Herself (8 page)

In the zoo of the social sciences is where the musk-glands of humanity are removed—for study. A novel doesn’t study—it invents. Inevitably, it represents. In the end, the novels a nation chooses to keep, to admit to its heritage, are always those which in some way cohere its own images of itself. Often, in America, these have been class-images, of some class structure the nation doesn’t yet know—or refuses to know—it has. Yet among the great European novels I had been bred on, those I most grappled to me were the least naturalistic or realistically representative; I would always choose a Dostoevski over a Tolstoi. My American heritage was showing.

An Englishman of the widest reading once said to me of a novel of Joyce Cary’s which I couldn’t “see” as I thought I “saw” the others, “You can never understand why we so took it to our hearts. It so represents us as we know we are.” As they already know they are, from centuries of being it. Americans resist any classification, or confirmation of what they are—as if from the founding fathers’ imperative to do so because
change
will be their greatness. Conversely, we:—or its middle class—love the masochistic trendbooks like Vance Packard’s, or any of those sociological simplifications which lightly flay us with those forms into which we may already have congealed. What we ask of literature, prose or poem, is that it give us back our national experience, in myth.

We asked it early. And got it, long before Jung, sometimes in a book like
Moby Dick
—which had to wait. As seekers of our myth rather than our realism, in the novel we were closer to German and Russian literature than to that of the language in which we spoke and wrote. And the genius of “our” novel, in so far as one could still separate it from the ever widening nonnational stream of them, often seemed to lie in those regions where, asked for myth, it could still give it, almost to the farthest poetic reaches of prose.

But all a writer thinks of when he or she first starts is “Well, now I am here.” And what do I do now? Next? Dare I? Can I?

After that first story collection in 1952, though writing steadily, if very slowly, I did not publish the expected novel, or any book, for another nine years. Partly because I still had stories to write, and because the vision of the novel I dimly saw (beginning in 1953) took its time. I saw it as something literally real enough for a reader to “walk around in,” yet non-real enough for those flights from the subscribed-to-ordinary in which for me the heights of literature lay.

I was beginning to have a host of fragmentary subjects, or mythic preoccupations, but as yet had no “world” to put them in. Certainly no national one. When it came, a novel-of-the-self grafted on a novel-of-event, it took a man, not a Jew, from that England which “we”—nation and family—had in part come from, to a South where that same “we” had in part arrived. And on to New York. Written through the late fifties, published in 1961, the only Jews in it were an English family, half mythic certainly, in the man’s beginnings, and their American counterpart, sought out by him close to the book’s end. The event-climax of the book (too soon for its length, some said, and until I completed the sequel and saw the whole, I half-thought so myself) was black-white. In these Ku Klux Klan sections, I had hit on a mythic-real we ourselves maintained as a nation. But I wanted more.

That book,
False Entry
, ended with a climax-of-self, in the man’s realization of his first “mythic” family through his second and American one, whose members appeared only in a kind of prelude of themselves, enough being left unanswered to set people asking me about them for years. I kept it to myself that when I had finished the book in the usual beatific daze, instead of going to the cupboard for the usual lone, Palladian drink, I had surprised myself by setting down and locking away a page of quick successive notes for a book on them, not to be taken up again until after two novels and other shorter works in the intervening four years. In the “sequel,”
The New Yorkers
, which takes place before the action of
False Entry
(I learn to think of them as one chronicle, approachable from either end, fitting together like the halves of an almond and publishable as
A Single Story
) I will take up that second Jewish family, with its Czech servitors and Viennese hangers-on, but in tandem with a Protestant family of like realm, following both through the ramifying world of New York—and time. …

By then, novels of consecutive time, written in ours, begin to bore me; I don’t think time is that, nor is this the order I would most wish to impose on it. Time should radiate complexly, as it does in life, or does for me. Nothing in art should be in too straight a line. … When I take up the sequel, its people impose their own labyrinth, of events and style. I also find in myself an ironic dryness less concerned with self-emotion than it is with society. And either book, will be less than the sum of the two, and better understood, better completed, as part of the whole. Even the West African in the second book (in the present climate, would some think of him as a token black?) complements those Negroes in the first one—a conscious man, Anglicized toward the “real,” as opposed to their mythic group-dark.

I see that now; I had no thought of it then, and maybe write here what ordinarily I would only muse—in order to show that later on, one can. Was I trying to express the whole American stream of consciousness in my time, what was in our event-stream, and the blood-directed stream of our collective minds? I can’t tell you. Not even now. A writer should never let himself know what he “wants to express” or wanted to, other than in the doomed-to-be words of the actual work. But one thing I did know as I wrote them; this second book
was
about class—here.

Meanwhile, back in the first years, I continue prowling the world of Jews I do know. I would soon write another story,
One of the Chosen
—about a well-assimilated Jew who, like me, had never suffered too many slurs, and thought he was safe—already my guilts were rising, as with non-sufferers all over the world. And all over unscathed America. After living in England again, I would write “Two Colonials,” which had to do with the way some tiresome Christians romanced Jews in a way we did not do ourselves. Together with the early piece I quote from, they were all I would do in that vein. I would not write of Jews again until
The New Yorkers
, where, returning as if to the earliest genre pictures of my own childhood, I took up again, in an effort to set down its mythic-real, the relatively unsung world of the Jews I knew best.

“Hun’ Forty-Fifth” (originally titled “Hun’ Forty-Fifth They Gotta Get Out”) is a period piece about the way some Jews felt about blacks. Twenty years ago. And now? During the New York City teachers’ strike, one of them, coming up to me at an art show “because I already know how
you’ll
feel” all but shouts niggerlover at me; though as a Jew I should be “one of us,” I will not join in the “This is how
we
feel” of her special establishment. l am a traitor because I will not “stand together” with her and them.

It is then, and in the weeks that follow, when black resentment against “Jew teachers,” “Jew merchants,” also finally gets out into the open, even into the papers, that I think of what happened to “Hun’ Forty-Fifth,” so long tucked in a drawer. It’s only an anecdote, on a subrosa subject to whose complications “nobody” except Leroi Jones and some other blacks “wants to contribute”—not the Mayor, not the Jews—and not me? I already know how it can be when, warily looking around me to assure myself that only Jews are present I mention, only as a contribution to history, those streetcorner “slavemarkets” where Bronx housewives not too many years ago used to bid for black dayworkers. “It’s not good to bring these things up,” they tell me. I am not sure. I am sure—and have been for years now—that there is a hierarchy among minorities too, which has extended even to literature.

By the time I write “Hun’” I have begun to be aware of what underlies Southern comfort. I know now who it was my father patronized. (When, some years later, I write a story called “Mayry,” which begins “My father, born in Richmond about the time Grant took it, was a Southerner therefore but a very kind man,” the copy-editor who is checking it for publication, very much a Southerner, will call me up to ask if I don’t mean the “but” in that sentence to be an “and”). So by now did many Southerners, and writers. I have been raised in the North; it can never be my total subject as it can for them. I am only half-Southern anyway. And Jew as well. How many sides am I fated to see?

(The side I shall see most and longest will be a matter for literature, not of racial controversy or any other. I will have to learn over and over, that the
blended
subject is the most difficult, anywhere. The normal literary treatment for “minority” feeling is to segregate it by ethnic strain. Certain subjects are sacredly reserved for one kind of treatment, which is comfortably apprehendable, and like a sermon or a good recording ratifies what we already know. Mixtures, of people or theme, only make trouble. They make
new
subjects, new ways of seeing.)

One penny postal from the mail on “Old Stock” had amused me. “Miss Calisher doesn’t know anything about Jews. Furthermore she doesn’t know anything about the
Catskills
.” Its girlish complaint reminds me of the girls I had known so well in the garment district; its undertone of “Us!”—that proud-anxious sigh from the sinuses, is one I have heard all my life. Lightheartedly, I set down their conversation. Perhaps I had literally heard it—and I have a parrot-ear. Their lingo, as they straphang on the Broadway train, is unconsciously self-certain.

Claire Brody, the chatterer, the leader, and on the job-hunt, describes how that day, an employment agency has sent her for a job off Seventh Avenue; they have mistaken her name for Brady. Without once saying “Christian”—but all Jews who read will know—she describes the firm, the interviewer’s innuendoes and the turndown—and her righteous wrath.

“‘Mr. Buck,’ I say, ‘My brother, an electrical engineer, he couldn’t get a job before the war—don’t bother to ask why. Right now there’s a shortage, he’s working, they don’t ask about his religion.’ They ask, he says, he’s going to tell them he’s a member the Ethical Culture Society—culture for what he learned in the night school, ethics for what he learned in the daytime.”

But all this time in the crowded car, she has been urging her confidante to stand in a certain place. “Hurry up, dope, like I told you. Over there.” They attach themselves to a new set of straps above two seats “occupied by a very black young man in an eclectic maroon hat and a very light-skinned Negro woman in a severe blouse and horn rims, who was reading from notebooks in a leather portfolio.” As the train enters the 145th Street station, the young man gets up to leave; Claire makes Selma take his seat at once. As the woman too gets up to go, the two girls see that her fur coat and Claire’s are almost identical.

Claire: (as she sits down) “What’ya know! Maybe I should a gotten beaver after all!” (She looks carefully around the car, almost all of whose occupants are seated now, before she speaks in a low voice: “Honestly, the real black Ones I don’t mind. But those pale intellectual-looking ones—don’t they give you the creeps?”

Selma (nodding) “They say you can always tell by the nails, though.”

As the story ends, Claire is thanking God for the Eighth Avenue subway. “On the Seventh, you never get a seat.” New Yorkers of those days will remember that the Eighth Avenue train ended in environs wholly white.

Claire: “Incidentally—what’s the matter your reaction time? I practically had to push you across the car. I told you—all you got to do is stand in front of a couple of them. Hun’ twenty-fifth, practically always. But the next one for sure. Hun’ forty-fifth, they
gotta
get out.”

In “Hun’ Forty-Fifth” I have dug up an even hotter potato.
The New Yorker
tells me that the piece will evoke more controversy. And this time, is not strong enough to sustain it. Downheartedly, I agree. Jewish conversation is stuffed to the gills with what I had described, but
reality is no excuse
. I hadn’t intended anything on a grander scale. I should have. In that moment I learned this. Oughtn’t a writer know better the importance of what he was saying? And know it first? “Old Stock” was a
story
. Out of pure experience. “Hun’ Forty-Fifth” was only a rebuttal. Of a professional experience. In light reportage. On a killer subject.

Still, what the piece says has a right to be said. No matter how? Or if “the wrong people” get ahold of it—which is why Jews are always saying we should close ranks?

I have a sudden itch to know what will happen if the right people get ahold of it. I’ll send it to one Jewish periodical, then put it away.

They reply swiftly that the subject is not within their scope. Maybe not.

Or not yet within mine.

By now I know that whether you write well or ill, you will never write truthfully about any ethnic group and please it; in humanizing it, how can you go on capitalising it? Yet, if I couldn’t stand with my own, what was I? A creature who, when the world cried “Chicken!” or “Traitor!” cried art? Until I could resolve that workably enough (which meant enough so that I could go on working) I often thought so.

The work was the answer.

…
People
stand together. Art stands with them, in their humanity. But art itself is not a standing together. I will have to learn that over and over.

As for “Hun’ Forty-Fifth,” by now it’s a period piece. Nowadays on the subway, they may only have to get out somewhere around Riverdale.

I
N THE MID-1950s
Philip Horton of
The Reporter,
overhearing me talk of a year spent working at Macy’s as anything from comparison-shopper-for-stocking-stretchers to head-of-stock-in-the-hat-department, asks me to “do a piece for us” on it. The magazine phrase already holds much that I fear. I haven’t the sociological stance for either the somber, “in-depth” approach of the serious journals, or the newer, light jazziness that is now growing on our commentators, perhaps from their sense that the “superficiality of our time” ought to be treated in its own rhythms. I had no “approach” and didn’t want one. … It is the hazard of all who commentate. And a stylish death for many writers. … Yet I am tempted. In spite of a hated year at that store, spent sunk in the misery of the college-graduate who is turned out,
en grande tenue
metaphysically, into a rough, cheap business, I had had only a smart worm’s view of the place. But more, ever since my fellowship year in England, I envy the serene mobility of writer-friends there, where writers as yet did not much teach for a living (or come here to, as they do now) but while working for the BBC perhaps, saw themselves as honorably able to rove anywhere in printed space. “Oh, I was only a Macy underdog,” I joke. “You’d have to get me to their President.” Next thing I know, I have an appointment with a vice-president; Horton has been told that my lack of reputation as a journalist proscribes anybody higher.