The Adding Machine (26 page)

Blake in
The Narrow Corner.
They don’t live. They don’t engage our affection. We don’t
like
them. We feel nothing for them. The reason is very simple: no feeling, no love went into them. Compare these pale lifeless characters with Lord Jim and the Great Gatsby. Consider the care and love that went into these characters. They
shine
with the writer’s gift of life. Maugham had no such gift to give. He lost it in the bargain. Only his malicious vignettes come alive at all. . . Roy in
Cakes and Ale
for instance. The closest Maugham ever came to creating a character was with Sadie Thompson, who draws her strength from the actresses who portrayed her. Interesting that Maugham turned down Tallulah Bankhead for the part! Maybe it wasn’t in the Contract. She could have been too good.

Obviously Maugham regretted his bargain and sought to deny its implications. It would seem that he didn’t even read the large print. For he must have known that the Devil can’t make you a good writer. But he can make you a famous writer, a successful writer, a rich writer. And Maugham got his full soul’s worth there: the Villa Mauresque. Lunch with the queen. Had he jogged the Devil’s arm he could have gotten a Knighthood.

But every writer wants to be a good writer. He may want to be the
best writer,
not in a competitive sense, since writers cannot be compared except in general terms. I mean any writer who is a writer wants to do the best job of writing he can do. And Maugham was a writer. He never made his living in any other way. He
chose
to be a writer, not a doctor or a lawyer or a politician.

So he knew what he had done and consoled himself with his paltry prizes . . . the perfect martini at one . . . lunch. . . guests . . . nap. .. walk.. . cocktails at seven. . . dinner with guests, oh very distinguished guests like Noel Coward, Winston Churchill and the Duke of Windsor. The Villa Mauresque was the biggest closet on the Riviera in more ways than one.

And one by one back in the closet lays . . .

Jean Genet said of Julien Green. . . ‘I’l n’a pas le courage d’être ecrivain.’ He does not have the courage to be a writer. Parenthetically I do not agree with Genet. I think that
Le Pelerin sur la terre
and
L’ autre sommeil
represent first class work in a very difficult genre, the borderline supernatural.

What is the courage Genet refers to?: The courage to face the horrific perils of one of the most dangerous of all professions, involving penalties and exposing oneself to punishments worse than death, much worse.

Old Lady: ‘It must be very dangerous to be a writer.’

Writer: ‘It is madam and few survive it.’

You can bog down in your style like Mammerstein. You can spend 20 years writing the great book that nobody can read like Joyce. You can standardize a product until it slowly dies for the lack of any good reason to live: the bad Catholic on a mission he doesn’t really believe in, debating the desirability or even the feasability of ordering another beer he isn’t sure he really wants before the boat docks.

Mr Greene, I was once caught short in a flight diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather conditions. There we are grounded, we can’t leave the plane because we haven’t cleared customs .. . Three hours ... no drinks ... no smoking ... But I have, so I think, an ace in the hole put aside for just such an emergency . .. I reach for
Travels With My Aunt
to ease the horror of my position only to find I have been served a worthless placebo ... My God, it’s terrible thin and empty . .. Sipping champagne on his patio as flowers rain down and ‘Lotus Land’ I thought. . . He is going to marry a young Indian girl, buy a Dakota and start smuggling whiskey and cigarettes. Is this your heaven Mr Greene? Perhaps the best thing is write a few wowzers and quit like Genet. . . What you do then? Nobody except perhaps a washed-up intelligence agent is less able to survive without his purpose than a dedicated writer. The thought appalls me. Oh, I have other hobbies to ride: guns and weaponry ... but for that you need money, and I don’t have any money except what I make from writing. And that source can dry up at any time . .. Remember an old 1920 song from the early days of motoring:

You’re going fine/ Then you see a sign/ With the word sublime/ DETOUR...

WRITER’S BLOCK. It hits you heavy and cold as a cop’s blackjack on a winter night. Suddenly you can’t do anything. You shrink from the typewriter. You turn sick with the sight of your words on paper . . .

WRITER’S BLOCK. We don’t like to talk about it. . . ‘It just doesn’t come any more!’ Hemingway said and shot himself. You can’t even write a letter. You’d rather do anything else than write. Some people sharpen pencils ... In the country you can cut wood . . . Anything to put off the dreaded moment: sit down and write . . .

Well maybe it’s time to retire. How does a writer retire? Retire to what? Maugham: ‘I’m 86 and that’s an old party.’ A very old party. . . It is pleasant to sit in the sun is it not?’ Chilling is it not? Like the old men in St Petersburg looking forward to the next meal and the next shit and sitting on their favorite bench in the sun . ..

And what causes WB? Usually it’s overwriting. Your bad writing catching up to you ... I remember Mary MacCarthy saying about me . . . ‘He writes too much . ..’ But I wouldn’t listen. . . Went on writing and writing and a lot of it is terrible ... Then it hits. . . You just have to wait it out. . .

Yessa very dangerous profession. . . They bog down in religion. They become Communists, which is worse because of the basically spurious position of Communism/Progress towards what? Better living standards for a population of decorticated zombies . .. Why? Who cares?

One cannot be dubious of a writer who does too many other things . .. the Renaissance Man syndrome. I felt that if I lived for 300 years I might begin to learn something about writing. What a writer is
actually doing.

Jack Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote. Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers and they can’t write, like a bullfighter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been there or he can’t write about it. And going there, he risks being gored. By that I mean what the Germans aptly call the Time Ghost. For example, such a fragile ghost world as Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age — all the sad young men, firefly evenings, winter dreams, fragile, fragile like his picture taken in his 23rd year — Fitzgerald, poet of the Jazz Age. He went there and wrote it and brought it back for a generation to read, but he never found his own way back. A whole migrant generation arose from Kerouac’s
On the Road
to Mexico, Tangier, Afghanistan, India.

What are writers, and I will confine the use of this term to writers of novels, trying to do? They are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or where they would like to live. To write it, they must go there and submit to conditions that they may not have bargained for. Sometimes, as in the case of Fitzgerald and Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written. In other cases, there may be a time lag. Science fiction, for example, has a way of coming true. In any case, by writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible.

To what extent writers can and do act out their writing in so-called real life, and how useful it is for their craft, are open questions. That is, are you making your universe more like the real universe, or are you pulling the real one into yours? Winner take nothing. For example, Hemingway’s determination to act out the least interesting aspects of his own writing and to actually be his character, was, I feel, unfortunate for his writing. Quite simply, if a writer insists on being able to do and do well what his characters do, he limits the range of his characters.

However, writers profit from doing something even when done badly. I was, for one short week — brings on my ulcers to think about it — a very bad assistant pickpocket. I decided that a week was enough, and I didn’t have the touch, really.

Walking around the wilderness of outer Brooklyn with the Sailor after a mooch (as he called a drunk) came up on us at the end of Flatbush: ‘The cops’ll beat the shit out of us ... you have to expect that.’ I shuddered and didn’t want to expect that and decided right there-that I was going to turn in my copy of the Times, the one I would use to cover him when he put the hand out. We always used the same copy — he said people would try to read it and get confused when it was a month old, and this would keep them from seeing us. He was quite a philosopher, the Sailor was . . . but a week was enough before I got what I ‘had to expect. . .’

‘Here comes one. . . yellow lights, too.’’ We huddle in a vacant lot. . . Speaking for myself at least, who can always see what I look like from outside, I look like a frightened commuter clutching his briefcase as Hell’s Angels roar past.

Now if this might seem a cowardly way, cowering in a vacant lot when I should have given myself the experience of getting worked over by the skinny short cop with the acne-scarred face who looks out of that prowl car, his eyes brown and burning in his head — well, the Sailor wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would a White Hunter have liked a client there to get himself mauled by a lion.

Fitzgerald said once to Hemingway, ‘Rich people are different from you and me.’

‘Yes . . . they have more money.’ And writers are different from you and me. They write. You don’t bring back a story if you get yourself killed. So a writer need not be ashamed to hide in a vacant lot or a comer of the room for a few minutes. He is there as a writer and not as a character. There is nothing more elusive than a writer’s main character, the character that is assumed by the reader to be the writer himself, no less, actually doing the things he writes about. But this main character is simply a point of view interposed by the writer. The main character then becomes in fact another character in the book, but usually the most difficult to see, because he is mistaken for the writer himself. He is the writer’s observer, often very uneasy in this role and at a loss to account for his presence. He is an object of suspicion to the world of nonwriters, unless he manages to write them into his road.

Kerouac says in
Vanity of Duluoz:
‘I am not “I am” but just a spy in someone’s body pretending these sandlot games, kids in the cow field near St. Rota’s Church . . .’ Jack Kerouac knew about writing when I first met him in 1944. He was 21; already he had written a million words and was completely dedicated to his chosen trade. It was Kerouac who kept telling me I should write and call the book I wrote
Naked Lunch,
I had never written anything after high school and did not think of myself as a writer, and I told him so.’’ I got no talent for writing. . .’ I had tried a few times, a page maybe. Reading it over always gave me a feeling of fatigue and disgust, an aversion towards this form of activity, such as a laboratory rat must experience when he chooses the wrong path and gets a sharp reprimand from a needle in his displeasure centers. Jack insisted quietly that I did have talent for writing and that I would write a book called
Naked Lunch.
To which I replied, ‘I don’t want to hear anything literary.’

Trying to remember just where and when this was said is like trying to remember a jumble of old films. The 1940’s seem centuries away. I see a bar on 116th Street here, and a scene five years later in another century: a sailor at the bar who reeled over on the cue of ‘Naked Lunch’ and accused us — I think Allen Ginsberg was there, and John Kingsland — of making a sneering reference to the Swiss Navy. Kerouac was good in these situations, since he was basically unhostile. Or was it in New Orleans or Algiers, to be more precise, where I lived in a frame house by the river, or was it later in Mexico by the lake in Chapultepec Park... there’s an island there where thousands of vultures roost apathetically. I was shocked at this sight, since I had always admired their aerial teamwork, some skimming a few feet off the ground, others wheeling way up, little black specks in the sky — and when they spot food they pour down in a black funnel. . .

We are sitting on the edge of the lake with tacos and bottles of beer. . . ‘Naked Lunch is the only title,’ Jack said. I pointed to the vultures.

‘They’ve given up, like old men in St. Petersburg, Florida ... Go out and hustle some carrion you lazy buzzards!’ Whipping out my pearlhandled .45, I killed six of them in showers of black feathers. The other vultures took to the sky ... I would act these out with Jack, and quite a few of the scenes that later appeared in Naked Lunch arose from these acts. When Jack came to Tangier in 1957, I had decided to use the title, and much of the book was already written.

In fact, during all those years i knew Kerouac, I can’t remember ever seeing him really angry or hostile. It was the sort of smile he gave in reply to my demurrers, in a way you get from a priest who knows you will come to Jesus sooner or later — you can’t walk out on the Shakespeare Squadron, Bill.

Now as a very young child I had wanted to be a writer. At the age of 9 I wrote something called
Autobiography of a Wolf.
This early literary essay was influenced by — so strongly as to smell of plagiarism — a little book I had just read called
The
Biography of a Grizzly Bear.
There were various vicissitudes, including the loss of his beloved mate ... in the end this poor old bear slouches into a valley he knows is full of poison gases, about to die ... I can see the picture now, it’s all in sepia, the valley full of nitrous yellow fumes and the bear walking in like a resigned criminal to the gas chamber. Now I had to give my wolf a different twist, so, saddened by the loss of his entire family, he encounters a grizzly bear who kills him and eats him. Later there was something called
Carl Cranbury in Egypt
that never got off the ground, really ... a knife glinted in the dark valley. With lightning speed Carl V. Cranbury reached for the blue steel automatic . . .