My Generation (55 page)

B
ennett might have appreciated the fact that several years ago two of his Random House writers, Philip Roth and myself, walked along a beach in East Hampton loftily pigeonholing people into three categories: the well poisoners, the lawn mowers (these are most of the people), and the life-enhancers. Needless to say, Bennett belonged to that rare and precious species called the life-enhancers, of which humankind has so much need. Being a life-enhancer, he invigorated and replenished the world he lived in, leaving the people with whom he came in touch exhilarated by his presence. The vital force in Bennett was so powerful, so seemingly indomitable, that he appeared virtually deathless, and perhaps that is one of the reasons that his passing causes us this dismay we feel. I recall one night some years ago flying on a plane with Bennett through a dark, lovely, star-crowded sky over Pennsylvania. The clear light of the cities below seemed to merge with the glittering stars, creating a wonderful radiant effect that touched us both deeply. Suddenly Bennett turned to me and said something which in another man might seem odd or even slightly bizarre but which in Bennett expressed his own quintessence. “Ah, Bill,” he exclaimed, “I love being alive so much!” Perhaps this explains why he was both so rare and so valuable. Loving life with that unquenchable love of his, he imparted the very spirit of life to others—that buoyant, generous, inimitably vivacious spirit that became apparent the instant he entered a room and that no one
who knew him will ever forget. He adored jokes, of course, and I think he might have appreciated it had I tried to make one up for this occasion. At the moment my own sense of loss is too keen, although I am consoled by the thought that there will come a time when memory will permit us all to reexperience, without grief, the warmth and the good cheer that were bestowed upon us by this immeasurably loving, life-enhancing man.

[Speech delivered at a memorial service, St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, August 1971.]

I
met Bob in 1946—the year after the invention of the printing press. I'd gone back to Duke University after being in the Marines, and Bob had come to Duke after service in the Army Air Force, and he looked about sixteen years old. We met in a tobacco-fragrant part of West Durham, in a sort of seedy salon presided over by an editor of the Duke Press named Ashbel Brice.

Brice called me Junior, and he called Bob—a year or so younger than me—Junior Junior. Brice introduced Bob and me to our first glorious dry martinis and also, bless him, to Joyce and Faulkner and Yeats. Bob's and my friendship was cemented by our passion for books and writing, which at that age is such a touchingly committed, exquisitely focused matter, like religion. We were also united, in that painfully repressed era, by our unrequited longing for girls. I recall walking on the Duke campus with Bob and glimpsing an especially gorgeous coed sauntering by. I said wryly, “Well, Bob, you can't have everything.” To which he replied, in despair, “You can't have
anything
!”

When he married, I was his best man. I've never seen anyone in such ghastly throes of prenuptial nervousness. To allay his anguish, I walked him up Fifth Avenue to the Central Park Zoo, where I tried to distract him by showing him the lions and tigers. We were late getting back to St. Patrick's. His bride, Gloria, was frantic. “Where have you been?” she shouted. Bob replied, accurately in fact: “To a cathouse.”

With the exception of my first novel, Bob has been the overseer of all the thousands of words I've written for publication at Random House. What a splendid overseer he has been. Bob's reputation has of course preceded him, and people have often asked me what it is that has made him such a great editor. I can't explain the source of his genius—the why of it—but I can briefly describe the mysterious and baffling process whereby his amazing intuition has taken hold and gone to the heart of a problem.

I've learned to dread the tiny, nearly invisible pencil marks Bob will make in the margins of a manuscript. I dread and welcome them. I dread them because, as we go over the text together, they are almost invariably ego-damaging, uncannily catching me out in some little nasty self-indulgence I thought I could get away with. But with Bob you can't get by with these moments of laziness or failure of clarity or self-flattering turgidity; he pounces like a cobra, shakes the wretched phrase or sentence into good sense or meaning, and soon all is well. How sweet-mannered and gentle Bob is—but how ruthless, how uncompromising. That's why the better part of me has learned to welcome those faint little pencil marks: They signal perception and wisdom.

But there is something beyond this devastating technical brilliance that has made Bob Loomis so important to me. It goes beyond the pleasure I take in seeing his happy life with his second wife, Hilary, and his son, Miles. It has to do with the faith and loyalty and the friendship of—I can scarcely believe it, saying these words—half a century. Had it been mere editorial wizardry, that would have been wonderful, but, even so, scarcely enough. What has sustained me for so many years as a writer is the knowledge that possibly the oldest friend I have is always there and, without necessarily speaking the words, patiently urging me on, helping me in spirit to continue striving to be the artist I hope to be.

[
At Random
, no. 17, Spring/Summer 1997.]

I
first met Philip in the mid-1950s at a dinner party in rural Connecticut, only a few years after my first novel had been published. Mine was a book which, for a first novel, had received considerable acclaim in the popular press; although in terms of what I conceived to be the New York literary establishment—most notably
Partisan Review
—my Southern gothic tragedy may as well have been printed on water. That evening, therefore, I felt myself dining, if not precisely among the enemy, then with a species of intellectual so high-powered and demanding that I could not help but feel intimidated, and a little resentful. I had of course read much of Philip's admirable and brilliant criticism, which made it all the more painful to feel something of a nonentity in his presence. And what a presence it was! There Philip sat across the table, heavy-lidded, glowering, talking in nearly unfathomable polysyllables—not so unfathomable, however, that I might fail to understand that he was cutting some poor incompetent wretch of a writer to shreds. But how devastating and deserved was that demolition job, how pitiless was his judgment upon that star-crossed nincompoop so misguided as to ever have taken pen in hand! I think I shivered a little, and after dinner sidled away. Later, though, when goodbyes were being said, I was dumbstruck when Philip approached me and took my hand, saying in that voice which was such a strange amalgam of fog and frog, “Hope to see you again. I liked your book.” And then, as if to endorse this stunning statement, he
added with a negligent flap of his arm, “It was a good book.” When he was gone, the enormous astonishment lingered, along with an unabashed and immodest satisfaction. Even then, before I knew him, I was powerfully aware that you had passed a crucial muster if, in the eyes of Philip Rahv, you had written “a good book.”

In retrospect, I can understand that my initial discomfort in Philip's presence had to do in part with a mistaken prejudice. At a time when the urban Jewish sensibility was coming to the forefront of American literature, and the writing of Southerners was no longer the dominant mode, I shared some of the resentment of my fellow WASPs over what we construed as the self-conscious chauvinism often displayed by the literary establishment. Thus, in an awful momentary lapse, I had confused Philip with somebody like Leslie Fiedler. Certainly, I should have known better—should have known that among the things that characterized Philip's approach to literature were his utter lack of parochialism, his refusal to be bamboozled by trends or fashionable currents, and, most importantly, his ability to appreciate a work in terms of difficult and complex values which he had laid down for himself and which had nothing to do with anything so meretricious as race or region or competing vogues. If one knew this—as I had after college and postcollege years during which
Partisan Review
was required reading—then to have earned the respect of Philip Rahv was exhilarating. I shudder to think what it must have been to experience Philip's disfavor.

Some years later I got to know Philip very well. Strangers often found it hard to understand how one could become a good friend of this brusque, scowling, saturnine, sometimes impolite man with his crotchets and fixations, his occasional savage outbursts and all the other idiosyncrasies he shared with Dr. Johnson. But I found it easy to be Philip's friend. For one thing, I was able almost constantly to relish his rage, which was a well-earned rage inasmuch as he was an erudite person—learned in the broadest sense of the word, with a far-ranging knowledge that transcended the strictly literary—and thus was supremely competent to sniff out fools. I discovered it to be a cleansing rage, this low, guttural roar directed at the frauds and poseurs of literature. He had, besides, an unerring eye for the opportunists in his own critical profession, where he vented his contempt in equal measure on the “trendy”—a word he virtually coined—and those who were merely windy and inadequate, the pretentious academics who might have had a simple-minded taste for novels but lacked utterly the acquaintance
with politics, philosophy, and history which was essential to the critical faculty and a civilized perception of things. If any critic had the right to be magisterial, it was Philip Rahv.

But if Philip was angry much of the time, there was beneath it all an affecting and abiding gentleness, a real if biting sense of humor, and throughout, a strange vulnerability. One felt that his arduous grappling with the world of men and ideas had caused him anguish, and that a sense of the disparity between the scrupulous demands of his conscience and vision—whether reflected in literature or life—and the excesses and lunacies of modern society had laid actual hands on him, wrenching him with a discomfort that was nearly intolerable. At the same time, I delighted in his ease and pleasure in preparing good food, in being a host for the men and women he respected and chose to charm. He was often a difficult and prickly soul, at once outgoing yet so secretive as to be almost unknowable. I was proud to be a friend, if only because he was a man who, steadfast to the end, held to those principles and ideas that he felt to be liberating, humane, and—Philip, I can almost see you flinch at the word—eternal.

[Speech delivered at a memorial service, Brandeis University, January 1974.]

I
first got to know Ralph Ellison back in the early 1960s, when he and Fanny often came up to Connecticut for weekend visits. We had wonderful, rather liquid evenings. Our Virginia and Alabama by way of Oklahoma origins gave us a common ground of interest, and we talked about Southern matters—such things as bird dogs and cars and whiskey and the native cuisine. This is not to say that we shied away from intellectual or social concerns, far from it, but though the civil rights movement was on the horizon we rarely spoke of race and the racial conflict. Neither, for some reason, did we dwell much on literary things. A mutual reticence, I suppose, kept us from talking about our own novels. Which, as I reflect on it, was a great pity, for I really yearned to have the courage to tell him how passionately I admired
Invisible Man
.

Recently I received a set of the volumes in the new and beautiful Modern Library. I was especially pleased to see that
Invisible Man
was one of the few novels by a contemporary writer included in this collection.
Invisible Man
surely deserves its place among the modern classics. It appeared in 1952, a year after my own first novel was published, and I recall that when I first read it I had none of the envy first novelists have for each other, because I realized I was in the presence of one of those amazing books that one can call
transforming
. A transforming work is one that breaks all the rules and causes you to rearrange your understanding of the world so radically that an
important part of you, at least—your conscience or your sensibility, probably both—is never really the same again.
Invisible Man
is, of course, essentially about the anguish of being black in America, but countless books have been written about that experience, and while many of these have been excellent only a very few have been transforming. The difference between
Invisible Man
and these others, and what makes it a masterpiece, is that it is a great fable which, though it never loses the particularity of its negritude, is really about the half-madness of the human condition.

Ralph was an artist of the first rank and his artistry is the secret ingredient of the book, really, and the reason why its naked bleakness and manic glee continue so to haunt white people as well as black people and to command our respect and attention. As only a few writers have done—Gogol is one, Mark Twain in
Huckleberry Finn
is another—Ralph, with his musician's sense of tonality, struck the perfect eternal pitch between hilarity and excruciating pain, and the reverberations have been immense and lasting. He will be with us as long as the written word has meaning.

[
Sewanee Review
, January–March 2009.]