Herself (45 page)

Who of us knows for sure a revolutionary when he sees one, even if it is himself? I had my first experience with drugs at twenty, when an appendectomy went wrong. After days of dosage for the pain of having had intestines reeled out and put back again, and violent dope reactions of which I was totally unaware, I woke to an old harridan of a head nurse leaning over me. “Why didn’t you
tell
us,” she snapped, “that you were allergic to morphine?” Even my incision wanted to laugh, and answer, though I couldn’t, “How the hell should I
know
?” I had never had anything more vicious than aspirin in my life. “Trauma,” said the doctor at her side. “Next time it may be different.” And he was right. It is a question of the patient wishing to go under. Some rooms can be entered after all, at will.

That is why the thought of death so troubles me. If I am in pain, I shall certainly want painkillers. But a mere five-sense psyche is always untrustworthy. Its trouble is that it never wants to die. And it never confuses nirvana with experience. Or lethe with life. That’s hard going at the end, that is. So I see why people might want to study the ins and outs of turning on and turning off, to learn how to prepare themselves early. Otherwise, even at the bitter end, one might not know how to go gracefully under. One still might want to rise. And kick the stone.

(Thus spake who?—not reminded he was daily slave to a boiled egg.)

Certainly what I am slave to is clear. I still want to kick the stone.

I had never really looked back before, at my own literary history as entangled with others. I seemed to me just getting to be of an age to have a history, though not ready yet to embalm it in conventional autobiography. There have been eras, like the 1920s and 1930s, when certain writers have done that extraordinarily young—and some, having expended their stamina and lifescape, live the rest of their lives collecting their medals but without conclusive work. My era, elasticized by literacy, media and an ambivalent life-expectation—die older,
if
you dodge the bombs—seemed ever more hypnotized by the future. Art was at best a present seizure.

The past for some artists was entirely a dead lava-plain.

Oddly enough, their future looked just like it.

Ego art. We know we are the era of it. Naturally, our reasons are compassionate: in clouds of self-media—but only after the death of certain gods, and under continuous war—we take on ourselves, as the supreme burden. Our century began, after all, with the great re-entry of Self into art. … Eras, before they decline, exaggerate. Ego art occurs when that great art-of-the-self becomes a trade.

A writer is expected to use his ego like a great probe, suffering diagnostically to record the world. He always expected to, but now he must do it by convention. The “world” in turn no longer feels itself reportable in third person, or in imaginative art: everything must be first-person in order to be believed. Imagination as willed fantasy, or fantasy wilfully shaped, is therefore false: the “conscious” artist must fall back before the scrupuously accidental action-painting of “life.” Reviewers cannot read novels which present themselves as more than this or different from it, and novelists, quick to catch the blight, cannot write them. The suspension of disbelief is willing no longer. A writer must be his own character, so thinly veiled that we know. Fyodor Dostoevski—give him his
full
name—can still be his underground man, but how can one Dostoevski be Raskolnikov? Was he ever? Satire, always closer to the critical faculty, is still reputable. But once the imagination shaking free of the ego-possible, strays past “It really happened to me” into those mysteries which lie beyond, or once the writer declares his intent to make a world that lies beyond, made perhaps of third-person-reported pysches, or not clearly based on his journalistic ego—then he has crossed the Styx, into the world of ghosts. The facts are against him. The critical faculty—in novelist as well as critic—coaxes us to mistrust what cannot be explained or has not been literally lived, and to deny that powerful art is made of it. Non-ego art is still here, as it has always been. But speaking up for it, to those for whom the journalistic “I” is now the sole category of literary belief, is like trying to describe what even blind men can see with their eyes closed, to a very visual elephant.

Modes of writing really have very little to do with the quarrel. “Fiction” and “non-fiction” are magazine words or workshop ones, indicating only as always that business is perfectly capable of influencing art. The real bite is not between novels and history, or journalism and novels, or even between confessional and “constructed” art. (Any more than that there exists a real quarrel between poetry and prose—instead of a teasing, Constantly changing, pingpong difference.) All are sides of the writer-animal, evoked as the spirit moves us. Or as the battle does. Or as the wind turns. The real tussle—paradise lost, hell regained—is between the orphic and the didactic poles in all of us. Literature is all the gradations between. Yes—all.

Time was when the novel, that bastard upstart, was more clearly a poor fictive thing, and belles lettres—always doing what it could for other forms—more surely sublime. As almost always, the lettrists are still in power, and as always have to be reassured of it. For though men of letters start out from interest in the conduct of values, the conduct of their lives is often such as to persuade us—and even themselves—that power is what they are primarily interested in. The change in them is—that the lettrists of today, or critics once
pur et simple,
will do anything to keep from being genteelly called belles. They, learn their tough stance, of course, from the novelist.

The old New Critics, less genteel than predecessors like Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, were still formally on the side of us angels, the
pur et simple
writers—although the effect of their honest dissections was usually to show that an angel is a winged creature who cannot walk. Men like Van Wyck Brooks went on to explore their own nervous crises as artists did—and men of letters often have, or wrote their critical work under the assumption that this too was art. Edmund Wilson, with the sincerest flattery, now and then wrote “imaginative” books. Why not? A critic attempting a work of imaginative art is only as assumptive as a writer attempting literary criticism. Each may be assuming that he can have or get the best of both sides. Or each may be freely reveling in the continuum that is literature. In which writers might more keenly remember that the limits of a critic’s generosity show up as quick as those of his intelligence. And critics might be warned that imagination never conceals what you are. And is most nakedly what you are. What is required of either of us is a soule—though
soul
is welcome too.

Today’s men of letters want that as much as ever; only the form of their desire is different. As usual they copy those who, in the bitter nature of things, precede them by writing the books on which their own must wait. Today’s lettrist can’t be belle, not only because the world isn’t, but because the writers aren’t, anymore. He wants to be an ugly lettrist—a true-blue plug-ugly whom nobody gets to imagine, mind you, but himself. Where, if he talks about himself instead of books, as the critic does so much of nowadays, it is with a lash aspiring to Swift’s and a whine he hopes is Rousseau. Again, he gets this harsh-tender stance on himself from the novelist. On whose attitudes he must wait, before he can react, shadow-box, kill—perform. The meateater smells of his meat. Often tainted with the “put up your dukes!” reverse romanticisms of the day (as in
Making It
, where a sensibility as conscious as any maiden’s becomes an insensitive ego sensitively recording). He craves the same wounds as the “imaginative” artist, given and taken in the same ring. Or the self-inflicted ones.
Particularly
those. So, the critic too, ends up writing ego art. He has to tell you about his psyche before he can render his judgments. Often it is very interesting—because psyches are.

But when he gets around to the books again, to that other-directed artist to whose north pole he is south—watch this
jolie laide
very carefully. He himself has claimed the free man’s heady right to an obsession with his own life; now, for the novelist, he may stipulate it. He mistrusts the objectivity of another man’s imagination, on the same terms as he mistrusts the objectivity of his own intelligence—nothing will convince him that these objectivities are not the same. So, ten to one, he will be telling you what the imagination can’t do anymore. He never sees it as the other writer sometimes does—illimitable, grossly and gloriously unfactual. To him, the nonreal is never a true source. Artists must no longer invent. Novelists must report only their own dilemmas, in the appropriate areas, ages and sex of their own true lives, otherwise he can’t believe it—he won’t. Twain is not Huck; Anna Karenina is not Leo Tolstoi. It’s over. And of course it is. For this psyche is projecting. It is timid about imagining imagination. People who have to wait around for other people’s often are.

Yes, watch the ugly man of letters. How he craves imagination’s risks!

And watch me. How sometimes I, at the other pole, I crave his.

In school and early childhood, fantasy is sometimes coddled, but the didactic is what we are urged to trust. Early on, I ran from it, as from what teachers and other crocodiles fed on only to regurgitate a dead corpus of that literature which I had to find out for myself later was still painfully alive. Fantasy, imagination, whatever you called it, a great free river of possibility in language, was what you could trust. Once you learned to swim and mull there, life and feeling accreted to it. From its dark shallows came those anode-cathode associative bounds, those sudden firm ledges of insight, of something put into the world that had perhaps never been there before. A small babe of vision might be made. After a while, I never read critical comments any more; their comparable river ran so sandy and thin. Critique was a game that I had played at in college, trifled with as a possible vocation, and done too wildly well at: “You certainly sling the King’s English—but what is
this
you say!” I was too young to confess that the only authority for it was myself. Or others like me but better at it. Even later, I would always rather read what I still tend to think of as the
primary
manuscripts. And if confined to hard choice—rather write them.

What I know now is that one need not make it a hard and separate choice—indeed one cannot. Slowly, all those categories the crocodiles put in me were one after the other to melt away. Grudgingly, I would see that in the greatest of writers, the fantastic and the didactic combine. (Not always, surely, in the first person singular, or any of its facsimiles. Sometimes in a wildly differing array of personae, not all of whom could possibly be her or him.)

For if criticism doesn’t precede writers but follows them (never a popular theory with those “influential” reviewers, who prefer to project a more innocent version of their influence), then writers do not consciously or collectively know the change that is coming upon them, at the time. And prefer not to. Talk can kill verbal art. That blind orphic impulse wants not to be phrased, but to phrase.

But one inescapable way of learning what literary change is, is to live through one. Unconsciously.

Category, I can tell you, is the only real crocodile.

In 1948, it was astonishingly true that the reigning ideal of the “proper” short story—not only at
The New Yorker
, which published my first few, but generally in America—was the absolute reversal of what I have called ego-art.
Author should not appear
. A story, a novel, possibly even a poem, was designed—
should
be—to drop from a hand which was nowhere, as a
Ding an sich,
a globe maybe ready to burst inside the reader from its own hot internal pressures, but meanwhile wholly contained, even coolly so, by only its own symbolic skin. Later, when I was more knowing if not wiser, I would term this method “the oblique.” It is one of the great modes of art, and at first I was writing in it, but I didn’t know that. The one supernal fact about any mode of art is that it isn’t the only one—but I didn’t know that either. (Not consciously, though an inner tug was soon to move me). At this time, I knew no writers, only a couple of very restrained editors whom I saw rarely, in fact almost nobody who “talked books,” and this isolation was to continue for some time. Further, I had read almost nothing of the “modern” short story, American or otherwise. I hadn’t known I was going to write any, for one thing, and even if so, hadn’t the temperament for research. Even then I was perhaps self-protectively reading books strangely unallied with what I was doing, and always books a little behind or tangential to “current” ones—a habit that has persisted and one I often suspect other writers of. It keeps you out of the collective
conscious
.

First influences, they say, are always the deepest. Well—for a time. Back in high school, I had read much on my own among the Russians, but only the novels were important to me. Chekhov I absorbed silently along with the rest, but in college, where I found him in the curriculum, I immediately backed away. I had a tendency to back away from whatever was touted there. James (except for
Daisy Miller
) was not yet studied there. Sometimes I touted him (and other stumbled-upon oddities like Gide and Colette) to them. But at home, much earlier than any of this, what I remember is the thumbed small book of Hawthorne’s stories, and one of Flaubert’s (containing “A Simple Heart,” “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaler” and “Herodias”) which I still have. Also Wilde’s Fairy Tales (I
knew
“The Nightingale and the Rose” was a sexual dream though I didn’t know of sex yet), some Jewish Publication Society folklore where the one-level characters never grew, so rather bored me, but I would read anything—and a corner of tattered paper Nick Carters, where I much lived.

Make what one can of it. The likely truth is that any actual influences were outside “the short story” entirely: in the Bible (mostly Ecclesiastes and the Prophets), whose rhetoric I was never to recover from—and a complete set of Thackeray, read and re-read by the age of ten, in which I was quite as happy with “The Yellow-plush Papers” as with
Vanity Fair
. Thackeray keeps appearing in his own pages, remember? (Always welcome too, except when he quoted Greek.) And the Bible, though pithy, keeps saying what it thinks.