Authors: Hortense Calisher
I guess we see clearest what it no longer is. As late as 1932, there was another English novelist in the tradition of Bronte, Winifred Holtby. Her much praised
South Riding
could subtitle itself
An English Landscape
and mean it, in the old exhaustive way from manorhouse to councilhall, squire to alderman. Reading it now, one suspects that for many in its own time it was already
déja vu.
For by then, the concepts of place and place-time had so altered that novelists either were affected, or had already helped to alter them. For all men, the old Aristotelian unities were shaken forevermore—or again. By 1930, Robert Musil had already published
The Man Without Qualities
, where a 1913 Vienna vibrated with all the interpenetrations of a “modern” city, and chapters had headings like “If there is such a thing as a sense of reality …,” or “Which remarkably does not get us anywhere.” Proust had written. Joyce had given us his Dublin of the mind, and Kafka had given us a paralyzed geography in which man stood on the pinpoint of himself. Some of this had already been done before—some always has. But for the art of the future, and the man—the psyche was to be the recognized “place” now.
So, it’s come about that literal place-reality in the novel can no longer impose the same dignity or force. We can neither read nor write about it solely in the old way, without that unalterable flash of
déjà vu
. New enclosures, long since sighted by literature, make this impossible. And these in time become the new convention, as we have it now: “Better to ignore place altogether now. Or make it metaphysical.” For of course, a convention is an either-or proposition. It never lets you do both.
And in the American novel, the dilemma has been particularly sharp. For we were still lagging in the pioneer’s lively enthusiasm for
real
places, new ones, and for that “American experience” so rooted in them. No one wished to annihilate this, or could. What happened was simpler. Certain places, mostly urban, became proper literary; “modern” novels could take place there without fear of ridicule, or damwell had to. The rest of the country could go back to pulp, and damnear did. The West went into the westerns. The South redeemed itself, as the special home of our guilt. The small town disappeared down a trap-door marked Babbitt. And nobody heard tell anymore of the farm. Not in high places. And so arose a new American literary convention, of unparalleled naiveté.
A “regional” novelist was now a man born in the sticks and doomed to write about it, under rhythmically weathered titles:
Hardscrabble Sky
,
A Light Sweat Over the Carolinas
, this to let the reader know that the book’s prostitutes would come from the fields and there would be no highclass restaurants. Metropolitan novels meanwhile, even if bad were never
regional
. The provinces had too much parvenu respect for the city, and the city agreed with them. Across the nation, the whole literary push had been toward the cities—as in Dreiser, whose novels were saved by that fact. Or toward Europe—for experience of which Cather, Anderson and Wescott could be condescended to, and Hemingway praised, for having once again (after Wharton and James) brought Europe back to us. For thirty years, literature rushed east, and many writers sank there, in all the artificialities that a buried nativity can become. But, as with any convention, all writers have been affected by it. For, if “rural” now meant “rube” forever, the city now became the very citadel and symbol of Nowhere.
It has been several other clichés in its time. Once, as in Dos Passos, it was the Great Collage. Before that, the abattoir, and the “teeming poor.” Or in a later frivolous era, the Penthouse. For the real American interest is in change, and the city is the place that changes most, and most “modernly.” In time, the city has become the best place for an American novel to be, since all psyches of any importance are presumed to be there. At last it has escaped the old dilemma of place altogether, by becoming
the
existential Place. Totally surreal, of course, never parochial; the absolutist novel cannot be both. Personae in the novels of this type wear their eyeballs on stalks and float down nameless avenues, like paranoid balloons. The Action: Unisex in Nighttown. Probable Title: a single symbol, maybe &, or $. And, presto, a new cliché, of sorts. Natives of the city will once again recognize an old one: The City—by an author who comes from somewhere else.
A writer’s region is what he makes it, every time. Great novels will not be impeded by the presence of cows there. And the absence of them, or the presence of pavement, has never kept great urban novelists from a kind of rural concentration. Dickens, Musil, Biely, Proust—are all great regionalists of a city kind. London, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris all “live” in their pages, through people who if written of elsewhere would not be as they are. Looking back to those eras, the perfumes and stinks, and the ecology, are all clear to us now. The people live in the scenery of those cities, and the city now lives in the people, tangentially, through their eyes and minds, or as in Biely, like a hero itself in the wake of the supernumeraries, its streets following like waves the little people it makes flotsam of. Simple. Yet for our times, our own times always, what a balancing! For a novel at best is never a historical or descriptive thesis, but a sub-news or a supra-news of the world, which all but drags the novelist down, or up and out with it. The novel is rescued life.
What a novelist must trust to is that continuity exists somewhere, somehow to be seen, perhaps as a useful terror strikes his heart. Casting ahead, in order to
see
change in the name of intellectual duty, will not help me. Nor will going back—to such as West Egg or Wessex or Yoknapatawpha; these and their kind hang like mosques made for once only, above their own documents. The novel never goes back in that sense, just as it never leaves the documents as they were. After
seeing
an enclosure, which means making one, a writer may then choose to leave it, as a philosopher leaves a fully expressed idea. Or he may elect to spend his writing life there. But except as a reader, another writer will not be able to accompany him.
So, every age is a sighing Alexander—how can there possibly be more than
this
? Yet every decade brings in more documents. Ours asks the literary artist in particular to shiver and to bow before these—forgetting that the “facts” of the past are often very much what art has made of them. Sometimes, one is tempted to say that all art of any kind is an attempt to make the unimaginative imagine—imagination.
And there’s no perfect time for it—except now. “Modern times” sees itself as the time of the breaking up of the myths. That may well be its. The age which my own most reminds me of is the medieval—the same brutality and enchantment, the same sense of homunculus peering around the cornice of a history happening far from him—and the same crusade toward a heaven not here. It’s chill, lone, and wuthering for some, an overheated faery-land for others, and running with guilty blood for all. An age when change can be caught like quicksilver and held up against the gloss of what we think we remember, where all the gauntlets of starvation and curtailed freedom are still thrown down to us, while sex will be our aphrodisiac and the documents our earthly paradise—who can fail to recognize that description? It is a marvelous time for art.
I
WANTED MORE. BUT
I had no idea where I was going next.
I had always loved slang, collecting it as the energy of language—and of the nation. It keeps your ear to the ground—and to the groundlings, on whose side I most wanted to be.
We were coining slang very fast now, hacking it out with the coughs and cheapened body odors of the television ads, or buying it up bright and carbon-streaked as the goods at a firesale—wonderful mobile images whose jokes or poignancies were dead in a month. For our reactions to such language ran the same quick course as it did, from natural to fashionable, from honest to false.
There was a phrase of the day—did it come from Harlem streetcorner or Hollywood press-agent, out of “real” jive-ass music, or from the curly boys at the recording studios?—“Let it all hang out.”
Such a phrase means what you make it, depending also on what you are. We coin ourselves from day to day out of such phrases, which interlock enough to keep us going and understanding one another. So if I am feeling false-rural or mock-naive—or if on the other hand I am merely young enough to be nearer the slang—such a phrase may perhaps conjure up women at the washline of the ancient grievances, freed at last of their corsetry and proudly breastfeeding their babies in public places. Or men with bellies hanging easy over their beltlines, from all the good greeds of simple, open life. But if we are merely feeling jazzy, city-corrupt, for today, then the words, jumbling from the crowd, say “Stop the Mafia-style whispering, let down your hair and/or your pants, admit old sins, like maybe that you still say cullud quicker than black, stop being a closet-queen, roll the shirtsleeve from your junkie-arm—be anything you weren’t allowed to be yesterday, even if it’s bad news or badmouth taste, which it is bound to be, for all honesty is really shame.” Shake with “natural” music—even if unnaturally! And above all, loose the pajama string. On anything from the genitalia to literature and politics. For connections between the three are once more being made.
From as far back as Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” American popular-sexual slang has had its own brand of coyness, odd if one considers that most of such slang probably comes from the male side. Bottom of it all is the dinky phallus that the country has kept in the dark of the bedroom, or in the decent jockstraps of the locker-room, and has shyly immortalized best perhaps in its skyscrapers (with plenty of heavy money at their roots).
Some of this is what I was thinking. And that not all the modesty in the country was male.
Let it all hang out. Rather a fine phrase, that one.
So, gathering my own echoes together, I did.
Sex. Literature. American.
A mug’s idea of it, I always thought. Whenever I saw any two of those words paired together.
Sex was never just a topic, to me. Literature doesn’t move by topic; critics do. Our literature hadn’t been all-American since well before I was born. And my fellow American writers, who so often fought out their friendships in the magazines—or their judgments—had never been joined there by me.
For two and a half years, until that summer of 1968, I had scarcely read any of them. The novel I had been working on had become a meditation enclosing all I could handle of a sustained metaphorical world: I wanted no interruptions except from life. Increasingly, for the duration of each book, I had found myself doing this, perhaps ever since that first novel of 1961, after which I had been made to see (if I hadn’t seen it before, or not as parochially as the commentators demanded of one) that I too was writing about “America.”
Every writer is a loner in his own way. By circumstance, I had been a late and fairly innocent beginner at an age when others were professionals, belonging to no school except in the minds of those who fixed on those eight early stories in
The New Yorker
, by temperament alien to the nitpicking of the quarterlies, by sex a woman in a period when the short story was a great female province but the novel was felt to be male, by heritage European, American Southern, and a Jew. When it was complained that I couldn’t be trusted from book to book to hold my own “image,” I gratefully agreed. Yet I could see that all of them were as much American as anything else, and as much about America, as anything else. In this latest book, I had faced that in a way I hadn’t before. Or rather, the book had led me to this conclusion, one outside its own pages or purpose, because it was a chronicle of the past, done in terms of the hot present of the past, but not of the now—in a way I had never attempted before.
But now it was done. We were in summer, on island. I was a reader again. Each morning the postmistress handed me a bundle from the New York Society Library, and I returned her one. I groaned in empathy over every book. As for their “status,” that lay embalmed in the silurian light of the winter claques.
Then—for the record, while pausing in James Purdy’s
Eustace Chisholm and the Works
at a sentence—I happened to look into the eyes of a deer.
In June, those deer who all year have the run of that island come to the porch to stare. Behind them, their dark wood nibbles our scent. We have left the city of literature. Bringing with us our pathetic fallacy that nature is
not
watching us. They have left nothing. They bring the gloaming. So, under their eyes—there was now the doe, the fawn, and back in among the trees the stag—I closed the day’s book, on that sentence: “I could drink your come in goblets”—said “millionaire Reuben Masterson.”
Why a goblet, I thought irritably, why not a plain glass? Why does he have to be so
fancy
? Then I burst out laughing. “Oh, well”—I said to the vanishing scuts of the deer “these days there are millionaires everywhere.”
The idyll was over. The reading had become the meditation. For days I took notes on the flood of it. At first I seemed to be writing of Sex in American Literature, but as other sideshows advanced, I let them, and writing for myself, I named names. Sex, literature, America, I was seeing as sideshows in a circle. Male, female and otherwise, created He them. He was looking for His image. I went looking for mine.
Finished with my orgy of judgment, I made no rewrite, and hid the packet away as one does the minor madnesses. From time to time, hoping to understand what it was to me, I took it out again. I saw nothing in it but what any critic has—ego and empathy, prejudice and taste. Yet perhaps one slim advantage. The creative critic will sometimes do a showy interpretive dance around another man’s book, reworking it in rather the same hungry, possessive way in which certain Freudian biographers seem to want to relive the very life. Writers have small interest in such recreation.
Some of what I had said had not yet been remarked as far as I knew, or not in this way. Or not by a writer. A critic usually thinks he is objective. A writer always knows he is not. At any given moment he can tell you where his ego is. But the empathy wrung from him by the work of other writers tastes of his own sweat. And the balance between these is his brand of scholarship.