“Us
?” I remember saying to myself. “Did he say
us
? Who is
us
?”
Frankly, I was amazed, not that the two of them didn’t approve, but
that at this stage of their lives they had taken the
time
. “My God, those two old piles of bones!” I said to the reporters who began clamoring for interviews. “They’re
my
age!”
I was sixty-eight. I
knew
how it must have drained them. How could they have spent those untold hours, ground out those thousands and
thousands
of words—the two old codgers had gone on for pages—
pages!
—to review a novel? How could our two senior citizens have found the energy in those exhausted carcasses of theirs? In interviews Updike was already complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two canes, one for each rusted-out hip.
The way John Irving, who was fifty-seven, joined his fellow oldsters in this obsession with
A Man in Full
did not involve such debilitating toil, but his emotional toll may have been even greater. Irving threw a temper tantrum on television.
He was in Toronto appearing on the show
Hot Type,
plugging a book about how he had retreaded his novel
The Cider House Rules
for the movies, when
Hot Type
’s adept and provocative young host, Evan Solomon, brought up
A Man in Full
, knowing full well the rise it had gotten out of Updike and Mailer. I found the next five minutes riveting when I got a glimpse later on videotape. Irving’s face turned red. His sexagenarian jowls shuddered. He began bleeping. It was all the show’s technicians could do to hit the bleep button fast enough. “Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping
write
! He’s not a
writer
! Just crack one of his bleeping books! Try to read one bleeping sentence! You’ll gag before you can finish it! He doesn’t even write literature—he writes …
yak
! He doesn’t write
novels
—he writes journalistic hyperbole! You couldn’t teach that bleeping bleep to bleeping freshmen in a bleeping freshman English class!”—and on and on in that mode. It was spellbinding. I don’t pretend to be a lip reader, but it took no particular expertise to decode bleepos that began with such bitterly lower-lip-bitten
fs.
Evan Solomon kept covering his face with his hand and smiling at the same time, as if to say, “How can the old coot make such a spectacle of himself—but, wow, it’s wonderful television!”
Evan liked it so much, in fact, he called and asked me if I would like to appear on
Hot Type
and respond. I told him if he would be so kind as to come to New York for the taping, I’d be delighted. So he did, and the tape rolled, and he asked me:
“One of the foremost novelists in the United States, John Irving, says you simply can’t write. You’re not a writer. Does that make you feel bad?”
“Bad?” I heard myself saying. “Why should I feel
bad
? Now I’ve got all three.”
All three?
“Larry, Curly, and Moe. Updike, Mailer, and Irving. My three stooges.”
Stooges?
Seemed like the right word to me. A stooge is literally a straight man who feeds lines to the lead actor in a play. My three stooges were so upset by
A Man in Full
, they were feeding me lines I couldn’t have dreamed up if they had asked me to write the script for them.
“Are you saying they’re envious of your success? Is that all it is?”
By no means. Granted, the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as
A Man in Full
, and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor. “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens,” I told Evan. “I think he would like to be compared to Dickens. But what writer does he see now, in the last year, constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe. It must gnaw at him terribly.” And who was it who had “made the cover of
Time”
? Knowing my three stooges, that all by itself would have been enough to send them ballistic. “It must gall them a bit that everyone—even them—is talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.” But no, I didn’t think it was jealousy in the simple sense of displeasure at a rival’s success.
Did I think there was any personal animosity at work here, any old scores that hadn’t been settled?
Oh, people had suggested that, but I didn’t think so. Years ago, when I was a reporter for the New York
Herald Tribune,
back before I
had ever written a book, I had reviewed a novel of Mailer’s,
An American Dream
, and called it a clumsy paint-by-the-numbers knockoff of Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment.
(Which it was, or else Jung’s concept of synchronicity is truer than he ever knew.) About that same time, I had made fun of Updike in a couple of newspaper articles. (One, it so happens, is available on pages 255-87 of the book before you.) But all that was decades ago. With Irving the screen was an absolute blank. We had no old scores, settled or otherwise.
Then what was it?
Something much more obvious, I told Evan.
A Man in Full
had frightened them. They were shaken. It was as simple as that.
A Man in Full
was an example—an alarmingly visible one—of a possible, indeed, the likely new direction in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literature: the intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right now—a revolution in content rather than form—that was about to sweep the arts in America, a revolution that would soon make many prestigious artists, such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.
All three had risen up as one to make not merely an accusation but a plea. The plea was that
A Man in Full
be regarded as …
out of bounds
. Each cry was the same. Each of our seniors had cried:
“Anathema!”
Updike had said: Look, we’re not dealing with literature here, not even “literature in a modest aspirant form,” but, rather, “entertainment.” Irving had said: Look, we’re not even dealing with a novel here, much less literature, we’re dealing with “journalistic hyperbole,” with “yak,” with bleep. Mailer had said: Look, we’re not dealing with any sort of legitimate creature here, but with a bastard, a “Mega-bestseller” whose dissolute creator “no longer belongs to us (if indeed he ever did!).”
Us
. And who was
us
? Why,
us
was we who belong to “the literary world,” in Mailer’s terminology.
A Man in Full
and its author inhabited another place entirely, “the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers.” In other words, Wolfe and his accursed book were …
beyond
the pale
, a
pale
(originally synecdoche for
fence
) being an area of permissible conduct with definite boundaries. That which is beyond the pale does
not count …
and us members of the literary world do not have to be measured by it.
Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Zola, Ibsen, and Shaw, not to mention Mark Twain, all of whom were enormously popular in their own day—Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Zola published their novels serially in magazines—Ibsen and Shaw
gloried
in their box-office appeal—all would have been highly amused by this attempt to place literature here on this side of the fence and entertainment and popularity over there on the other. How could my three stooges ever have maneuvered themselves into such a ludicrous position? That wasn’t hard to explain. You only had to think of the sort of novels they had been writing.
The novel Mailer had on the market at the time
A Man in Full
was published was an autobiography of Jesus—yes, an autobiography of Jesus—called
The Gospel According to the Son
. The book Updike had just published,
Bech at Bay,
consisted of stories about a seventy-something writer named Bech who is irritable about the sagging status of the man of letters in America. Updike’s novel before that, like Mailer’s autobiography of Jesus, was a fantasy,
Toward the End of Time
, about a small town north of Boston in the year 2020 following a war between the United States and China. Irving’s last novel,
A Widow for One Year
(1996), had been about two neurotic writers who seemed unable to get out of a house in Bridgehampton, Long Island. As the pages wore on, I kept waiting for them to kindly make it into town, just once, even though town—I’ve been there—is only a two-block strip along a two-lane highway. At one point the two of them … leave the house! They get in a car! They’re driving through a nearby hamlet called Sagaponack, a lovely little Hamptons Rural Chic retreat—I’ve been there, too—and I’m
begging
them to please stop—park next to the SUVs and German sedans and have a soda at the general store there on Sagg Main—take a look, just one look, at a $125,000 show-circuit hunter pony in the pasture over there at the Topping Riding School—
do something—
anything
—to show that you’re connected to the here and now, that you actually exist where the author claims you exist, on Long Island, U.S.A.! But they don’t listen … they just drift on, encapsulated in their neurasthenia … and disappear behind the walls of another timeless, abstract house …
So was I saying that John Irving was untalented, just the way he said I was untalented?
“Not at all,” I told Evan. “John Irving is a talented writer. Norman Mailer is a talented writer. John Updike is a talented writer. All I’m saying is that they’ve wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them,” by turning their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history. Instead of going out into the world, instead of plunging into the (to me) irresistibly lurid carnival of American life today in the here and now, instead of striding out with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., “the literary world,” or such wholly ghostly stuff as the presumed thoughts of Jesus.
But how could I say that about Mailer? asked Evan. What about
The Executioner’s Song,
Mailer’s 1979 novel based on the Gary Gilmore case (in which a convicted murderer insisted, to the distress of antideath-penalty activists, on becoming the first American executed by the state in more than ten years)?
I
wouldn’t
say that about
The Executioner’s Song
, I told him. “That book should have taught Norman a lesson, but obviously it didn’t.”
Mailer’s career had been floundering for the better part of a decade when one day a remarkable Santa Claus named Lawrence Schiller turned up. With him he had bales of transcripts of interviews he had done with Gary Gilmore, his family, and other people involved in Gilmore’s life and internationally publicized death. He had visited Gilmore in jail many times and had witnessed his execution. Schiller was a photographer who had developed into a reporter with an unusual
specialty. He amassed material for books on hot topics and then looked for writers to write them in co-ventures. Mailer took Schiller’s reportorial gold mine and wrote what turned out to be the only good novel he would ever write after his first,
The Naked and the Dead
, back in 1948. Schiller said later that he interviewed “close to a hundred people over a year-and-a-half period and prepared all that material … He [Mailer] never interviewed any of the people or was at any of the events.” Why Mailer hadn’t drawn the obvious conclusion and headed out into the country himself as a reporter before doing his next novel, or at least signed up with Schiller again, instead of writing the ghostly novels that were to follow, I can’t imagine.
For that matter, what on earth prompted John Irving to spend more than four years writing a 633-page novel set in India,
A Son of the Circus
, and publish it (in 1994) with a preface that said: “This isn’t a novel about India. I don’t know India. I was only there once, for less than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the country’s foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me”?
I don’t know India
. It was true—which only makes it odder.
A Son of the Circus
, all 633 pages of it, is not a novel about India or any other place in this world. It sank without a trace.
Since my interview with Evan Solomon, John Updike has published a new novel,
Gertrude and Claudius,
yet another otherworldly story, this one about what transpired in Hamlet’s family prior to the events depicted in Shakespeare’s play. It was received congenially, respectfully, collegially by …
us
… in
the literary world …
and then, dismayingly, it dropped off the radar.
Us
was one thing;
they
, the book-reading public, were quite another.
They
lost interest so completely, so rapidly, that
The New York Times
ran a story about it, also mentioning other highly “literary” writers whose current novels, likewise duly praised by
us
, had suffered the same fate. Since the others (Saul Bellow was one) were about the same age as Updike, the
Times
raised the question of whether or not it might be a generational matter, a case of older writers no longer resonating with a younger audience.