Mind of an Outlaw (26 page)

If she had done Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
the way she announced she would all those years ago, and if she had done it well, then she might have gone on. She might have come all the way back into the vault of herself where the salts of a clean death and the rot of a foul death were locked together. We take the sleeping pills when the sense of a foul and rotten death has become too certain, we look for the salt in the Seconal. Probably
to stay alive Monroe had to become the greatest actress who ever lived. To stay alive Hemingway would have had to write a better book than
War and Peace
.

From
The Deer Park:
“There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” I think that line is true. I think it is biologically true. And I think its application is more ferocious in America than anywhere I know. Because we set ourselves out around the knoll and get ready to play King of the Hill. Soon one of us is brave enough to take the center and insist it belongs to us. Then there is no rest until the new king is killed. Our good America. We are the nation of amateur kings and queens.

Each month our column will end with a small sentence. Make ready for our last cattle king, Robert Ruark. Robert Ruark has the kind of personality Ernest Hemingway would have had if Ernest Hemingway had been a bad writer.

TALKING TO CALLAGHAN
one day, Fitzgerald referred to Hemingway’s ability as a boxer, and remarked that while Hemingway was probably not good enough to be heavyweight champion of the world, he was undoubtedly as good as Young Stribling, the light heavyweight champion. “Look, Scott,” said Callaghan, “Ernest is an amateur. I’m an amateur. All this talk is ridiculous.” Unconvinced, Fitzgerald asked to come along to the gym at the American Club and watch Hemingway and Callaghan box. But Callaghan has let the reader in earlier on one small point. Hemingway, four inches taller and forty pounds heavier than Callaghan, “may have thought about boxing, dreamed about it, consorted with old fighters and hung around gyms,” but Callaghan “had done more actual boxing with men who could box a little and weren’t just taking exercise or fooling around.”

So on a historic afternoon in June in Paris in 1929, Hemingway and Callaghan boxed a few rounds, with Fitzgerald serving as timekeeper. The second round went on for a long time. Both men began to get tired, Hemingway got careless. Callaghan caught him a good punch and dropped Hemingway on his back. At the next instant Fitzgerald cried out, “Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes.”

“All right, Scott,” Ernest said. “If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

According to Callaghan’s estimate, Scott never recovered from that moment. One believes it. For months later, a cruel and wildly inaccurate story about this episode appeared in the
Herald Tribune
book section. It was followed by a cable sent collect to Callaghan by Fitzgerald at Hemingway’s insistence.
HAVE SEEN STORY IN HERALD TRIBUNE. ERNEST AND I AWAIT YOUR CORRECTION. SCOTT FITZGERALD
.

Since Callaghan had already written such a letter to the paper, none of the three men could ever forgive each other.

The story offers a fine clue to the logic of Hemingway’s mind, and tempts the prediction that there will be no definitive biography of Hemingway until the nature of his personal torture is better comprehended. It is possible Hemingway lived every day of his life in the style of the suicide. What a great dread is that. It is the dread that sits in the silences of his short declarative sentences. At any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonizing demands of his courage. For the life of his talent must have depended on living in a psychic terrain where one must either be brave beyond one’s limit, or sicken closer into a bad illness, or, indeed, by the ultimate logic of the suicide, must advance the hour in which one would make another reconnaissance into one’s death.

That may be why Hemingway turned in such fury on Fitzgerald. To be knocked down by a smaller man could only imprison him further into the dread he was forever trying to avoid. Each time his physical vanity suffered a defeat, he would be forced to embark on a new existential gamble with his life. So he would naturally think of Fitzgerald’s little error as an act of treachery, for the result of that extra minute in the second round could only be a new bout of anxiety that would drive his instinct into ever more dangerous situations. Most men find their profoundest passion in looking for a way to escape their private and secret torture. It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him.
What is more likely the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all of his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day that would have suffocated any man smaller than himself. There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will. It is the merit of Callaghan’s long anecdote that the second condition is suggested to be Hemingway’s own.

THE LAST TIME
I remember talking about the novel was a year ago, last June or July, and it was in a conversation with Gore Vidal. We were reminiscing in mutually sour fashion over the various pirates, cutthroats, racketeers, assassins, pimps, rape artists, and general finks we had encountered on our separate travels through the literary world, and we went on at length, commenting—Gore with a certain bitter joy, I with some uneasiness—upon the decline of the novel in recent years. We were speaking as trade unionists. It was not that the American novel was necessarily less good than it had been immediately after the war, so much as that the people we knew seemed to care much less about novels. The working conditions were not as good. One rarely heard one’s friends talking about a good new novel anymore; it was always an essay in some magazine or a new play which seemed to occupy the five minutes in a dinner party when writers are discussed rather than politicians, friends, society or, elevate us, foreign affairs. One could not make one’s living writing good novels anymore. With an exception here and there, it had always been impossible, but not altogether—there had used to be the long chance of having a bestseller. Now with
paperback books, even a serious novel with extraordinarily good reviews was lucky to sell thirty thousand copies—most people preferred to wait a year and read the book later in its cheap edition.

So we went on about that, and the professional mediocrity of book reviewers and the indifference of publishers, the lack of community among novelists themselves, the backbiting, the glee with which most of us listened to unhappy news about other novelists, the general distaste of the occupation—its lonely hours, its jealous practitioners, its demands on one’s character, its assaults on one’s ego, its faithlessness as inspiration, its ambushes as fashion. Since we had both begun again to work on a novel after many years of working at every other kind of writing, there was a pleasant irony to all we said. We were not really as bitter as we sounded.

Finally, I laughed. “Gore, admit it. The novel is like the Great Bitch in one’s life. We think we’re rid of her, we go on to other women, we take our pulse and decide that finally we’re enjoying ourselves, we’re free of her power, we’ll never suffer her depredations again, and then we turn a corner on a street, and there’s the Bitch smiling at us, and we’re trapped. We’re still trapped. We know the Bitch has still got us.”

Vidal gave that twisted grin of admiration which is extracted from him when someone else has coined an image which could fit his style. “Indeed,” he said, sighing, “the novel
is
the Great Bitch.”

We’ve all had a piece of her, Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac, myself, Ross Lockridge, Thomas Heggen, Truman Capote, John Horne Burns, Calder Willingham, Gore Vidal, Chandler Brossard, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Vance Bourjaily, William Humphrey, Willard Motley, Wright Morris, William Gaddis, Alex Trocchi—as well as the writers I’m going to talk about here, specifically James Jones, William Styron, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Philip Roth, Jimmy Baldwin, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger—and all the writers there’s not been time to read or write about this trip: James Purdy, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ken Kesey, John Hawkes, Mark Harris, Louis Auchincloss,
John Hersey, Clancy Sigal, J. P. Donleavy, Bernard Malamud, and how many others I’ve missed, and all the women, all the lady writers, bless them. But one cannot speak of a woman having a piece of the Bitch.

Let me list the novels I wish to discuss. They are
The Thin Red Line
;
Set This House on Fire
;
Naked Lunch
;
Catch-22
;
Rabbit
,
Run
;
Letting Go
;
Another Country
;
Henderson the Rain King
;
Franny and Zooey
; and
Raise High the Roof Beam
,
Carpenters
. They are not necessarily the best novels to have been written in America in the last few years, although if one could pick the best ten books of fiction which have been done in this country for the period, four or five of the titles on my list might have to be included. I chose these particular volumes by a particular test which might as well be explained.

It is impossible to read each good novel as it comes out. If you’re trying to do your own work, it’s distracting. Generally you stay away from the work of contemporaries for a year or two at a time: it saves a good deal of reading. It is amazing how many much-touted novels disappear in eighteen months. The underlying force in book reviewing is journalism. The editor of a book review has a section which he hopes to make as interesting to the owner of the newspaper as any other department. If, for two or three days, a newspaper is filled with news about a murder, one can be certain it is treated implicitly as the most exciting murder in the last twenty years. So with war novels, first novels, novels about homosexuality, politics, novels by authors of the Establishment, and historical novels. If I had a chapter of a novel for each review I’ve read of a new war novel which was said to be as good as
The Naked and the Dead
or
From Here to Eternity
, I would have fifty chapters. One never knows, of course. Maybe a few of these books are as good as they’re said to be, and even if they’ve since disappeared, they will emerge again in ten or twenty years or in a century, but it is easier and much more logical to ignore what is said about a book when it first appears. There is too much direct and personal interest in the initial opinions, and much too much logrolling. The editor of a large book review is of course not owned by the Book-of-the-Month Club, but on the other
hand the editor would just as soon not give more than two or three bad reviews in a year to book club choices. Nor is his attitude dissimilar when it comes to choosing a reviewer for the novel which a big publishing house has chosen for its big book of the season. Robert Ruark, James Michener, Allen Drury will pick up their occasional roasts and slams, but considering how bad their books can be, it’s impressive what attention they get. The slack (since a book review, depending on local tradition, can have just a certain proportion of good reviews) is taken up by misassigning small, determined literary types onto most of the really good novels, which then receive snide treatment and/or dismissal.
Catch-22
, for example, was reviewed on page fifty of
The New York Times Book Review
. Since this causes a vague uneasiness afterward in the book review editor, there are always good young writers like Updike and Roth who get on the approved list and get many too many good reviews from bad reviewers. The point is that any serious novelist knows enough to stay out of the flurry which hits a new book. Every year whether the books deserve it or not, four or five first novelists will be provided a brilliant debut and four or five respectable young novelists will receive the kind of review which “enhances their reputation as one of the most serious and dedicated voices in the vineyard of literature.”