the merely touching. Technicdly at least, Tlte Breastseemsto me Roth's best book so far. The humor and pathos(it hasfair amounts of both) come from his solid graspof how life is, his firm knowledg. of the imponance of strengthof characterand the will to live. Or, as Kepeshcdls them "S.of C., and the W. to Ll' He in his meetingswith his psychiatrist, explains,"These banal phrasesare the therapeuticequivdent of my lame jokes. In these,my preposteroustimes, we must keep to what is ordinary and familiarl' The trick which is the hean of the book is brillisnt: to celebrate the ordinary,the silly, the banal,createa grotesqueand extraordinary banality-^ hugedetachedbreastwith human consciousness and feeling. The trick is good, so obviousand easyand yet so rich with meaning, it's a little hard to translatefrom what it is, a piece of art, to reviewer's language. Roth playse\€ry posible gamewith his conceit. For instance,Kepesh mournfully and rcry touchingly (though I know that soundsridiculous) compareshis "red life" situation with the merely fictional situation of, among others,Kafka's Gregor Samsa,cockroach-a joke that grves Roth a chanceto make fun of Freudianan and neurosistheories,to ape pompous and silly ideasof literary critics about "unique vision" and "geniusl' and to reconsider(lighdy and slyly, of course)the whole theory of the non-realisticnovel. For another instance,the breastconceit allows Roth another confused and loving slap at Mom, also at mankind the wailing infant; a shot at the Playboyculture we're mired in; and a cunning metaphor for post-Christian,post-Sartreanman-blind, insatiable.'A joke. A grotesque."Or a joke and grotesqueto soffie; not to the wise. There are two secretsto pulling off such a literary trick, and Rorh knows them. First, once committed to reponing the experienceof a

68 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrlNG

rnan turned into a breast, the writer must by powerful imaginarion immerse himself in the situation. What exactlywould everyoneinvolved feel, think, say, do? (You can get Lwaywith mistakesin the redistic norel. That's why one can write best-sellingtrash. In a world constructedout of thin air, impishnessand childish ioy, one little slip and you're a deadman.) Roth is on good termswith the hunchbacked rnuseof the outrageous.His dull, red peoplein an outlandishsiruation are hilarious. The spinsternurse who pretendsnot to hear the breast'sobscenesu#estions. Or the former Englishdepanmenthead, now dean, at Stony Brook, whom Roth caricatureswith relish and mad genius. The secondsecretis that one mu$, dl the time one wrires, be so steepedin the meaning of the centrd conceit (more a matter of feeling than intellect)that nothing comes into the story just for laughs. Every event, every joke, must ambush the readerwith reality while he laughs, and again Roth mostly pulls it off. He also does, I'm sorry to say, what I've always found tiresome and stupid in his writing, especiallyof late, and what's worse, he doesit right at the beginning, which may prevent some readersfrom ever reachingthe good pans. He talks too much-like a hungup schoolboyor like the trendy popular novelist he is, for dl his vinues-about taking down his trousers,studying his penis,moving his bowels,maintaininghis sexud potency,and so on. He says,for instsoce: ", . . the flesh at the baseof my penis had rurned a soft reddish shade. I looked stained,as though a smdl raspbety, or maybea cherry had beencrushedagainstmy pubes,the juices running down onto my member, coloring the root of it nggedly but unmistakably red." I know all the argumentsthat favor this claptrap0 mean the pun), including the argumentat the core of Roth's book about banality,but I still say it's boring. As a rule of thumb I say,if Socrates,Jesusand Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't. Or metU, diny Chaucer, who does nothing like this, much lessSwift who, enyway,was crazy.The banal may be wonderful subject mafter, but it's lousy as a literary mefiod. Gass, Elkin, Purdy and Fowles, among others, deal brilliantly with sex and defecation.In Roth, as in Updike, the stuff's embarrassing, unhealthy. (The sick, the self-regarding,is preciselywhat Roth attacks in Tbe Breat. He shoots down all signsof it wherever he seesthem. It seemsto me he missedone.)

r H E B R E A S T/ 6 9

The fault'snot enoughto wreck the book; though for me, at least, it underminesthe book's authority. And I may as well mention the sympromof what some may think another fault' The story doesn't linger the way the bestwriting does,imposingits own redity on the reader'sway of seeingfor days and weeks. like a I think the reasonis this: Roth doesn'tchiselout sentences delightpoet. He writes with intelligenceand sophisticatedcleverness, fully and lightly. Nowhere am I stanled by a fine new idea, a turn of phrasethat inclinesmy hair to standup. Theseare mattersof taste, no doubt. In mattersof style, I persondly preferthe mildly apocalyptic to the banal. But I say all this merely for the sakeof completeness.Roth is no C'ogol-a comparisonhe boldly and jokingly invites-but Tbe Breast is terrific for a thing of its kind: inventiveand saneand very funny, though filthy of course,as I've mentioned.It's incredible,in fact, how sman he is for a man so hung up with his you-know-whar.

The \illray Ve Write Now

V E R Y O N E S E E M ST O B E A G R E E D L A T E L Y

that the seriousnovelin Americais goingrhrougha change.The realistic novelis dead,one hears;and somethingexcitingis risingfrom its ashes.I takea dimmerview,but I do think somethingis happening, and the declineof redismis a superficidpan of it. What is happeningis that aftera periodof cynicism,novelistsaresrruggling-for the most pan in waysdoomedby indifference ro novelisticforrn-ro seetheir wayclearto go heroic.Strangenewworldsarein, cynicism and despairareout, replacednot by true affirmationbut by psychologicd survivaltactics. Iet me b.g- with somestatemenm of theobvious.Americannovelists,elrenAmericansby choicelike VladimirNabokovor Ieny Kosinski, cannevergetrid of the qualifyingeffectof Arnericanliteraryandcultural tradition-that is, the Americancharacter-aslongastheywrite to or aboutArnericans. I would saythat thisrneans, nor so rnuchhistorically * symbolically,the Ti'anscendentdists, with rheircult of the child, Indianor illiterate(Faulkner's Negroes, childrer,or idiots);"lifelike" speech(theJewishidiom is asgoodasHuck Finn'sfor cutting down soulless sophisticates); andWhitmanishquopby way of formthe optimisticexpectation that the bookwill somehowpull through, like nature.

THE wAY WE WRITE NOw / 7l

It meanschildlikefaith suchasEmerson's,which organizesredity's through reason'sdiscourasnghowevers,but when clutter and smashes forced ro seefacts givesway in a rush to petulant, childish despair like that of Howells or Twain-grown-old.IfJames and Fitzgerald,and innocence in his own way Melville, got pastthe blithe and unsustainable that is the hean of the American character,it remained their literary subject,as it remainsthe subjectof their heirs,John Cheever,John Updike and William H. Gass.For Nabokov it's frequently the butt of the joke, as in blita and Ada. of extremes(happyEmerson,black-heanedMelville, Our experience light and dark assimple asvinue and wickednessin a Congressman's electionspeech)makesall Americansradicals.Our normal view is that if everyrthingisn't terrific, it stinks.Thus American self-doubtsabout Vietnam, racerelationsand ecology lead instantly to a conviction that life is unendurable,God is horror, and our wives and children all hate us. So in the sixtiesblack humor camein-the Vonnegut shrug-and nihilism, asin William Burroughs,and smart-mouthsatireof the kind third-rate novelistsare still turning out, Brock Brower, for instance, in Tbe Late GreatCreature.Where not crushed entirely, the built-in American hungerfor audaciousaffirmationwent desperateand kinky, as in Norman Mailer's An AmericanDream, which tried to savethe fat from the fire by witchcraft. Most critics assumedit was all some kind of metaphor,not yet having heardMailer's theories on telepathy and the moon. In the absenceof any remotely tenableaudacioussuggestion(Faulkner, by now, was as dead as Captain Marvel), we began to ger by in the late sixtieson the merely audiculous,that is to say,the heroics of a $renuously encouragedmouse.It came to be generally understood-panly becauseof William Gass'stour-de-forcenovella Willie Masters'LonesomeWtfe and his numerous anicles (later collected in Fiaion and tbeFiguresof Ltrt)-rhat though real existencemay be senselessand painful, oft makesup for it. And eft, when the anist is unable to say anything helpful, meansstyle. Gass'sown writing doesn't illustratehis theory. Some of Roben Coover's does,though not his best book , Tlte Origin of tbe Branists. All of John Banh's does.The "reality" of Tbe Sot-Weed Faaor or of GilesGoat-Bayis the words of the novel, nothing else.Giles finds that a librarian is readingthe rary book he'sinside.E*ry noral is a funhouse,

72/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

as Banh has it elsewhere,in which the novelist pulls the leversand the hayseed reader rides. The themes in Banh are the traditional American themes-there are even mord problemsand thrilling soludons. But Banh is not so brazen as to recommend his solutions to humanity (if humanity exists). The recent cult of style has the splendid effect of making novels more enjoyable,lesssludgy; but the assenionthat style is life's only ralue-that style redeemslife-is fdse both to life and to the novel. Gass, in his own novel Ommsettcr'sInck, has nothing in his theory to protect him from a too-long middle sectionthat is mostly the verbal acrobaticsof an oversophisticated,exhaustedcharacter,and nothing to explain why the end of the novel, which involvesmoral affirmation and a changeof heart-a typicrlly American, totrlly convincing resurgenceof innocence-is so profoundly moving. Similarly, his own comments in the shon works collected in In tbe Heart of tbe Hcart of tbe Country have nothing to do with the moral and poetic power of the stories. "The PedersenKid" Gassdescribes as "an srercisein shon sentences."Once watchesin r"ainfor the flicker of a smile. Gassisn't joking. He's Huck Finn grown up and teaching philosophy in St. Louis. In another sge, an age not embarrassedby audacity, Gassmlght take pleasurein the fact that his bools are moving affirmations, and he might consistentlyconstructhis fablesaround the searchfor ralue, rather than around languagepeaks.As it is, by the luck of good character,he surpassesand contradicts his age and, to a large extent, his theory. lerzy Kosinski, another celebratedstylist (Tbe PaintedBird, Steps, Being Tbere'),is truer to both. The blood-curdling sketchesand story fragments which make up Supshave undeniable effect-like fdling from a silo and landing on a plow-except for the honest country readerwho, not inexcusably,throws awaythe book. The obsessively dark vision is dedicated"to my father, a mild man" and has an ePi' graph on self-conrrolfrom the Bbagaaadgita.In other words, Kosinski isn t imitating redity but making up a world whoseonly real-lifeparallel is rhe life of the damned. Escapeto purgatory and ultimate salvation ere not, he seemsto feel, his businessiN an anist. His business is not empathy and the andysis of mord and psychologicd process but strictly appropriatepresentationof a mordly stadc surface.His businessis "style."

rHE wAY wE WRITE NOw / 7t

The purity of the experimentis revealing.Where style really is the whole concern,there can be no real drama-how people come to be damnedor saved-and no "lessonl' Like twelrre-tonemusic, the technique can expressonly boredom and horror. Granted, boredom and horror are legitimatesubjects.What makesKosinski'striumph suspicious is that, to the disillusionedoptimist (Tvain too furious and heanbroken to makejokes,or Updike'sSkeeter,the outragedidealistwho deliverstirades in Rabbit Rcdur) Supsseemsan accurate description of life, whateverdedication and epigraphmay hint. The affirmations lay outsidethe book, which itself supponsa grossoversimplification traditional with Americans.Needlessto say,the unrelievedblackness readersfind in Steps,though Kosinski may not mean it, is the whole brg of tricks in William Burroughs, who believesevery groaned-out word .ln Tbe Ticka Tltat Erploded,style is explicitly a cruel falsehope to us soft rnachines,a thing we must destroy. The antithesisto the searchfor sdvation through style is the gospel accordingto Donald Banhelme. He avoidsstyle at any cost, and also avoidspsychologicdor moral analysis,escapingdespairby America's oldest,still commonesttrick' the childishnessand befuddledinnocence of YankeeDoodle, Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield-the childishness (in this casemad) that sneakspast oppressivereason. "The intellect,"saidThoreau, "is a cleaverl'In a world whose findings droveMelville half insane,the tanscendentdists' ideal child indefensibly assenedconvictionsthat felt right to basicdly sentimentaland good-heaned,though often fierce and wrongheaded,Americans. In a world where the mechanicsof DNA and RNA prove conclusively what Melville could only fear (it's DNA that makes Burroughs so furious) and where our noblestintentionsharreresultedin what some call genocide,our traditional optimistic feelingsare, for some crazy reason,as intenseas ever. To say we're wrong is like telling a lion to settle down and be a horse. Banhelme'scraziescan expressand ralidate those romandc feelings, at the sametime checkingoirr coclsure tendency to meddle and preach and reform every passingjay. We laugh at his seven psychological dwarrcs n Srmu Wite , sincethey're lunaticsand fools; but their feelings about peopleand the puzzlementand ultimate wonder of things are exactlyour own. It has nothing to do with black comedy-Beckett's HoPp Days, for instance,which angrily laughs at brainlessoptimism.

74/

oN wRrrERS AND wRITTNG

(Banhelme's charactersare not exactly optimists.)Like R"lph Waldo Emerson ("1 contradict myself?"), Banhelme'scraziessystematically evadethe issue,and they encour4gethe readerto erade it too, with neuroticdly hedthy vigor. They work like the Christianity of those Updike adultswho haveshuckedreligion but carryon from childhood a security ultimately untouched by their knowledg. that it's groundless. At times Banhelme himself becomesthe sacrifice-when he says "baff " for "bath" and no one but Banhelme can be speaking(not some narrator or character).He flaunts his psychologicalweaknessas Tivain flaunts Huck's ignorance,and for the same purpose:to stay clear of the gro\iln-uplies. Frequently the managementof plot is the model of our evasionof what might wreck us. Notice, for instance, in the srory "Prunella" in City Life, how neatly Banhelme slips every red-world difficulty. He distorts reality but he survivesand (mostly) smiles.He stayswith what feelsimportant but can't be defended,reshap ing the world to fit the soul and acceptingthe oddity causedoutside, for example a father who's been run over and killed but is also,for some reason, sitting on the bed and weeping. Banhelme's affirmation was never meant to havepoetic power and has lessfirst-ratehumor than his admirersclaim, but his work, slight or not, is mainline American-"innocent eye,"non-analpicd mind, fafuhor€r knowledge,celebrationwithout irony of trifles that Americans love, like the phantom of the opera.Banhelme-and this is the irnportant point-affirms not a value or systemof valuesbut a way of being. His choice rules out novelistic form (conflict, profluence,enlightenment) and is typical, or so I hope to show, of what is now going on, the rise of groundless,cautiously optimistic affirmation, the good as psychologicd survival tactic. Superficidly, no two writers could be more unlike than Stanley Elkin and JoyceCarol Oates.Elkin at his bestis a mad barbarianturned srand-up comic (his favorite devicesare the pun and the punchline) who answersall whining and pessimismwith perverseassertionsthat whatever the whiner whines about is in fact a great good. In A Bad Man he praises,with incredibleverbalenetW,a bad man. ln Tbe Dick Gibson Sbouthe turns that friend of midnight drivers, the trivial and dreary all-night tdk show, to a fast, loud circusof bickering and outrageous,consciouslyChaucerian tdes. In his fonhcoming novellacollection he goesfunher, hitting lunatic magni{icentheights-or maybe

THE wAY wE wRITE Now /

7t

depths.Not that he arroidsreality. His charactersare forever arguing with themselres,with eachother, or with the reader("Perhaps you sensibleobiection will say. . :'). But the purposeof eachdiscounaging, is to trigger an dtiloquent, crazymen resPonse. in fact, is in nothing he proclaimsor pretendsto Elkin's message, proclaim, nor even in the fancy symbolism, but in energy pure and simple. In his earlier writing (Crim and Kibitzen nd A Bad Man) he seesall human relationshipsin terms of power. In Tbe Dick Gibson Sbout(which is therefore a better book) relationshipswhich begin as power-struglessoftentoward understanditgand appealsfor lora. Nerrertheless,ir's raw energy that Elkin loves-in prose and in characters. He's Ahab smashingthrough the mask with jokes, an eternal child whose answerto oppressivereasonis to outperform it, outshout it. Gfizzly reality is his straight-man. I happento know JoyceCarol Oates,the goriestwriter in America, shutsher eyesduring the bloody partsof Polanski'sMacbab.One knows from her best stories and frorn watching the gende and humorous minor charactersin her novels,that her rraluesareJamesianand that the razor-sharpintellect neededto makeJamesiandistincshepossesses tions. Nevertheless,shewrites "gothic" novelsand has describedthe of modern lifel' Unlike all the genreas "a fairly accurateassessment is I think, of doing what she capable, writers I have mentioned, other great novelistsdways do, which is to build tight form out of singleminded psychologicaland moral analysis. She hasoccasionallydone this in long stories(for instance,"Free") though not in her bestor most typicd stories("In the Region of lce" and "The Wheel of [orc") which hara, though the technicalmeansare different,the effectof her novels.In novelsshearoids analysisin away that seemsintentiond, fragmentingthe world (and the novel'srhphm) by ^ use of close,almost myopic examination followed by stanling cuts-to anothercharacter,enother era-that disorientthe readerlike the kick of a mule. Crisis situationsariseand ranish before either the them, making fuie intellea a uselesstool readeror characterscan assess (shewrites repeatedlyof the brilliant but mad) and producitg * image of history personalor public, asa track of machine-gunwounds. Vdue aflirmations are as fleeting as destructions, and often as grotesque. The resultis that, asfor Banhelme or Elkin, thought-out rtaluesthe solid foundationsof characterthat Henry Jamesor Jane Austen

76/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

fictiondly develop and recommend to the reader-are replacedby " philosophicallygroundlesssurvivaltactic, horror and uneasycompassion as a fxed stateof mind. If her purpose is to "understandj' ,ry, the Detroit riots tn Tbmr, that is nor, I think, her anistic achievemenr. The technique she chooses-like Banhelme's, in this one respecmakesthe readera certain kind of person for the momenr, &n innocent who, wide-eyed and tremblirg, survives. Odd as the suggestionwill no doubt seem,JohnUpdike doesmuch the same,though in another way. He is, in one sense,a realist-he has a keen, deadly accurateeyeand a surefeeling for his time and place.His work makesnonsenseof the theory that rhe realisticnovel is dead.But his realism,like that ofJames,is rich in .ythic and symbolicoranones, archaypal pamerns.He writes repeatedlyabout children and grcwn-ups, country and ciry, past and present,often, as in Coupleqrhe Arcadian Pastof nymphs and satyrs(in Couphsthey shape-shifrto Merrymounr revelers)and a present where Arcadia is sought in rrainby people of psychologicdly arresteddeveloprnent.In fact, asthe critic brry tylor hasshown in his book on Updike, all of Updike's work canin a way be approachedas a brilliant symbolic orploration of the pastoraltradirion. Updike's chief way of "understanding" a problem is to discover its symbolic equivalents.Symbolism is his way of thinking and hope of salration, as perfectedstyle is the hope of Gas or energericaffnonrery the hope of Elkin. In Cmples,again,he plays a good dealwith (among a thousand such symbolic counters)the fact that in Christian tradition fate is representedby ^circle, faith by ,straight line, but that in hyperbolic geornetry, all lines make circles. Get the symbolic equationsright, Updike saysin effect(and include enough sexand precisedescripdonto keep the charactershuman), and the confusion will dl snapclear.The most baffling and painful questions take on order once you find all the possibleanalogesbetween (in Rabbit Redur) copulation, religion, spaceexploration, Parkinson's disease,the war in Vietnam, and race relations. All writers use this method to some extent, but in Updike it becomesmore imponant than plot, characteror style, any of which he will dter for a symbol. Symbolism, in other words, is for Updike, as it was for Hawthorne and Melville, a good-luck piece. The method is medievd, which doesn't rneanwrcng, and the hope is asgroundless,philosophicallyspeaking,asElkin's clowning or Miss

THE wAY wE WRITE NOw / 77

Oares'swidenedeyes.ln RnbbitRedur,his finest book so far, Updike finds in the method not only solacebut a seeminglyfirm platform from which to launch funher affirmations, and in these he goes far beyond most other writers in terms of value commitment. I honor him heartily for that, yet I wonder if evenhere the assenionsstick. Even here he is relatively indifferent to what Jamesbelievedwas the red businessof the novel, whether the novel is realisticor not. Though Updike comesro someof his conviction through the expehe neverputs his money on psychologicaland rienceof his characters., unfolding norclistic form. That Process inevitably drama, moral andysis, givesUpdike his rough draft, I suspect-the lines of his plot and those many fine moments of insight, penetration.But given the draft, he sropsthinking about the real, scientificdly inexpressiblemechanicsof peopleand evenrs.He beginsjuggling and ornamenting,working up his complex allegory and moving farther and fanher from dramatic necessity.At the point of the main dramatic conflict in Rnbbit Rcdur, the novel turns to tirade, a retreat from drama. What Rabbit really thinks about it all is left uncertain. In shon, asother writers lately are doing for other reasons,Updike abandonscloseanalysisand dramaticinevitability in favor of, simply, away of being-Huck Finn asingeniousequation-maker.There's the problem in all our finest contemporaryfiction, I think. It's the reason for the thin, ungluedqudity in eventhe most dazzlingtechnicalperformances.Whether you write about dragonsor businessmen,it's in the carefulscrutinyof cleanly apprehendedcharacters,their conflicts and ultimate escapefrom immaturity, that the novel makesup its solid truths, finds courageto defendthe good and attackthe simpleminded.

SaintWalt

FEW YEARSAGO WHEN YOU MENTIONED

Walt Disney at a respectablepafty-or an) vay this is how it was in California, where I was then-the standardresponsewas a headshake and a groan. Intellectuds spoke of how he butcheredthe classicsfrom Piruabio to Winnie-tbe-Poob-how his wildlife pictures were sadisticand coy, how the World's Fair sculpturesof hippopotamuses, etc., were a national if not international disgrace.A few craziesdisagreed, and since craziesare dways people to watch, it beganto be admitted that the early Pluto movies had a considerablemeisure of je ne sais quoi, that the background animation inSnarutWbite was "quite extr& ordinary:' that Fantasiadid indeed have one great sequence(then it becam€t\Mo; now everyonesaysthree, though there's fierce disagree' ment on exactly which three). Being a stubborn, intractablesort of personwith no innate good sense,and having investedhours and hours of my life riding my chaintread Roadmastersevenor eight miles every Saturday night to Walt Disney movies that came to the Star Theater in Attica, I held outthe way you'd hold out for a kind old uncle accusedof child molest' ing-for Disney'sabsoluteand total exoneradon.With animus,mind you. The solemngenerationhad done me damage.SinceSnoutWbite was roo frightening, bad for children's psyches(evennow I hide under

sArNr wALr

/ 79

Capmy sear,,r'henI think the witch is coming),they'd emasculated (but a tain Hook in PeterPau they'd even half-tamedthe alligator and a wany noseand thunder).They smilecan be asscary asbuzzards alsotook awayour cornicsand Oz books-all about castration-and deploredthose terrific crows tn Dumbo as a sinisterpiece of racism. So I fiercelyarguedfor the sideof the unrighteous-"Disney is the grearesr!"I said. "Compared to Disney,Michelangelo is a lowbrow, filthy-mindedpunkl"-ruining panies,endingold friendships.. . I will tell you God's truth: when I wasin SanFrancisco,northern Cdifornia seriouslyconsideredwithdrawing frorn the pan of the sute Wdt Disney lived in. I foughr on. The odds seemedoverwhelminglyagainstme, and at But the outcome is history, rimes,I admit, I felt a little discouraged. Walt Disney is now universallyrecognized as the greatestanist the world has ever known, exceptfor, possibly,Apollonius of Rhodes. There hasrecentlybeen published,in fact, a huge, somewhatexpensive,richly illustratedan book on Disney'swork, TbeArt of WaltDit*!' From Mickey Mouseto tbeMagic Kingdom (l$rams). It's a book well wonh buying,written by a bona fide professiondan critic, Christopher Finch. Excepthere and there, when Finch seemsto me gratuitously and senselessly criticd (he objects,for instance,to the "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria" sequencewhich closesFannsic, finding it a lesssublimeexpressionof Christian feeling than, say,Chartres Cathedral),Finch hasexactlypinpointedDisney'sgreamess and appeal, Walt Disneywasa rnan who wantedto pleas€,& man who had a downright awesomefaith in the ordinary. He was a celebratorof man-ashe-is.He had no grandprogramsfor improving man'scharacter,only programsfor making man'slife more enjoyable,more hedthy. So, in an agewhen other people'sanimatedcanoonswere still jerking foolishly through vaudevillegags,Disney produced Tbe Band Concert,his first Technicolormusicshon, featuringMickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the best William TellOaertureyou'll everhear; and in an agewhen people were just beginningto worry about ecology, Disney was not only planningbut building futuristcities,ecologicallybalanced,pollution free.(Finch closeshis book with an essayby PeterBlake, practicing architectand former editor of ArcbitecturalForum, or the profound significanceof Disneyland and Wdt Disney World for architecture and urban planning-in fact, for the very survival of urban man.)

80 /

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNG

Finch tracesDisney'slife from beginningto end-and beyond the end, sincesomeof Disney'snoblestprojects,includingthe Experimenml Prototype Community of Tomorroq were still in the planning stage when Disney died of cancer-and in the processshowswhat it was about Disney that made him so nearly infallible. Disney knew what he liked, felt absolutelycenain that other human beingswere exactly like him, and went after it, cutting no corners.His assumptionwas absurd,of course,but it's an issumption everyreal anist makes,and the characterMickey Mouse alone would be enough to justify the assumption.Though Disney couldn't evendraw Mickey Mouse-as Disney was always the first to admit (Mickey was the invention of Ub lwerks, but everyline, every pucker or sheepishgrin was subject to Disney's never hasty approval)-Mick y was, in fact, Walt Disney. Only Disney could do Mickey's voice,a point more imponant than it mny at first sound, sincethe voice controlled everyflicker of emotion the animatorsgavethat indefatigable,endlesslysubtle mouse; and as Disney's charactermellowed,so did Mickey's. From Tln Band Couert, where neither bee nor tornado nor even Dondd Duck can interrupt his conducting, to TIn brrcrn's Appcntia, wherehe takeson the powers of the universe,Mickey is the Artist, the Ordering Intelligencethat will nor be abashedby its littleness,at least not for long. There is, of course, more Christian feeling in late Mickey Mouse than in the 'Ave Marial' One could make much of this-the Midwestern Protestantismof Walt Disney, his comfonable certainty that all is well, that evil is a thing never to be taken very seriously' though the beautiful apple may tempr Snow White, it cannot really kill her; the Wicked Queen will be thrown down like Lucifer by lightning out of heaven,and around Snow White's casket,lighted asif by a stainedwindoq the soundtrack will play, full of sorrow and devotion, "Some D^y My Prince Will Comei' which, praiseheaven,he will indeed.Theseare not at dl cheap appealsro srock Christian ernotion; for the mo$ part, they're probably not evena maffer of conscioussymbolism,merelyan attitude so basic ro all Disney's work, even his propagandafilms during World War II, that he hardly understoodwhat was there. Take his greatestfilm, Pinoccbio.ltopenswith what Finch calls,rightly, "a stunningly effective shot-the camerapulling back from a largewhite star, panning acrossthe tiled roofs of a sleepyEuropean village, then closing in on

sAINr wALr

/ 8l

the lighted window of Geppeno'scottagel' liinch continues: "It is the kind of shot that has become familiar enough in lirre-actionmovies zoom lenses,but taken within the sincethe adventof po\Mer-operated context of its own period, and within the history of animation, it is innovative and spectacular.Nor is it just a piece of flashy showrnanship. It senesro captureour imagination and draw us into the atmosphereof the story before a singleword has been spokenl' It doesdl this, Finch doesnor go on to add-perhaps becauseit's too obviousbecauseir's corcnly Christian, as Christian asthe angel-likeblue fairy, or demonic Stromboli with the hell-fire eyes,the salvation through sacrificein the belly of a whale, the final death and resurrection of Pinocchio. If one wishedto be tiresome,one could go through all Walt Disney's films and show,in every m)'th or legendthat he treats, how he tends to transform it to the Christian one, or rather, the Christian one as understood by Methodists, Presbyterians,and the like-people who, in generd, feel so confident that C'od has things well under control, 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and dl manner so certain that of things shall be welli' as the Angel told Dame Julian of Norwich, that they forget even to bother with religion, or, to put it a better way, they transferfeelinp to everydaylife. Whether in the hands of Mickey Mouse or Mary Poppinsor the benerolent witches in Bedkrwbs and Brotmsticks,magc is miracle in a Disney film-stricdy Protestant miracle, thrilling but commonplace,exactly what we should haveexpected.The temptation is alwaysto seesuch a view of life as evasive and simplistic-the standardchargesagainstDisney. Perhapsit is (no one knows), but it is a view that hasbeen held by some very complex minds, including Melville's. Profound and subde asMelville may harre been, he is closerin spirit to Disney than is usually recognized.If his "wickedly squinting whale" is no caftoon (as a whaler he must have known it was a litde inaccurate),considerthat caricatureof evil, Cap'n Ahab, and those prgtailed heathen Chinese he uses as his oarsmen. Like the Wicked Queen, Stnrmboli, and the rest, Ahab challengesthe universeas cosmic outlaw and finds he nerrerhad a chance. Ishmael survives,floating on a coffin, and unharming sharks glide by "as if with padlockson their mouths"-all Disney images.In other moods, Disney was closeto Foe-haunted houses,rotting casdes,the uneanhly beauty of innocent ladies-good and wil in stark, "simplistic" contrast.

82 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRITING

But whereasPoemovedfrom the early comic talesto a vision increasingly dark and pessimistic,Disney grew increasinglycenain that all would be well. More and more he made heroesof traditional villainswitches, mad scientists.More and rnore he turned his art to the improvement of so-calledreality. Disney'strue works of art, of course,are the animatedfilms and his few really good live-action films (Tieasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under tbe Sea,Mary Poppins),not the televisionprogramswith which he advenisedhis studio'swaresor the amusementparks and model cities they helpedto finarce; but the impulsebehind both kinds of work was the same,that well-beingthe moviescelebrate,the conviction that evil, rightly understood, is a threat no more seriousthan Cruella de Vil , tn OneHundredand OneDalmatians,ShereKhan, the comically menacingtiger of Tbelungle Book,or the great flunk-out villains of the animatedRobinHood.What is perhapsmost interesting about Disney'snew respectabilityis what it impliesabout the world that hasgrown respectful.What once seemedgraveobjectionsto Walt Disney's arr seemnow mere odditiesof his character,like St. Francis's queer habit of preachingsermonsto birds. Takesentimentdity.In the fifties,sentimenalitywasa terriblecrime. Books on understandingliteraturegi*ly wamedagainstit (Hemitt$"ty and Faulkner requiredapology),books on paintingexplainedwhy the seemingsentimentdity in early Picassowas an optical illusion. "Undercutting" and "irony" were very big words. Then came the Beatles, and that sameafternoon everybodystoppedlooking at the extraordinary backgroundin Disney'sSnru Wbite and stanedlooking at Snow White, and behold,if shewas a sentimenmldistonion of the way real girls are, if shewasan absolutefiction, exactlylike the Wicked Queen, rrue that the way she moved-the way shefloated it was nevenheless on the exrraordinarybackground-was a splendidthing to see,a thing worth the grearplopping tearsof the sevendwarvesand the audience roo. Why norl That is to say,American intellectualswere suddenly no longer afraidof seemingfoolish and childlike(asAmericanshave alwaysbeen,asAmerican anistshavealwayspointedout). Some may even have noticedthat the former scorn of emotion "not adequately grounded in the probabilitiesof characterand action" was defensive, tight-sphincteredimmaturity. Dickens, too, was beginning to be re' evduated. Somebody was growing uP-at leasta little.

sAINT wALT / 83

Or takeDisney'sway of dealingwith animalsin the wildlife series. by camera He setsthe mating tricks of birdsto music;he emphasizes, angle,selection,and soundtrack,the horriblenessof the wolf pack's kill. Suddenly,for some reason,everyoneunderstoodthat what had once beeninterpretedasa sometimessilly, sometimessadisticstreakin Wa[t Disney'scharacterwas an accidentof moment. He had decided to do an Alaskamovie, an adventureof some kind, and had hired a to shoot him sornefootagewhich might pair of Alaskanphotographers trigger an ideafor an adventurestory.Along with other footagecame somepicturesof seals.Disneysat$il[, struck by the fact that he liked watching seals(thereforeeveryonemust), and puzzhngout what he rnight do with the discovery.He had invented,that instant,the Nature film, bur when Disney thought of it, there was no way under heaven to sell such a film except by the creation of an illusion of plot and character-exactlythe kind of thing his studio was bestat, the presentation of animalsas parodichuman beings.It neveroccurredto him to do anythingelse,but assoon asSealIslandwas on the storyboards, Born Freeand the greatdocumenmrieswere inevitable.His real feelings about animds he provedby buildingthem safeenvironmentsand enormoussanfiuariesand by his moralisticecologicalpiecesfor television. Or take Disney'sattitude toward machines,from the flying car in TbeAbsmt-MindedProfessor to the willful Volkswagen,starof Tbel-oae Bug,to' the audio-animatroniccreaturesof the Hall of Presidentsor I first sawDisney'srobot Lincoln in 196+, the Country BearJarnboree. at the lllinois pavilionof the New York World's Fair.It was a horrifying business-evenI, his devotedadmirer,would admit it. Like a group of AuschwitzJews,the audienceis movedinto alargeand plush auditorium, where the doors closeautomatically,almost silently,and you wait in blacknessand unearthly hush for the sound of escapinggas. The stagelights come up, revealingfuneral urns and sculpteddrapery (Disney'schief notion of the classicdcame from mortuariesin lllinois and Missouri),and there'sthe huge,seatedfigure of Lincoln, obviously dead.Music, a crossberweensickeninglypatriotic and sickeninglyreligious-then more light, and then, slowly, the great dark corpse rises and speaks.Finch tells us, not that one wants to know,

The sheerenergylockedup in the hydraulicandpneumatic of anyaudio-animatronic systems figureis considerable, and

84/

oN wRrrERs AND wRrrrNc

unlessthis energycan be preciselyconrrolled,the figure can become quite violent. The Lincoln figure [just before its instdlation at the fairJwas very complex and posedseriouscontrol problems. The Presidentsmashedhis chair and threw mechanicalfits that threatenedthe safetyof the men working on him. But Disney was determinedthat the figure be ready in time, and eventually the power was harnessed. What redly made the figure seemhorrible, of course-and would later make the Hall of Presidentsmore horrible yet-was the ghastly sugge$ion,which had neveroccurredto Disney and his people,that all religion and patriotism are a sham and a delusion,an affair for monstrous automatons.Or perhapsa suggestionevendeadlier:thar all of us are monstrous automatons,helplessPinocchiosdanglingfrom rhe stringsof Disney's computerizedMuzak and mind-shushing"rides." lately we've learnedto shrugoff such sugge$ions.We seethe Presidents-or the goss and tiresomeCountry Bears-as Disney saw them, merely as big, remarkable toys, desperateeffons (if I tell the truth) to arnusea corn-pone audience.To put it another waf, nothing in Disney is threatening anymore. Those rides, for instance,in which you're given no choice but to starestraight ahead,and the car rnoves forward or turns side to side,forcing you to look at what they want you to look at-exactly asa movie editor or, say,an ancientpoet chooses which sceneyou're to look at and in what sequence.Those ridesonce indifferentworld in a mechani?Ed, seemeda proof of man'shelplessness of sdes pitches,Styrofoam cake,and accordionmusic.But the impression was mistaken. The computerized,impersonal,fully automatedworld that so terrified all men of sense-and that Disney so eagerlylooked forward to-no longer threatensus becausewe've begunto suryiveit. His unspeakable lowbrow msrewe waveoff like a mosquito' his dancinghippos in Fantasia,his sculpturesof hipposat the New York World's Fair,the innumerableobscenitiesat Disneyland,were neverintendedasa philistine assaulton the cimdel of an, and the reaction of anger,the feeling of imponant valuesrhreatened,now seemslunatic. His celebrationof the ordinary was a celebrationof dl of us, even intellectuals,as we ore; and the reasonWalt Disney hasgone up in our estimationis that we ourselvesharr gone up in our estimation.We harredecidedto admit

sArNr wALr

/ 85

that we are sometimesa little sirnplisticand sentimental,that despite dire predictionswe are inclined to believethat life on eanh will continue for awhile-we're evenwilling to do things about it-and willing to admit, just betweenourselves,that as storiesgo, well, Finnegans Wakeis a little hard to follow. Or to put it more soberly, in a way that soundslessanti-intellectud,w€ havebegun to doubt those great dark visionsof the fonies and fifties and to be more nearly persuaded by thoseoptimisticinnocentsfor whom nothing, in the end, is more imponant than a first-class,relativelytasteful imitation of how real human beingsbehavewhen no one'slooking-men like Chaucerand Walt Disney. We haverelaxedinto admittingthat Disney'svillainsand heroes-and those he fatheredindirectly,through forrner employeeslike JayWard and Walt Kelly-are the peopleof our age:you and ID€,reader.Who or dignity from the Road Runner or Pogo, can expectreal seriousness not to mention that maniac Donald DuckP Who can expect oldfrom those middle-agedwriters like fashionedanistic high seriousness William Gassor StanleyElkin, writers whose tdents were licked into shapeby some clownish,dumb-eyedDisney bear?The whole reality of such writers is a huge animation that shuddersbetween extremes of Geppetto'svillageand R. Crumb'sjohn. It's futile, in shon, to attempt any judgmentsof Walt Disney's art. We can no longer tell it from so-cdled reality-which for dl our sakes,and for the sake of the future, is probably just as well.

TheAduenturer

I T ' SF R E Q U E N T L Y P O I N T E DO U T T H A T T H E R E are no longer heroes in literature, only anti-heroesand spoof heroes like 0O7, and that the reason for this is that writers and readerscan no longer believethat there are heroesin so-calledreal life. In a world in which everything seemsto havegone wrong, w€ long for heroes, secredywish we could be heroesourselves-that by some incredible act of intelligenceand daring we could make everythingnoble, as ir usedto be-and on the slightestprovocationwe rurn somequite ordinary mord mediocrity into a godly ided: Dr. Kissinger,for instance, before we learned of his involvemenrin the murder of Chile. Hope springseternd, but we know better oow; and so the novel really is, in a cenain sense,dead, and civilization has died with it. We wanly smile at the last-gasphumor of Banhelme, we laugh our loud ar the outrageouslyengaged,canoonish romantic heroesof Elkin, or, like Cato whiling awayhis last hours, we sniff our the tonuous windings of philosophical Gass. Optimists tell us our generaldespairis an effect of Vietnam and the Nixon Administration, but PaulZweig s imponant book, Tfu Adamturer, sugge$sthat the trouble is rnuch deeper.The idea of the rrue, unselfconscious hero-"the adventurer"-went hollow long tgo, and went hollower and hollower, stageby stage.The object of his study is

86

T H E A D V E N T U R E R/ 8 7

ro traceand explainthosesages.Evenwhen he'swrong about paniculars, his argumenr-for me at least-throws startlinglight on where we are and where we'r€ been and provideswhat e\reryfirst-rate theory is supposedro provide,a new way of seeingnot only the books and men he choosesto talk about but also those he passeso\rer in silence, from the late Roman odes to, for instance,Wdlace Stevens. He beginswith the shamanisticelement in epic poetry mainly Gitgamesbandthe Odysscy-tells how the adventurer (in this casethe to such placesasthe country of death and brought shaman)went Lwary back wisdom and power, helps to humanity; how the heroic adventurer was half maniacwild man, as dangerousto his friends as to his enemies,nor yet shackledby ethicsor common sense,an elemental brought hedth to the whole comforce; how the adventurer-shaman munity, gavelife meaning.All this Zweig elaborateswith talk of the Iliad, Beruutfand Sir Gawain and the Grem Knigbt Throughout this discussionof things ancient and medieval, Zwei{s thesisis somewhat harmed, I'm afraid, by his fairly complete misunderstandingof the poems;but distractingas Zweig'smisinformation may be, the thesis is a sound one, and a true argumentbadly arguedmay nevenheless be significant. When he turns to the adventurerin modern times, Zweig's book takeswings. In a seriesof brilliant analyseswhich touch on most of the imponanr modern European and American writers but focuses mainly on Defo e'sRolinsonCtusu, Casanovr,the gothic norrelists,Edgar Allan Poe, Nietzsche,Mdraux and Saftre, he traceswhat happened ro us: how the adranturer'sfhSt and figh, turned inward, so that where once monasticor castlewalls held out the dangerouswildernessthe adventurerbrought news of, there were now the thicker, far solider walls of Protestantmordity, Defoe's code of "due and regular conduct," so that evenon Crusoe'sisland,potential paradiseof the adventurer, we find that (asZweig quotesVirginia Woolf assaying),"There are no sunsetsand no sunrises;there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrtt!, staringus full in the face nothing but a large eanhenwarepotl'Adventure, to Crusoe,is a dumb idea. It leadsto being capturedby headhunters.Better to tame one's patchof land, fenceit in. But alas,the walls of decencythemselvesbecomea prison, and as that fact beganto be recogntzedclearly, new forms arose-the gothic novel of impotent evil and bungling good, the frivolous attempt at

88 /

oN wRrrERS AND wRrrrNG

escapein Casanova,the monstrc)uslystupid transvaluations of the Marquis de Sad€,8swell asthings hedthier, what Zweigdescribesas"rhe new mphology of adventure" in EdgarAllan Poe, and the transvduations of Nieusche. On dl these Zwergwrites,with splendidoriginality and insight, such a set of analysesas we haven't seenin years.To rePon his conclusions,it seemsto me, would be like giving awayan earnedsurpriseending. Pan of what's surprisingabout Zweig'sbook, in fact, is that he can think of so mtub that's new and rrue to say about so many old chestnu$. His piece on Poe is the best, maybe. Someonehas finally managedto explain why the mysteriousending of "The Narrative of A. Gordon Py*" is so rerrifying. Zweigcloseswith Malraux and Sanre.He points out the well-known terrible paradoxin T E. lawrence's Swm Pillan of Wisdom."rhe paradox of our culturet its longing for great acts,combined with a sense of their irrelevance,"and shows that Malraux and Sanre divide that paradoxbetweenthem, "Malraux's adventureris locked into a solitary combat with the viscouselementsof the jungle,with the feverof decay which sapshis body, with the irreducible solitude which constitutes la conditionlrumaine"; for Sartre,fighting evena jungle is absurd'"The treesfloated, more like a collapse;from minute to minute, I expected to see the trunks become wrinkled, like weary rods, shrinking and fallingto the ground in a soft, black, folded heapJ'Out of this come, among others, Beckett, Borgesand Norman Mailer, on all of whom Zweig speaksshrewdly. In the end Zweig leavesthe reader-wisely, perhaps-to write his o\Mnfinal chapter,a chapter that would get down beneaththe surface of one interestingremark in Zwei{s introduction: "We are facedwith an interestingparadox.Oriental tnaditionsdiscourageadventurebecause they considerthe vigorous individudity of the adventurerto be an illusion, a trick of Maya. Modern traditions in the West have been even lesshospitableto the adventurer.. .Yetvigorous individudity is precisely what our culture has come to value most." Zweig'sexplanationof our presentstateis that we in the West have gone inward completely,to drug literature,anti-realistic"fabulation" and so on. That sounds like a grim and terriblefinis, but I wonder if it is. The shamanstook drugs and createdfabulations.Out of their discoveriesand symbolic tales writers like Homer made highly conscious, social and religious works of an like the Odyssey,the story of

r H E A D y E N T U R E R/ 8 9

a man (not a shamanbut a man)who fights his way backto the duties he loves,his kingshipand family, and purgeshis islandof peoplewho scorn "hospitality" in the highestsense-ordered community, glory of kus and the Chinese.Both in the lliad and the OdysseyAchilles is a splendidhalf-divineanimd who's vastly admired and ultimately judgedwrong-inferior to Odysseus,who lies and cheatsand, with Penelope'shelp, suryives. I might never have noticed if it weren't for Zweig's book, but it seemsro me that asfar back in time zNwe can trace the mind of rnan, the idea of the hero has alwaysrung hollow-for all its appeal-and that the stagesof the adventurer'sdeclineare nothing other than alternativeways,after old ways havefailed, of desperatelysnatchingat the heroic ideal we stubbornly refuseto live without.

BEond tbeBedroomVall

IT'S NOT EXACTLY COMMON, IN RECENT years, to run acrossa clearly first-rate novel that tracesthe generations of a family. The last really good ones, if memory seryes,were Wallace Stegner's Big FockCandyMountain andJohn Cheever'stwo Wapshot books. There are dl sons of reasonssuch novelsdon't get written, and one wuy of dramatizing l-arrry Woiwode's achievement in his huge new norrel,Beyondtbe BedroomWall, is to spell out some of those reasons. We still have a foolish prgudice againstwhat Henry Jamescdled, in annoyanceat 1blstoy, "windy, b^ggy rnonstersl' Even as we admit the foolishnessof the prejudice,we must grant that the problem of really controlling the massof material necessaryfor a family sagais monumentd. By nature,life sprawls;and the iprawl inrolved in four or five generarionscan lead only, one would swear, to soap opera. For another thing, the "serious novel" has become,in our time, self-conscious.Whereasthe eighteenth-or nineteenth-centurynovelist talked comfonably and (it seemed)knowledgeablyabout doctors,fish' ermen, prime ministers,marriageableladies and madwomen, rnore recenr novelistsharretended to doubt their omniscienceand narrow their domain. Turn-of-the-centurynovelistsstuck to what they knew by v.'riting about the anist-usually a painter-or by writing about

90

B E Y o N D T H EB E D R o o M w A L L / 9 l

the sensitiveyoung man who may eventuallybecomea novelist.Later (with major exceptionslike, sometimes,Faulkner)one wrote directly about the norrelisttrying ro write a novel, reveding all his cards,asking for advice. novelfashionableis not, I think, What hasmadethe self-conscious its greathonestyandwisdom. Evenin the besthands,such asSamuel Beckett's,rhis fiction is pretty pakry stuff intellectudly. Its advantage over the more old-fashionedkind of "realistic" fiction is that it suits our for the mosr pan childishly petulant contemporary mood-our self