33

lfiQuarterly 33

Ongo\ng

Anierlcan Fictionm

--

--

----.

-��-

Elliott Anderson

EDITOR ART DIRECTOR

.•..........

MANAGING EDITOR

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

ASSISTANT EDITORS

.......•

ADVISORY EDITORS

PRODUCTION FULFll.LMENT

Lawrence Levy

Theresa Maylone Michael McDonnell Allan Gray Lisa Freeman George Mundstock Debby Silverman Mary Elinore Smith Gerald Graff Peter Michelson Robert Onopa Cynthia Anderson Mary Margaret Zakrasek

TriQuarterly is an international journal of arts, letters, and opinion published in the fall, winter, and spring at North­ western University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. Subscription rates:

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Foreign subscriptions $1.00 per year additional. Single copies usually $3.50. Back issue prices on request. Contributions, correspondence, and subscriptions should be addressed to TrlQuarterly, University Hall 101, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions, but

queries are strongly suggested. No manuscripts will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1975 by TriQuarterly. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America. Claims for missing numbers will be honored only within the four-month period after month of issue.

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ANN

100,

FROM

ARBOR,

Fiction JAMES PURDY

from The house of the solitary 5

maggot M. D. ELEVITCH

Single for tonight

ARTHUR A. COHEN

Hans Cassebeer and the Virgin's

DAVID KRANES

Cordials

ROBERT ONOPA

The man who swam through jellyfish,

rose

71

79

113

through men-of-war

121

FREDERIC 1UfEN

Letter from Mao to Malraux

131

MICHAEL ANANIA

The Red Menace

DANIEL HALPERN

A balance of nature

DANIEL HALPERN

An interview with Paul Bowles

141 153

Interview

159

Foreign perspectives 179

ALAN Sll.LITOE

Harrison's row

CESARE PAVESE

from The crystal world: notes on excerpts from Cesare Pavese's

Thejob of living translated

by Richard Koffler 185 Criticism ROBERT ALTER

The self-conscious moment: reflections on the aftermath of

modernism EDWARDW. SAID

Contemporary fiction and criticism

MORRIS DICKSTEIN

]ffi

231

Fiction hot and kool: dilenunas

of the experimental writer FRANK MC CONNELL

on

GERALD GRAFF

257

The corpse of the dragon: notes

postromantic fiction

273

Babbitt at the abyss: the social context of postrmdem American

fiction

sos

This issue of TriQuarterly was

illustrated by William E Biderbost

With issues 33/34, Charles Newman,

Editor andfounder of thisjournal,

resigned. He will continue to serve in an advisory capacity.

Elliott Anderson, present Executive Editor, assumes editorship.

Theresa Maylone, Managing Editor, and Lawrence Levy, Art Director, will continue to have things pretty much their own way.

I

from The house of the solitary maggot James Purdy

For my grandmother. Minnie Mae DO NOT DISTURB!

reads the plaque over Eneas Harmond's house.

"I can see no one," he would call out from behind his shutters (Eneas Rex Harmond is the complete name). "The town has fallen, how else can I explain it," he began, "but in this communique style, our town of

Prince's Crossing has fallen, Mr. Skegg, its leading citizen has been interred in Lady Bythewaite's rose garden (a few delphiniums are

growing there also), with the body not having been inspected by coroner or doctor (there is no coroner or doctor for miles around), and if you ask me Lady and her Bythewaite alleged great great-nephew are both out of their heads. He has just come home from the war, and is, if not a madman, using a dangerous drug, he is seldom clothed, and they spend their entire afternoons and evenings (their mornings are spent in their hobbling around in a state of undress drinking pot after pot of strong Louisiana -style coffee) in listening to a tape recorder into which Lady Bythewaite has been persuaded by this said nephew to pour out the story of her life in Prince's Crossing. Furthermore, I have never heard this alleged nephew say more than four or five words in succession. Actually I have only heard him clearly pronounce only yeas and mnnos. Despite my willingness to believe him an impostor there is a strong family 5

TriQuarterly

likeness in his face and body to both Lady Bythewaite (she is called Lady

by the people of Prince's Crossing, a village as I say which no longer exists, expunged by a merciless state, county, and township authority) and to her common-law husband Mr. Skegg, who has, as I say, recently died (mysteriously) and been perfunctorily buried by order of Nora Bythewaite. The nephew, a stalwart fellow, though of delicate mouth and eyes, buried him, assisted by me as shoveler. There was no ceremony.

But this is only part of the reason I have put up the DO NOT DISTURB

sign.

My own sanity seemed to be at stake, I who had been her steward, bailiff, caretaker, use any word you like, for so many years.

I stood that morning of the burial my eyes on the delphiniums so that

judge of them, was studying them, and they were, 1 know, almost hurting-beautiful in the cool spring air.

"I am happy at last, Eneas," Lady Bythewaite whispered. "Happy one would suppose I was a

...

at the very last.

"

"I never knew you had a great great-nephew. Never knew, actually,

anybody had."

••

,

He searched the land for a relative," she explained .• But did you

know,oh Eneas," she came back to what was, I gather, her happiness, ,.

did you actually know there were such things as these tape recorders

which catch the human voice?" 1 almost heard tapeworms. Here in

Prince's Crossing, I cogitated, deaf now to her running words, here we have almost consciously ignored the world. First we were a town in the

nineteenth century, a flourishing little place, then we were downgraded to a village, as the twentieth century came blighted into being, and

finally in the Great Depression, we fell to Unincorporated, and, wait, only lately a huge truck, from the county or township or state, came and deprived us even of that designation. We are not even a crossroads, perhaps. Prince's Crossing ceases to exist. That is another reason I have left the sign on my house DO NOT, etc.

"Lady Bythewaite is to blame!" I spoke to myself after that rude funeral. Or perhaps the dead man, Mr. Skegg, known as her common­ law spouse, was even more blameworthy I But the overriding fact, up and beyond his death and her guilt, remains: a "community," if not a great 6

city, has fallen. (Lady Bythewaite being a staunch individualist eschewed and even loathed the word "community" because it implied using other people's property and talent to loaf and dwindle away on.)

And Mr. Skegg who was the living embodiment of this "settlement" (here I avoided the word "community," so under her heavy jurisdiction was I, though it was on my tongue's tip to say). will be "My great-great-nephew staying with me," she had begun that day of his arrival, ushering me into her study, trying to prepare me for the change in the great house his coming would effectuate. "Do you hear what I am saying to you, Eneas Rex Harmond?" she called out to me like a voice in the county seat registrar's office. "My nephew, be prepared, is like an unwashed say, horse," she took this animal for a after on had her comparison having tongue to say, I do believe, horse in the first place, but almost changing it to goat, not wanting to call him ...

horse for a reason that a listener is more apt to understand when he has heard all her words which went into the whirling spools. "There are real

nettles, burrs in his hair, I do believe, and-Eneas, are you minding?­ he is alas using some powerful stimulant

But when one's town, one's lifted and hands property" (she eyes to the rafters) "are falling on top of one, I am

...

glad to have almost anybody in this house

...

It is most

unusual for me at my age (what was her age?) to see a young man at the

breakfast table without anything on at all but a neckerchief. I believe my great great-nephew is good-looking if one washed off all the ac­

cumulations of

Eneas, he is not after my money, I deposit, say dirt know that. He cares nothing for property. I don't know whether it is the ...

...

stimulant he uses or what, but he is indifferent to goods, don't you see, indifferent to all that the world has to offer."

Her voice had gone far far down on the scale on these last words, like one still

talking while falling to sleep.

"But, as we know," she cried coming to with ajumpand start, "Mr. Skegg is dead, and his body lies in that room yonder. Pray step in and say a last farewell to him

" ...

But the nephew came in at that moment, and stopped me from paying my respects. We stood looking at one another in strained embarrass­

ment, Lady Bythewaite making no move to introduce us to ourselves.

"What is your nephew'S name?" I began at last.

7

"What is his name?" she countered, like one who has been deeply

insulted.

The nephew replied by roaring out a laugh which caused Lady Bythe­ waite to put her hand to her temple .

,

.

He is entirely impossible, Eneas, but I am not in need of a possible

youngman.

"To return to Mr. Skegg, my sorrow is greater here than you perhaps will care to admit to yourself, oh, hard, judging Eneas. To think he lies

dead in my parlor! He had lost everything, owned not a penny, after

being the greatest magnate in this part of the country. Penniless! Not a red cent! He came to me. He said, I will go to the poor farm. Never, I

countered, not while there is breath in my body. But to no avail! He was obsessed with going to the poor farm. My hospitality was too kind! So there was nothing to do to satisfy him but lend him my horse and buggy to convey him to the poor farm. I had always offered him my home, with

free access to all the rooms, at any hour

nephew

was

" ...

Here she first observed her

fiddling with the little machine and spools which were to

capture the words that will begin to unfold momentarily. "A court reporter, Eneas Rex Harmond!" she exclaimed, more surprised than angry. Occasionally, letting the spool roll without his aid, the nephew would go take a peep at the dead man stretched out on a Victorian ottoman, a beautiful lap robe over his high shoes, his long white freshly

shampooed hair down to his shoulders. He was the great magnate, soul of Prince's-Crossing, who without Lady Bythewaite's intervention and friendship would have known a pauper's grave, had there been such a place in our vicinity but there being none he was to be given a plot in the rose garden, Mr. Skegg whose chief fame, other than being a magnate, great silent film star MAYNARD EWING, who has undergone a revival, as people tell me.

was that he was the father of the

Lady Bythewaite has never acted more irresponsible in some ways than she does today, that is has never acted more like herself, one might say. She claims the young man is her nephew, but perhaps for reasons best known to her, or to him, she has invented this. Many people think she has invented her entire life. For instance, why do people call her Lady Bythewaite? True, she is English, that is she came from Britain in the last century, but, and here is the important thing, does anybody 8

think that Lady, so laughable in this district and part of the world,

implies any usurpation of a title? And ifhe is her great great-nephew, who was his father, mother, what were his beginnings? She keeps her

lips closed on all that.

But the scandal of Mr. Skegg's death! Had any ordinary person been mixed up in all this, he would be visited by the authorities, indeed would be taken into custody. But there are no authorities in Prince's

Crossing,

except, come to think of it, a sheriff two or three counties away who comes on very unusual occasions to take a look around. And remember, about the time of Mr. Skegg's strange death and burial it had already been decided that Prince's Crossing, which had been a town in 1800, a

village in 1902, is today nonexistent, and people have told me they had not even got a glimpse of it when they drove through it even at a slow pace!

Lady Bythewaite always smiled, I thought, when we talked of how Prince's Crossing no longer existed, perhaps because she owns prin­ cipally all the fine old houses left, and so what was a town, a village, and then unincorporated is, in a way of speaking, her "fief." It is all Lady Bythewaite's private domain. And the people here and about (I was tempted to use the phrase "neck of the woods" but she has forbidden the use of this expression in her presence) are not up in arms against her at all, as they may have been years and years ago. They now claim they love Lady Bythewaite, though her great great-nephew being one of those youngsters (long hair, stimulants)is far from finding favor here. Yet even he, coached no doubt by her, is a favorite-favorite with the few people who have run up against him. We are going fast! we Prince's Crossing people. Mr. Skegg's death was so serious! He who had been one of the richest men in the country, died a pauper. In fact he had debts which Lady Bythewaite paid.

There is a long-standing rumor that Lady Bythewaite was the mother of Owen Haskins, Mr. Skegg's younger son, and that she may even have been the mother of the famous silent-film star MAYNARD EWING, who

appeared in the silent screen classics Eagle 's Nest and Eye of the Storm.

Then before I began to listen to her in earnest, to hear the spools as they flew with her talk, my own sense of the succession of events was

confused, clouded, for there was Mr. Skegg laid out in the parlor, and then there was the frightful accident of the' 'funeral" itself. I came 9

home ready to burst with horror. For a horse and wagon were racing

about the streets and roads, and suddenly the driver stopped, and out from his coffin Mr. Skegg fell to the pavement. His mouth opened,

showing he had his own teeth and, unlike many ancient persons', they were very very white

...

But she seems almost to welcome this dissolution of the country, the

losing of our railroads, the general confusion and disrepair. For what other woman of her antecedents would have taken in this boy, avowed nephew? He's not right, I cogitated, once Mr. Skegg was gathered up again, put in his coffin, and we had buried him. Look at his eyes, hair, mouth. He's under the influence of some strange powder or plant, who knows?

Am I, too, along with her and him, taking advantage of the fact that

Prince's Crossing is no longer under any immediate jurisdiction of

federal, state, or local government? In the confusion of the present day when even the weed-grown-over sign Unincorporated has at last

disappeared "He was spared a pauper's grave, remember, Eneas!" She had bent over me as I sat there in my blackest depression. "Do not reproach yourself, I say. He was laid to rest by friends."

Lady Bythewaite kept her eyes fastened on me as she spoke into the whirling spools of the nephew's recorder, while my glance rested on him.

He had received some sort of eye damage in the war, and used spectacles which he had purchased at the dime store but which he put on only when he adjusted the spools or looked over old papers or photographs.

Unused to recordings I interrupted with "You mean to tell me you have buried a man without the proper authorities being apprised of this ...

fact, or of his death, indeed?" Later I was to realize all these "uncalled for" remarks of mine went down on the record of the spools, but the

nephew did not seem to mind • ,

.

What do you expect me to do, give him over to the crows, buzzards,

field rats?"

Lady Bythewaite always used three or even four examples to back up her defense where one would have done, that is why didn't she just say leave his body to the crows.

10

Her digression expanded: "The doctors all left here ages ago. There is no coroner because there is no local

government, and you of all men

know this, Eneas!"

Yes, she was bright as a button-the rumor she is mad is unfounded.

But the great great-nephew, I pondered. What isn't wrong with him?

She refuses to blame his war experiences for his condition, however. She

merely says he has always been an unusual boy. Besides, the present generation, Lady Bythewaite informs me, is most remarkable.

The word' 'remarkable," like many words used by her, seems obscure in meaning to me. Did she mean worthy of remark, terrible (which to her often meant unendurable but satisfying), wonderful (good), or what?

"Imagine my telling him of my life, Eneas," she again addressed me instead of the spools. "Imagine, if you can, a young person who wishes to know everything about me. That is what is remarkable, that and that alone, don't you see?" She was laughing uproariously, and I now saw that she was smoking the same pestiferous drug he used.

I did not answer her, I did not accuse her either. She was always ready for the new provided she could have her own way with it.

"He has brought me back from the state Mr. Skegg was in Before I had lost You came, nearly my memory my great-great-nephew recall how once when you were away, Eneas, I hired the old man down

the road, Mr. Cruikshank, to come in twice a week and catechize me as follows: What day of the week is it? What season are we in? What are the principal constellations when I look up at the heavens? Hour of sun­

rise, sunset? Finally," she added watching me grin, "what is my name, and who do they say I am about the county?"

"Our Lady Bythewaite always makes ajoke of everything," I addressed the nephew.

"Cousin Harmond," she used my county name now, "sit quiet,

please, as I speak." There was only the kitchen stool which pleased me to sit on, and I had been squirming a good deal even on it.

"Get your sprawling farmer's body quiet.

My great great-nephew has fallen hopelessly in love with me. Rather, in love with my period. I have seldom known such happiness-to be heard out, I mean. To speak into the little whirling reel and hear it but a moment later come back, a ..

bit coffined it's true, in sound and volume with my-as he calls it11

voix d 'or, for our nephew has traveled. Eneas, he loves the story of Mr. "

And the bravery of the boy to bury him. He buried my Skegg "Lady Bythewaite, since you have thrown all caution to the winds," I started up, "why don't you use the word for him Prince's Crossing always used?"

"My paramour," she responded immediately, a softening of the lines about her mouth, "or in common parlance, lover, common-law husband." She laughed like a young woman. ...

...

I had been upstairs. I had seen to my considerable surprise (I am

beyond terror, I was in the" other war," there is no horror that I have not sat down to, I once held a man's eyeballs in my hand, I was buried in another man's bowels for two days, I have been subjected to intolerable physical abuse, atrocity by the enemy, and so on, but this is not my story, the world is tired of heroes, though I am one). I saw the imprint of two heads in the giant feather bed. Great great-nephew and great great-aunt were sleeping together at night, for a twofold purpose; one, that he did not wish to miss anything she might think of in the night (the recorder and spools were kept at the foot of the bed), and two, because owing to his war experiences he sometimes became hysterical at night, and then while he shouted and cried she smoothed his hair, and heated for him a

special calmative to drink. "

You are responsible for me.

"

Lady Bythewaite was shaking me

Ah, yes, the terms of her will. She had named me executor of her estate when Mr. Skegg had died, and was buried,

gently, bending

over me.

after falling out of the buggy

...

"Doesn't your great great-nephew ever speak?" I, Eneas Harmond,

inquired at various times of Lady Bythewaite I hear him talking in the bathroom at night, but that's after he's had his pipe," she replied after a great deal of hesitation for her.

"Ah, so," I said, trying to act as if I found his mum nature not really .

••

remarkable

.

And, Lady Bythewaite," I began after even more hesitation than she had shown when her nephew's constitutional silence was broached, "is it ••

12

perhaps true, as I have thought at times, that all these spools of your "However, I stopped. speech "Go on, for God's sake!" She counterfeited impatience and anger ...

here.

"Is it true the spools will see the light of day? I mean will they be

printed?"

"Printed!" I saw that she was almost horrified. The thought of her voice on the spools finding print had indeed hit her hard. I was afraid it would spoil everything, indeed that she would stop, that the nephew would be banished, perhaps, and I restricted to the humdrum necessary

chores, never spoken to again except when some particular task was ordered me.

"Light of day, print, the public." She was going on about my even thinking such a thing, let alone saying it out loud. She stared at me as if I were berserk. "After the years you have served me, Eneas, it is a pity for me to see how ill you know me. You don't think I'd share my life with a

public, do you? It could never read, and today, poor socketless thing, perceives reality only through its major muscles! Share myself with the Go home." great public! Eneas, you astound me "But is your nephew ....

"

...

"He's normal. He's taken a vow of silence."

"At his age?'

"He won't speak-he has managed to convey this much to me, Eneas

-because of the crimes of the country, you see. But he is willing to hear me

speak. I will speak for him. He doesn't approve of me, but he will

hear me out. That's our arrangement."

Once Mr. Skeggwas interred, and they, or rather I, had dismissed the

maids, the cleaning women, the other bailiff, all their tasks now fell to

"trustworthy" me.

I proffered to do all this because I, again, and not they, did not want anybody in our fallen village to know that a great-aunt slept with her great-nephew. Explain it that there was only now this one great bed, a feather bed, in the house, that it was not a sexual passion between them Still, there was love there, unholy, preternatural, older than time.

One day she spoke: "He complains, Eneas, of the feather bed, says he is sinking into it, that he can find nofooting Have we anything else?" ...

...

13

I fetched from the barn two

sumptuous Victorian divans, carried

them, to their admiration, on my back. He commented on my strength two to three times though I wondered a bit how he could see

my "feat"

owing to his being "blinded by the dandelions" (which is how he referred to his serniblindness), But though the Victorian sofas were placed side by side, and fitted with bedclothes, they, in the end, preferred the feather bed, and went on

sleeping together there.

"I am going back in time now, dear Eneas." She held on to my hand

people did long ago from the window of a fast-train which is already beginning to move. "He has willed it, and 1 cannot begrudge him any as

favor, in view of

...

You have been a faithful and dear servant, but you

do not need me, Eneas, as much as he does

...

He will die if 1 do not re­

create for him the story of our life, my family and his

this in the dead of night

...

He has told me

" ...

I wanted to blurt out that he was an impostor, but as 1 looked at his

waiting face 1 sawall too clearly he was indeed her nephew, the great luminous, if going-blind, eyes, the mouth of so hungry lips, the delicate complexion, the brown-black hair, ending in curls, and the long lashes disguising the dying eyesight.

And so 1 protected them. He was, for all 1 know, a dangerous criminal, certainly he used a "dangerous" drug, which 1 nowoccasion­ ally shared, they had buried a man without the knowledge of the law or authorities, and I had done nothing to inform anybody they had done so, they were living in sin, though a century apart, and I went along with this, abetted them, their accessory, a court of law would claim. And like thein, all 1 wanted to hear about was Prince's Crossing, and the silent films. Something too lacking and unreal in the present epoch,

something base and wrong had riven us backwards and backwards. 1 shook my head, wiped my own eyes of a mist, as if I too had looked too long at the yellow of the dandelions.

"We are ready to begin! Eneas Harmond, ready!" Her golden voice!

The winter was passing, had passed, though it would still cover Mr. Skegg's grave (we had dug him over eight feet deep) with some occa­ sional frost, a snowflake or two, but the golden voice was bringing him 14

into the room, and with him the three sons, one a bastard, one a

castaway, one a great star of the silent screen.

But she was not quite ready for the past, and interrupting herself,

exclaimed, repeating herself: "For the first time in my life I am free! You have been faithful to me,

Eneas, but recollect this well, when Mr. Skegg my only foundation and

hope fell, and the earth was ready and opening also to receive me, as from nowhere, from out the ether, came this great great-nephew" (he

stood up as she said this with one of the spools in his left hand), "having

only his army clothes on his back, a pipe, and his recorder. He lifted me up from the grave, he restored me to speech, he buried my husband on the day our town had fallen. I am not only alive again, I am young!"

She was speaking a truth. If one half-shut his eyes, Lady Bythewaite resembled a young girl as she gamboled about the garden, and went up the steps two by two. What had the great great-nephew given her!

Indeed at times he looked older than she did. And they did little but talk into those spools! Like her, he wished to go back in time, to her time, he wished to be, I could only suppose, in the age of the silent screen.

I fetched down an old upright piano from the attic, an idea entirely my own, and planked it down before him. He banged on it for a while.

Then he returned to the spools.

One day just before they settled down in earnest to talking into the

spools, he had rushed out into the meadow, and then came back holding his eyes.

"The yellow of the dandelions has killed my sight!" At least this is

what she thought he had said. But she was not sure they were his exact

words, he spoke so seldom, but he brought back a dandelion wet from the dew. The beautiful yellow of it had hurt hisretina, She soothed his head as he lay on the sofa, and talked: "I will tell you everything. I have been a terrible woman they all agree and that will calm you knowing I have been so. You and I are free

because we judge nobody. You accept all things, dear young nephew, and I accept you

" ...

I, Eneas Harmond, overheard it all. They excluded me, and I let

them, for what they did not realize was that I was more eager to be a 15

witness than he to hear or she to tell

...

But because of the strain of my

devotion, well, sometimes I wilted before them, yes that is the right word, my head fell over from my sitting posture, and then in pity of that devotion, they handed me the pipe. and I smoked with them, sitting

finally away from them on the floor, while she went on with her gold voice telling and telling and while he held his eyes from the pain of the dandelions.

"I fear. Eneas, he will lose his sight." She took me aside while he

fiddled with the spools. "Perhaps you could go to the dime store in some

nearby village and get him stronger specs."

I raised and lowered my head. I knew it was useless to mention a

doctor, they would not allow one to set foot in the house, and then there wasn't one for fifty miles in any case.

I noticed Lady Bythewaite was making clothes for him, for he had

only his army fatigues to cover his spare sinewy form. I will not say that then the scales fell from my eyes, but I realized with each new "meeting" with them that all we have learned about women is false, maybe they taught it to us false to hide from us who they are, but this naked robin of a great great-nephew had brought back from the long ago a woman I did not know, the same woman whose story was being recited into the whirling spools. I don't know which I observed more, the alleged nephew with his glaucous eyes "spoiled by the effulgence of the dandelions" (" He went blind from looking at these harmless meadow weeds," she kept whispering to me), or the dew-fresh aunt who slept with him, ate with him, was never out of his presence, and though he almost never opened his mouth to say a word. employing a grunt now and then when he wished her to stop talking long enough for him to change a spool of the recorder so that we could go on with the glories of Maynard Ewing, and the old magnate, Mr. Skegg, or "maggot" as they pronounced the word magnate in Prince's Crossing.

Touching on Mr. Skegg, she said: "He refused to pity me when I told him I was pregnant by him!" "Pregnant by me, my child," he had stormed, "when hardly a night passes while I'm out driving I don't see Take those pathetic tales back you in some ditch with a farmer's son because you knew your here She to England with you shipped you ...

...

16

trade, and I disremember ever so much as having exchanged a kiss with "

you

...

"Yet," Lady Bythewaite told the spools, "he was the only man I had been intimate with for those few years, during which my three sons were born

" ...

There, I felt, a fact had come through at last, and then out of her mouth, like pebbles falling, I heard the numbers 1900,

1902,

1909.

Were these the years her bastard sons were born? And did she speak

the truth they were by Mr. Skegg, the old maggot (magnate)?

No one had ever known any solid fact pertaining to her in Prince's

Crossing.

Nonetheless, when the great great-nephew heard the year 1900, his strange dim orbs lit up, he cupped his ears as if hearing the tick-ticking of enormous clocks. Lady Bythewaite suddenly looked very ancient, instead of as a few moments before when she had been gamboling about the room like a farm girl. The sound of numbers had restored us to

reality, which Lady Bythewaite once said was another name for death.

1900, 1902, 1909 the tape recorder wheezed and sighed through its bonelike apertures which recalled for me the rotting corpse of Mr. Skegg in the rose garden.

She has buried her seducer, her common-law husband among the choice flowers, the thought drifted again and again across my mind.

Then I heard their combined attack on me.

Lummox, big strapping thing, rustic boor, clout, wake up!

But they knew I was faithful, and would not call the authorities, and

wasn't I an accomplice? A kind of undefined series of crimes had long ago settled over the old house, the mansion, but our chiefest dereliction going backwards in time instead of like all mortals forward

was we were

to death.

Actually, I go back to the burial now, Mr. Skegg is laid to rest more in the cornfield than in the rose garden, that is the sweet corn has sort of gone wild and encroached upon the rose garden, so that in fact he is buried a little within both, his head rests under the roses, his feet and

thighs under the corn.

17

As 1 came through the kitchen door today I heard Lady Bythewaite

saying, "We haven't been allowed to own gold since 1933, the Republic fell about a year or so afterward, there has been nothing but worldwide "

carnage since The tape recorder had stopped. The nephew wheeled it on only when ...

she was talking about Mr. Skegg, the sons, or her shame as an unwed mother.

She gave her short speech then against the federal government, and the criminal record of the presidents.

Then we were back again to 1900 or so. She said

...

It was not too hard for her to say great great -nephew, but gradually

he permitted her to say Corliss Valiant, his baptismal name. 1 think he forced her to use both his names together for suddenly now she ad­ dressed him, instead of greatgreatnephew, as Corlissvallant.

She said: "Corlissvallant has got me almost to the place where I met Mr. Skegg for the first time. He had retired from Wall Street young, you know

" ...

They looked at me benignly now and again, as one would at a stray bull which is permitted, once they are sure it will not butt or gore, to move about in the

pasture land. Corliss ValIant let me know by gesture

and a certain kind of nodding he was aware of my once and still residual

great strength, an idea which calmed him.

"You should have known Eneas Harmond when he was young," she

told him. "I say him lift a steer onto his shoulders. He also, at a county

fair, raised aloft a tree

" ...

I sat down tired at the thought of my diminishing muscles. strength,

preparing for death at a quicker rate than she was. Not speedier than he was, though. 1 felt the angel's wings about him from the moment he arrived. 1 heard wings in the revolving tape recorder.

"My heart is not too good." My voice once rose against the whirring of the tape recorder. "The doc some while back said 1 am a powerfully­ marrow. 1 was

built man yet, but my heart is tired."

Lad y Bythewaite nodded as if she had heard something set forth which was an accomplishment. "

You served your country, Eneas. You are above reproach.

Sometime you might show Corliss ValIant where they bayoneted you.

Yes,now."

I had never stripped before people since "service," and a few weeks 18

ago had anybody said I would remove my shirt before the old dame, I would have told him where to go and would have forgotten it.

I realized how damaged the nephew's eyes were now, for he had to come clear up to me to be sure of the

bayonet wound. And Lady Bythe­

waite, see what stuff she was made of after all. Only now was I beginning to know her complete. The wound from the bayonet looked almost as

fresh on me as the day it had been plunged into my abdomen and chest.

The sight of it had made even some doctors wince. But she was quiet.

"But your arms are as strong as a young man's," Lady Bythewaite

commented.

She and I both paused in any speech we might have made, for Corliss

ValIant had put his hand into the still remaining hollow of my wound, and kept it there until my face grew scarlet.

"We have all been through a great deal," Lady Bythewaite spoke,

almost near embarrassment, or was it compassion for Corliss ValIant's

understanding of my flesh's own memory?

"Eneas is in a draft," she cautioned her great great -nephew, and handed me my shirt.

I believe, though, that in the silence which followed we were all

thinking of plastic unstable unprotectable death-meant quality of the human body. How had the human race, considering its fragility, come so far, especially in view of the fondness we have for total error?

Eneas Harmond must have fallen asleep on the front porch, in the old green swing. I speak of myself at times in the third person, at times, if anybody should peruse this, in the first; that is because sometimes I seem still

I, sometimes I belong to the entire past-past along with Mr.

Skegg, his three bastard sons, and the woman who was their mother, who by some concatenation of events sits here almost as dawn-fresh, if cut down, as her great great-nephew.

I say then that I, or he, Eneas, was sleeping on the green porch swing,

when I felt a kind of fanning of air come over my face, too sweet­

smelling in an almost artificial way to be from the lake or the river. I did not open my eyes. Eneas Harmond did not open his eyes. "What is it?" I

said with my eyes shut, knowing it was human breath on my face,

knowing too, I think, who it was.

"Do you know where you are?" I put my second question. There was no answer, but the

19

breathing seemed to stop.

"If I could have some of the marrow like from think I could get through the rest of it I think that was the first

...

your bones, do you

my life?"

complete sentence the great great-nephew

spoke in this house, though of course we were, to be accurate, on the porch; perhaps the porch gave him the background for a sentence, as the house maybe did not. The house was too grand, I sometimes for with its thought, speech, thirty-foot ceilings, its cornices, its gold filigree work.

You have your own marrow, plenty of it." , ,

"Echo that," he retorted.

Eneas Harmond opened his eyes.

The nephew did seem to see better in the dark. His

eyes looked quite

clear to me.

"They have scooped it all out of me," he said, and sat down at my feet.

I think I was forming my mouth to say "No" when a long white figure in appeared the doorway.

"There is nothing more alarming to hear than whispering in the dead of night," she said. "I might have known you would put your two heads together against me." She sat down on the porch swing beside me.

Then we, she and I, both looked at the great great-nephew. He had gone fast asleep against my boots. Even when we shook him, he did not awaken.

"It must be the first time he's slept since he came

...

home."

"Ah, so," I replied, and Lady Bythewaite smiled to ear this peculiar Prince's Crossing expression.

"So you have somewhere about your person the real poppy juice," she

spoke loudly. Corliss Valiant did not awake.

My eyes went out over the little hills and the tiny mountains that were our landscape. There were roads there, no mistake. But one could wait an hour before he saw headlights from a car. Had one the eyes of eagles he could see from here the unused, rusted, derailed paths the trains had taken. We were pretty much cut off then from the world of travelers. We had buried a dead man, and we had perhaps some kind of deserter under our roof-I caught myself saying "our." Well, she would not have taken offense had she heard me say "our." She had no interest in

property. About once in four years she went over all her possessions, kept enumerated in a huge ledger. When she had read all she was worth 20

she would grin. she was the one person I have known (l have not known many, though, so what is this worth?) who understood almost exactly

what the Preacher was talking about when he wrote about Vanity. Yet she was not immune to it. She had fallen in love with her nephew, after several times in the past having declared herself enamored of my own person. Older than the hills, she should have been in some ill-marked grave, but here she sat in the pre-dawn light, swinging back and forth with me in gentle drowsy cadence, while the nephew snored like some young farm beast, saliva and drivel coming out from his mouth and nose.

"I believe sleep interests me the most now of any human activity," she

said, or I thought she said.

I was about to ask her about her statement when she gave me her sign I was to keep silent-this was done with a certain movement with her

wedding finger, though she had never been married, which movement meant you heard exactly what I said, you understood it, and so silence!

"There are certain things, Eneas, one does not tell other people, but I

telling this boy all of them. You see, there must be destiny. Just when day, someone comes, or death comes.

Instead of death he came. And you do not begrudge me my happiness, Eneas. It is all more than I hoped for. But to be able to tell all that one thought one would never tell even to oneself! My fortune is too good.

This destiny, I call it, which brought him to me must be jealous it has given me too much. Nobody gets too much in this existence, the planners am

we think we cannot go on another

above see to that

...

Now, Eneas, you must carry him up to our bed."

She sat grinning admiration as I slung him over my back and took him above.

When people ask me if I knew Clarence Skegg, I realize despite the

frequency of the question being put that a blank look must come over my face. Even when he was a young chap he was already Maynard Ewing. He played theater, or "show," from the time before he went to school. With no acknowledged mother, Clarence came to accept the gossip of the townspeople that his father had driven that poor woman off to the city where she had died, and when he questioned Mr. Skegg, he changed the subject back to his only abiding topic of interest, 21

property. Even then Mr. Skegg had been always scowling, though he did not need glasses, and even then was beginning to go white in his leonine

shock of hair, and too tall to pore over ledgers, he was a bit stooped in all his great height, and his hazel eyes saw through everything but human

beings.

"Pay no mind to Mr. Skegg," Lady Bythewaite's voice reached young Clarence, cut off as they were from one another by Mr. Skegg's decree that the boy had no living mother, "you will be on the stage, Clarence, or better yet, in the movies Mark my words, my boy "

...

..

...

Mr. Skegg was to blame me for all of it," Lady Bythewaite was

speaking now into the spools. "At the time I pretended to be guiltless, wronged, even noble, but now that he lies dead in my rose garden, I can see that he was right. In death all dreams come true-where does that sentence come from? In death all We had quarrel after quarrel, Mr. Skegg and I. Our whole life was quarrel. I was, nonetheless, the acknowledged mother of his second bastard son, Owen Haskins.

Haskins had been my mother's name. Oh, at the very end Mr. Skegg ...

had made some offer to marry me

...

But I wanted my son for my own,

my very own. Besides I had seen what he had done to Clarence, amend

that to Maynard Ewing. And these two boys, called by the townsfolk

half-brothers, became playmates, but Clarence always tyrannized over Owen, and in the end was the shaper perhaps of his destiny, in malevo­ lence, in a kind of love that too frequently wore the mask of hate, and when he was unable to love himself, which was about as infrequent as

the cessation of ticking from our grandfather clock, when the mirror no

longer threw back such fetching pictures of his good looks, he

turned to his 'half-brother.' But I never knew what went on in the soul of my own boy, Owen Haskins, so eclipsed was he by the greatness of

Clarence, of Maynard Ewing, star of the silent ftlms and silver screen, and yet even then, without my having a vestige of suspicion, under the

power and influence of a much greater 'hero'

" ...

The great great-nephew lay with his head in her lap, for the reel had

only just been set in motion. The spring day was cloudless, the robins, made their woodsy background song sparrows, and little flitting wrens was she for this so-long solo singing.

22

"I was dusting the banister in my big house where the maid had shirked her duty," Lady Bythewaite spoke, and she looked toward the

fifty years later unchanged, saw the orange band of sunlight revealing the myriad dancing motes of dust like countless same banister some

stellar worlds.

"And when I go to New York, Owen, you will die of grief for not

seeing me, you know that." Maynard's or Clarence's voice was coming again from the inner room, where they had played all kinds of games together, and where their quarrel went on continuously.

"But won't I follow you to wherever you go, Clarence

"Never, poor Owen,

never

...

...

?"

You know you belong here

...

You're

meant for small towns, and countryside. We're from different stock,

after all. You favor our father more than I, I must favor my poor mother who was a whore, I'm told

Ha, I thought that would make you start, Owen! No, Owen, I will not even miss you, for my own path is to be glory, ...

you know that, I've heard you confess it to me

successful I will not let you visit me

forget

me too,

...

...

But when I am

There, don't cry so

...

You'll

Owen, for you know the country is everything to you

" ...

"You shan't crush the poor boy like this!" Lady Bythewaite entered the room where the two boys were closeted. "You have broken poor Owen's heart." She took Owen's head and held it to her breast.

"Clarence, you are very cruel. You love only yourself, but the day will come, the cold day they all refer to here in Prince's Crossing when you'll

give anything in the world to have the affection, admiration, and trust of your little brother

...

You'll find when you go out to conquer the world

what stuff it is made of!"

"Does that come from the horse's mouth, Lady Bythewaite, or did you read that somewhere in a book? I would like to remind you, apropos of

reading, that it is hard on beauty and you seem to be losing yours."

"I should slap your face for that, Clarence."

"I know just the same that when I am gone, you'll have nobody to complain about, be shocked over, nobody to criticize, except of course Mr. Skegg."

He called his father Mr. Skegg as we all did, as one would speak of a building, monument, or park. There was little father-and-son relation­ ship there, and they were separated not only by the chasm of age, but by such an all-all difference.

23

"And when I achieve the great reputation which I know I will,"

Clarence orated while Owen and Lady Bythewaite almost huddled to­

gether like persons unexpectedly caught in a blast of freezing wind, "you'll all remember how you laughed at my ambition, derided my hopes and aspirations You know I've encouraged you in all your "Oh, stop it, Clarence dreams. Haven't I gone to your father again and again, and interceded? "

And hasn't he at least listened, hasn't he sometimes softened a little ...

?"

He bit his lip.

• •

You needn't intercede again," Clarence Skegg said, "for I'm leaving

tonight on the Big Four express

" ...

I, Eneas Harmond, felt the weight of that name, the Big Four express, as if it were

capable of bearing someone away from this planet.

"Have you told your father, Clarence?"

"No, Lady Bythewaite, I have not told my father

...

Do you reckon

he'll send the authorities after me, with a little nudging from you?"

"But how will you live, Clarence! looks

...

Certainly not on your good

" ...

He gave Lady Bythewaite a look of royal disdain, contempt, indefinite

loathing.

Then perhaps to the surprise of all present, he took his brother in his arms, kissed him, hugged Lady Bythewaite, covered her with kisses, and was gone forever from Prince's Crossing as Clarence Skegg. For even when he was to return, when destiny had tired of him as the great silent film star, he returned even in that chilled changed aspect not as our Clarence but as Maynard Ewing.

And so he died to us, and poor Owen nearly died. Hero worship is one of life's miserable calamities, especially when the hero, as is nearly always the case, is steeped in cruelty.

"No, Owen, my precious, you won't get over Clarence leaving you for a while

yet, for I know what a large place he occupied in your heart

" ...

Lady Bythewaite thus comforted her illegitimate son, just as she had in his last lonely insane years comforted "the old maggot," Mr. Skegg. She 24

went on: "I know it must seem he has blotted out the rest oflife for you,

and that is why

...

"But Owen was not listening, or she thought because

of the motionlessness of his eyes and mouth he was not listening, but she went on anyhow: "When you love somebody, as you loved your brother,

you think nobody else will come to fill the void. But my dear son," she put her hand ever so gingerly on his coat sleeve, "if you keep yourself

open to life, somebody else will come, somebody, I know, already wants to fill his place." Owen turned away, and a kind of snort came from his

nostrils, and moving he dislodged her hand from his sleeve, but she went

get over any grief, Owen, you will discover no wound ever But there are distractions, you see, until Owen had stood up, his eyes flashing, she faltered, she saw she was then no longer talking to a boy, and for the first time she felt fear in his presence.

on. "We never

really heals

"

...

...

The great great-nephew and Eneas started up at that look on her face.

An expression of terror had wandered into her voice with her last words.

"Until what, Lady Bythewaite?" Eneas exclaimed.

Then as if the spool had been put on properly again, her voice con­

tinued: "I comforted Owen Haskins, but he did not want comfort. He was

hopelessly attached to his brother. The world was a wilderness with­

out Clarence

...

But I could never send this half-formed young man, of

barely fifteen, to the wilds of a metropolis, for I knew Clarence would not properly guide or protect him, would in his old self-loving and offhand way push him in some wrong direction Perhaps I was wrong. Owen was, however, so much more handsome and manly looking than Clarence. But of course he did not know it, and Mr. Skegg and Clarence and Prince's Crossing, and I, too, had all hurt him, not because we all reminded him he was a bastard by our very existence and proximity-people hardly knew he was, and they were afraid of me and my buggy whip, afraid of my money which I had dragged from the bowels of this system by sharp investment, no, I think now Owen came scarred from his Maker Had he been born of royal and married ...

...

parents, and I believe sometimes he was, he would have come with a

damaged destiny

...

Whether I loved him or hurt him, whether his

brother loved him or corrupted and neglected him, my son, my only

acknowledged son was damaged

...

I could only stand and watch him

drown, I was tied to a window far above where he struggled in the waters 2S

of the lake

...

I called until my voice was a shred, a scratch like a nail

over a slate:

Owen, Owen, Owen, don't let him hurt you, don't pulled over to Don't go to New York. He'll kill you, give yourself suffering Owen He's made of different stuff, he's only your half-brother in ...

...

truth, if not in fact."

As if sensing some danger that the dead Clarence was about to enter and claim her dead son Owen. she had commanded me, Eneas, to go to

the front of the "great property" and set up the seldom closed gates, of which there were three principal pairs, never used: a heavy gate which closed the estate from the road; and a few rods nearer the house another

gate, not used in many years, which groaned and resisted and squeaked as I shut it; and finally an enormous iron bar of a thing which could be brought against the palatial white door, but which until now I had for­ gotten ever existed.

"We must not be disturbed." She smiled. I must say that Lady

Bythewaite almost never smiled. She saw that I was aware of this as soon as her lips had softened at me, and she looked up abruptly then, as if she already had thought better of wasting such an expression on me. I should say that the muscles around her mouth, though she still had her own teeth, seemed to be incapable of anything but speech and com­ mands, the lips, that is, were lifted only in utterance, never in expres­ sion, and her voice itself, which in England had been called true gold, had a distant and expressionless but extremely meaningful cadence, but was all the same a voice coming from an incalculable distance. and, I always thought, beyond sadness.

"We must never be disturbed again by the outside, Eneas, she said ,.

so low that I wondered if I had not

own

imaginings, I mean

put the words in her mouth, in my

.

'There must be some other boy your own age you can know, Owen, Someone who can go now that he has abandoned us for New York .

...

horseback riding with you

" ...

But her mind was on Clarence almost more than on Owen. She could not believe that a young man like Clarence, of such powerful

infl uence on the lives of all of them, a boy of such boundless energy, who into great animation and hilarity, who, she once turned any gathering

26

had quipped, had he walked through a cemetery would have evoked from the tombs some sort of whispering half-response. Without him, the great house was full of echoes, the countryside, the pasture behind

the house still and peevish, the sunrise, sundown more pallid, and Owen

dumfounded, stunned, almost imbecilic.

"Clarence has gone to attempt the most difficult thing in the wide

world," she told her son. "A raw country boy going to New York to be on the stage, or

" ...

"The movies," Owen corrected his mother.

"More difficult yet over

...

You see, Owen," and here a rush of hope came

her, "he'll be back by Christmas! An apple never rolls very far from

where it falls. Your brother will be back, and settle down, and we'll all be

happy again

...

You mark my words."

"This is your doing!" A cryptlike voice had come into the room, as she had sat at her spinet desk, in that long-ago, following with sore eyes a

huge column of figures. She had trained herself, in fear of men, to be brilliant with mathematics, and in fear of ruin, the poor house, being parted from Owen, she had outstripped her male competitors, and, some

said, herself.

"You have the raw nerve entering my house unannounced!" She

spoke with a contempt which would have cut down anybody but the person who had entered her home, Mr. Skegg.

Mr. Skegg was believed to have never been worsted by any adversary in his life. Lady Bythewaite had been no exception. But she defied, some would have said defined, his assaults on her. He had tried every strata­ gem and ruse to beat her to her knees. He had, as mad people are said to do, plotted hourly against her, digging if not her grave, a pit into which, once fallen, she would only emerge with his help and then face prison for life, prison in his custody.

"From the beginning," Mr. Skeggwent on, while seating himself at a small marble-topped table on which sat a winged figure of some god, and which he touched gingerly as if with ineffable loathing, "you've I believe his expulsion from filled Clarence's head with stardust West Point was owing entirely to the kind of letters which you habitually wrote to him. Letters that would unman any boy. You've always acted ...

27

not only like his mother but his sweetheart. And now you've driven him

away

...

But he will fail, Lady Bythewaite, and will return and follow the

path that I have with so much pains cut out for him

" ...

A bit cowed by his fury, stung even more that he spoke about Clarence's coming fail ure almost in her words, she paused longer than she was accustomed to in the course of their battles, and then cried: "No path Clarence follows could bring him to more wretchedness

than the one you have cut out for yourself. There is not a comfortable hour in your day or night. Your only friends are bankers, and they loathe you, being after all men

fromyou

...

As to my having plotted to drive your son

" ...

At this moment in the fray, Owen Haskins entered the room.

Mr. Skegg deliberately now rose, so in contrast with his usual

etiquette with respect to Lady Bythewaite's son. "The very fellow I've been hunting all over for! Owen, Owen, I never thought I would have the good fortune to find you in. You're always scouring the countryside on your horse, I observe, always in and out of doors, and of late, I notice in close company with Aiken Cusworth

" ...

Here Lady Bythewaite looked straight at Owen with a hard inter­

rogatory light in her eye.

"I'll be brief with you, my boy," Mr. Skegg almost shouted. "I've come to take you home with me

" ...

Lady Bythewaite's splendid laughter rushed through the room, the house indeed, and in effect rendered his speech, his invitation, something never uttered, and Mr. Skegg as somebody who had not only today, but never existed.

"00 you hear, Owen?" Mr. Skegg shouted still louder, nettled and turning red at her laughter.

"Give Mr. Skegg the answer, Owen," Lady Bythewaite gave out one of her great whispers.

Mother?" the boy got out after a long, painful"I am to leave never called

...

for her-intermission.

"You would not be leaving her, Owen. That would not be possible in I real sense. You would be coming with me to learn the business

any

...

have been deserted, abandoned by my former son." Even Lady Bythe­

waite's physiognomy moved a bit under the phrasing of his last sentence.

28

"I believe," Owen began babbling, "that is, I don't believe

...

Oh, no,

sir, no!" he suddenly got out, and rushed past Mr. Skegg to the shelter of the dormer window, and stood looking out at the pasture land there.

"Do you hear that no, Mr. Skegg?" Lady Bythewaite had risen,

having made her no thunder so much louder than Owen's.

"You ruined one son, Mr. Skegg," she continued, going up to within a few inches of the old maggot. "And once he escaped your clutches, you come immediately skulking about for mine And now her laughter knew no control, and might have known no cessation until she began violently to cough, and Owen springing from the dormer window helped her to the ottoman, looking down on her, both with great relief, doubtless at her having rescued him from Mr. Skegg, and also with great deepening worry at her paroxysm.

Mr. Skegg had picked up his hat, and had begun his progress through the long expanse of the drawing room, but at the very end of his journey there, her coughing having subsided enough for the sound of a voice to be heard, he looked back at the pair and shouted: "You'll change your mind one day, Owen, for you're not after all as mad as Lady Bythewaite!

Meanwhile the doors of my house and business are open to you!" "

...

"I want you to tell me that he is not my father," Owen began after Mr.

Skegg had slammed the two huge front doors, causing all the window panes to clatter and the great clock in the hallway to wheeze and tinkle.

Lady Bythewaite had picked up a Swiss paperweight whose miniature snowstorm, beginning to rage within its glass confines by her touch, she professed to study.

"Swear to me," he intoned, taking her right hand, "that as you are my mother, he is not my father. I will not have him be my father!"

"Oh, Owen, precious, we have been over this before. You are growing into a man. Soon other unwelcome knowledge will have to be yours. You are going to find out, sweetheart, that the world is based on a great foundation of horror. He is your father. I am sure you are not going to

blame me all over again. And I'm sorry I cannot pick out a father who is

exacting tastes. I don't know where your sensitivity, your highly developed aesthetic inclinations come from. I stand in amazement of you, Owen. Perhaps when you think how you more suitable to your very

29

hate your father, you can think of how much you love your brother,

Clarence. and Clarence means less kindly toward you than Mr. Skegg. I wish you would reflect on this from time to time."

Owen let loose of her hand, and bit his lip vehemently. She put her hand to his mouth, and shook her head.

"Don't refuse benefits when they are kindly meant," she advised him.

"That has been one of my faults."

"I'm grateful to you nonetheless for not having married my father,"

Owen said with truthfulness. "I am also a little vain of the reputation it has brought me in Prince's Crossing. But I would be freer still if

" ...

"If you would only give up your brother!" She let the sentence come in a voice so much like Owen's that an observer

might have thought it had

issued from the boy's lips.

"There you're at that again!" he turned suddenly on her but without as much of his former violence.

"I only meant, Owen, you mustn't let your whole world be wrapped up

in a

...

Oarence

able boy, who

...

He's a very cruel, selfish, and I'm afraid ungovern­

" ...

To his considerable surprise some tears came down her cheek.

"I do believe," she went on, after taking a kind of deep swallow, and

hesitating again while he put his hand now to her lips, whether as an angry car-ess, or a warning not to go on with her line of thought, "I do believe, Owen, that he would willingly sacrifice all our lives to have his fame and glory be known to the world Oh, my dearest, pray try to he finer are so much than is, more capable, with a better forget him. You brain. You are even better looking than he if you only only what?"

"Well, if you, say, looked the part."

They both laughed I mean," she went on, "if you believed in your own gifts, didn't look ...

"

...

"

...

.

..

"

apologetic at the world Owen caught a glimpse of himself in the huge hall mirror ...

.

I know I will lose you because you will grow up, are already growing lose you to him. Don't you see, though he up. But, Owen, I don't want to loves you as much as he can, he loves himself so much more, loves his own image. He can't give you what you need, and he might give you ..

something you'll never be rid of 30

" ...

"Why, Mother, you talk as if he was the devil with horns, pitchfork, tail, and so forth

..

;"

"I wish he was as harmless!" Lady Bythewaite stood up, and folded her arms. "And I know I'm doing all the wrong things by warning you,

telling you not to. Well, I never did anything, I don't suppose, right.

Who does? But I know Clarence. Know him as if he were as legally mine as Mr. Skegg's. Know him better because, thank God, I don't have to blame myself any more for him Maybe I've even helped him!" ...

"Well, he loves you the most," Owen said bitterly.

"He thinks he does," she corrected him. "When he finds somebody in New York more to his definition of grandeur, do you think he'll remember me or

...

?" She stopped short.

"All right, all right," Owen retorted. "I'll stay and be a farmer and And here to end our pitch manure along with Aiken Cusworth! confab is somebody coming up the walk for you, Lady Bythewaite He spoke in the playacting tones of Clarence Skegg, who treated his mother with the royal etiquette he supposed was conferred on crowned ...

"

...

heads.

At church, at the general store, at the post office, and in front of the bandstand where a group of elderly musicians played hymns and musical comedy favorites, Mr. Skegg told everybody he had lost his boy

through Lady Bythewaite's turning his head "by reason and example of her own days in the theater." Clarence had run off without a cent in his pocket, or a realizable dime to his name, etc., and Mr. Skegg would see him dead before he helped him. He then lengthily listed to whoever would bend an ear the boy's misdemeanors, his having been expelled from West Point, the long private terrible letter from Clarence's captain in that wonderful institution (Clarence' s uniform still hung in camphor squares in Mr. Skegg's own private closet bedroom), his drinking, etc.

Still stung by his being rejected by Owen, Mr. Skegg had gone home to issue a "summons" to the real source of his "rejection," Lady Bythewaite.

Indeed the person coming up the walk who had interrupted Lady Bythewaite and her own illegitimate son's confab was, in the termin­ ology of Prince's Crossing, the "bread boy," Aiken Cusworth, who, though it is true he delivered a few loaves of bread for a few isolated farmers from his horse and cart, was primarily Lady Bythewaite's 31

"horse tender" and" groom,"

being in daily attendance on, and care of,

the twenty or so splendid horses in her pasture land; along with the

delivery of bread from his cart, he was known to fetch messages, usually, as was the case today, from Mr. Skegg, who depended on Aiken almost as much as did Lady Bythewaite. Aiken held in his thick, heavy, but well-formed fingers one of those sealed great envelopes immediately recognized by all inhabitants of Prince's Crossing as a "summons" from the old maggot. How many farmers and small businessmen had felt their hearts sink when they were handed a "document" emanating from Mr. Skegg! It meant foreclosure, revocation of a loan, or something

equally catastrophic ..

.

Aiken. you will wait a moment, please," Lady Bythewaite addressed

the "bread boy," receiving from his brown and stained hands the docu­ ment. "There may be an answer wanted to this. We all know of course

who it is from

" ...

Only she defied the maggot. Only she could have opened the letter from a man who owned county after county surrounding them, of farms and great houses, pasture land, lakes, and mountains.

She read aloud, perhaps not only to show she was fearless and had

naught but contempt for Mr. Skegg, but to make his message to her contemptible and picayune.

It Is you and you alone who have taken aarence from me. I have therefore decided that unless you can persuade him to return immediately, a certain note which I bold with your

sIgnature, and which is past due wiD be presented for payment

•••

Mr.Skegg

"There is no such note!" In saying this, she crumpled the letter, or

document, and pressed it into the hand of a somewhat astonished Aiken Cusworth, who was not accustomed to have Lady Bythewaite touch his said within his person, owing to his being, as she herself had once animal manure, but of earth and earshot, forever covered with the stains ranted and raved, her eyes were actually for the while

Lady Bythewaite

first time resting in full earnest on the "bread boy" and she suddenly realized that he was much too attractive and dignified to be a menial.

Furthermore, it was on this occasion that she saw for the first time that she had underestimated his intelligence, for he showed by his smiles and

suppressed chuckles that he had found something humorous both 32

in her

dramatic reading of the letter and in the maggot's peremptory wording of his "decree" or "edict," which things Aiken had read about in World

History.

"My reply, Aiken, will be as follows," Lady Bythewaite had begun.

"Mother, must you dictate a private message like this before others?"

Owen implored her. He had blushed a deep scarlet, looking from Aiken to his mother, but on hearing his words, Aiken Cusworth too colored, and gave Owen a look of flashing indignation.

But Lady Bythewaite appeared not to have even heard Owen or be aware of his not wanting Aiken to be privy to their secrets. She was walking up and down the big parlor, and the "bread boy" had taken out a small ledger from his hip pocket, and a stump of pencil, waiting for her answer.

"Owen, if you are ashamed of your mother, and you have every reason, I suppose, to be, leave the room until Aiken has marched off

with his reply, for he is not ashamed of me

...

Aiken is not others, as you

call him! Remember that! Say this, Aiken": If I have inspired anyone to be free, and to do as his own talent bids him do, I plead guilty.

Let those who have failed as fathers and men and husbands sit alone in their

countinghouses and meditate on their own shortcomings and especiaUy on the fact that no willingly attend their approaching funeral.

one will

Lady Bythewaite

Aiken Cusworth gave a kind of grunt of satisfaction on getting this down in his ledger, and hurried off with his "reply," fearful perhaps

that she might change her mind, as she had in times past, and recall

him, substituting a dilute rejoinder for this more acerbic one.

"Confiding your secrets to the 'bread boy,'

"

Owen said, shaking his

head.

"As if you had not confided quite a few secrets to him yourself!" Lady

Bythewaite, stung, retorted. Then seeing something on her son's face which bespoke some trouble she did not quite fathom, she went on:

"There are no secrets in Prince's Crossing. I've found, as a woman of my

peculiar position, that it is much better to say it all in public oneself, and strip everybody of the sh-sh of later gossip. I am what I am, have de­ clared my faults for all to hear, and nobody has been led to believe I am anything but myself. Let the preacher's wife and the superintendent of 33

the Sunday school tremble under the bedclothes at what the town will discover later on. I have been whipped and branded, but can walk the

pavements with my head up. And thank God, Clarence has escaped

" ...

A kind of sob escaped from her, and she took Owen's hands in hers ..

.

But oh, do you think he will be able to stay there?" she wondered as if

alone. "For he's a mere boy himself, and

imagine him going on the stage

or into the movies."

Then the thought of Clarence's peril was so overwhelming she

dropped Owen's hands, and sat down on the ottoman with a heavy plop.

In her distress she almost felt she could hear the sound of his bones

being crunched, his skull laid open, his limbs severed and bleeding.

"Only I know what he will be going through," she mumbled. "I went through it all myself. But in some ways a woman is better prepared for the world than a boy Owen could only study his mother's face in a kind of admiring con­ "

...

fusion.

A few days later she was polishing her silverware in a kind of desper­ ate diligent manner under the imperfect illumination of an ancient

floor lamp, and Owen, his knees covered with caked mud and his face and brow scratched from where he had been climbing the hills and bush of the neighboring countryside, sat in one of his characteristic

dejected poses, his fingers covering his eyelids gently. Lady Bythewaite smiled bitterly, tossing a great gleaming fork aside, noting that Owen's habit of touching his eyelids was also that of Mr. Skegg, his natural father. So there is something in heredity, she opined, since the two never spent more than an hour together.

A crumpled letter lay near the pile of polished silverware. She had crumpled it, for it was from Clarence, begging her to allow Owen to follow him.

Ifyou go, Owen. she had warned him, I will send the sheriff afteryou.

Stirred by this impudent letter, in her vehemence, she rose from her task of polishing, she seized hold of Owen, and slapped him vigorously.

This slap roused Owen for almost the first time from the deep sleep­ like expression which he almost always wore. He looked about him

brightly, like one who sees for the first time where he has been absent­ mindedly dwelling.

34

"You feel very strong aboutthis, Mother."

"Don't call me Mother. I am nobody's Mother

...

Do you know that

your brother Clarence tried to make love to me?"

"Well, must you go on about it?" he flashed back at her.

She shook him now again. "Clarence never had any mercy on me!"

She had turned away from Owen and spoke again as if by herself in her "

complete my shame, I have a mind "And did you allow him to do sol" Owen had suddenly leaped up, and his moody menace almost cowed her a little. own room. "He wanted to

...

"He will use you to ease his loneliness, Clarence will," she went on, "in order to feel he has not lost all the scenes from familiar life and gentle affection. And then when he towers in glory, for, Owen, he will be

successful, I am sure of this now, you will be destroyed by him. He nourishes only poison for all of us

" ...

At the same time, despite her outcries, there was an unspoken under­

standing that Owen would go, that he was expected to go, that it was in the cards and so no one could prevent it, that Mr. Skegg and Lady Bythewaite had already been apprised of his comingjoumey, and merely read from hastily written "parts" their perfunctory, if angry, objections. For consider the background: these two boys, one a bastard, the other an heir, had never been separated. They had quarreled viciously, injuring one another, but their lives were certainly knit together in some unfathomable way.

The suggestion, the "news" that Clarence had made love to his mother did not change Owen's feelings toward either Lady Bythewaite or his brother in any fundamental way, though he mooned over it now­ if indeed she had told the truth! What was a physical act in any case between Clarence and a mere woman, compared to the obsession the boys had with one another, their quaking fear ofloneliness if the other one was absent, or not writing letters. And how many times in the past had not Aiken Cusworth carried letters from Owen to his brother when the latter was ill with some real or imaginary ailment, and kept to his

princely bedroom.

Now, genuinely separated, they wrote one another daily, Owen walking five miles in the mud to see the letter went out on the Big Four train, which now in the midst of these meditations of his, and at this 3S

precise moment, let out its iron wail of grief and crazy, beckoning invitation.

And so Lady Bythewaite began going over all his clothes, having his shoes resoled and reheeled, mending his shirts, and purchased him some new cravats from a mail-order house.

"The City is terrible." she would go on, speaking to him from under

the floor lamp on the succeeding evenings. "London is a horror, and New York will surely be worse. Everyone goes wrong, Owen, when he is away from his roots

...

You have everything here," she spoke with

furious patriotism and added, almost whispering, the conclusion, "

"except of course a father "Well, let him go and be damned!" she cried to herself later in her bedroom. She saw him already dead, in his coffin. Her hand trembled, ...

her eye could not see the needle she held in her shaking fingers. She must let Owen go, or expire herself.

"Clarence's whole hankering after the theater has one and only one

you!" Mr. Skegg had begun his "process" against Lady Bythe­ waite, a few weeks after Clarence's departure, in his cathedral-huge study, where he had summoned her peremptorily. Actually, she had ignored this summons, and had gone to his mammoth study solely on a mission of her own: to intercede with Mr. Skegg to prevent Owen from following after his brother, and she had come only to find that Mr. Skegg had decided on his own to send the younger boy after his actor­

source:

brother in order to' 'fetch the runaway home"!

"You'd throw one person into the quicksand head first to bring up

another who is settling toward the bottom!" she opined, forgetting in her anger the bad picture she was painting of Clarence's plight. "And

why, may I ask, do you have this sudden impetus to send Owen after Clarence, when it is I, according to you, who am so subject to brain­ You know something storms? You must be in receipt of special news ....

I don't know!" she finished, nettled that this should be so, for she had

always prided herself on knowing everything about her sons. while Mr. Skegg remained in some outer sphere, where only incidental intelligence was accorded him. And from as far back as she could

remember, she

had always wanted Mr. Skeggto know nothing about the two boys until

she was prepared to let such information "go."

36

"Would you have the kindness to read this newspaper account .....

Mr. Skegg proffered her a cutting.

She blushed. She could not read the newspaper without her glasses,

always mislaid, for she had long tried to pretend she did not need glasses, loathed having to wear them because they spoiled her good looks, and so now, without them, she began peering and straining at the little black characters of print.

Mr. Skegg smiled with superior satisfaction. "I will "Very well He proceeded with: read what it says, proud darling "

...

"

...

Mr. Clarence Skegg, wbo made sucb a sensational debut in tbe Broadway play Cyclone, has just signed up to take thejuvenUe lead in the hlgh-budget fflm Out of the West. He

wUI begin at that time to use the name Maynard Ewing. A splendid career is seen for the young actor, who has already won a huge foUowlng.

Mr. Skegg went on reading from the newspaper, though he was now

into other information not directly connected with his son, when sud­

denly looking up he saw, more to his incredulity than concern, that Lady Bythewaite had slumped down in the chair, as if she might slip any moment to the floor. He summoned the maid, and they brought her "to," with whiskey and bathing her temples with cold compresses.

"Go ahead with that damned newspaper," she got out after a some­ what puzzled look around her.

He put the cutting away in his breast pocket.

"You have never deceived me, Lady Bythewaite, as much as you pride yourself on thinking."

"Very well, then, I am jealous." She took now a mere drop from the glass of whiskey and let her head fall back against the chair.

"Jealous! I never heard of anybody fainting from jealousy. Mr. Skegg stared at her. He had assumed his most magisterial bearing, and she could only bring to mind that among his other callings there had been that of an attorney. "Long ago," his severe tone now reached her, "you had the thought that your two sons would never leave you, that they "

would be satisfied with you and you alone about them and near them, and so on and so forth. Why underline the obvious?

...

But one has left,

and the other will follow unless the first is not brought back!"

••

And so you wish to run the risk of losing both of them by sending

Owen after Clarence!"

"That is my plan," he had to admit, though she had spoiled the effect 37

he had hoped to make by a more

gradual approach to his secret­

sending Owen.

Lady Bythewaite stood up, and put down the whiskey not even half consumed. She tucked back a large hairpin in her raven hair.

"Owen as a messenger, or policeman, truant officer for Clarence Skegg! Good God Almighty, Mr. Skeggl" She laughed, and it was her kind oflaugh that always set his teeth on edge. Anger had brought back the color to her cheeks. She picked up the newspaper from which the cutting had been excised, and almost clawed at it, giving it an accusatory look of having ruined her.

But Mr. Skegg had been talking, or, as she now began to listen, raving! "He will either use his own name, or I will disinherit him. I will allow him to be in the films, but he must use his own name."

Yes, even Lady Bythewaite was astounded.

"You once told me that you had a better estimation of a common

pickpocket than a motion picture actor your name

...

...

Now you demand that he use

Don't you think he may have changed his name to spare

you?"

"When did he ever spare me?" Mr. Skegg wondered.

She paced up and down the room. It was he now who looked ashen and faint .•

.

I refuse to allow Owen to go," she said. "And I think your son

Clarence absolutely right in changing his name

" ...

"He will fail," the old man was almost muttering. "He will be home.

When he is ruined there, as he will be-e-don't you know I know how weak he is?-he will be back. But ifhecomes back he will come as a beggar and then he will have to use his new name, for I will have disinherited him

...

I will give Owen a thousand dollars to go to New York, enough to

set him up in his own business here when he is a man in a few years.

Clarence, besides, will listen to Owen

" ...

"You must have taken entire leave of your senses. You can do so well in figures, Mr. Skegg, but you are the complete idiot when you deal with

the first element of human nature

" ...

Nora Bythewaite, who had been looking at the westering sun, scarcely

blinked all the time Mr. Skegg was telling her that Owen would follow 38

Oarence, but when she had got out into the soft April twilight she could

barely see=indeed what was the point of seeing, she thought. She who had passed for worldly wise, sensible, sharp, clever, a match for any man, brave, indomitable, fierce, manlike in her strength, persevering -and one could fill up her ledger with the praise a hating world had bestowed upon her. There were thus two women, a Lady Bythewaite, who answered to the above description, and Nora Bythewaite, who loved only her sons and who in her dream of life had never thought they would leave, or that she would grow old. It had seemed to her from the day Oarence kneeled in front of her and took her hand and pressed it against his cheek, and the time that Owen as a small boy had begged her never to desert him and go back to London, she had fallen, like any silly Prince's Crossing farm girl, into an illusion which she took for genuine coin. She broke off a branch of a tree, and tapped her way home. In those days hardly a car passed one on the road, there were a few buggies, almost no pedestrians, but Aiken Cusworth, who was going homeward in his "bread van," spotted her, and stopped his horse. ?"

"Lady Bythewaite, what's amiss 'You can ask that again till your mouth is dry." She looked into the ...

,

direction from where the voice came. "I think the Lord has stricken me at last, Aiken

" ...

She pointed to her eyes.

He helped her into his cart.

"And when are you leaving home?" she addressed the young horse tender savagely, so that he came near to dropping the reins.

"Answer me," she pursued her question, her eyesight beginning to come back now as

they drove past sycamores and elms and fresh black

fields that would be corn.

"And where would one like me go to, Lady Bythewaite?" he mumbled in reply.

"Oarence has gone," she sobbed angrily, "and now Owen has been hired to follow him, by orders of that gilded

Bythewaite employed

a word so

" ...

And here Lady

obscene, though Aiken had never heard

the word before, but like many words it was imprinted on his soul so that

hearing it for the first time he knew its full meaning, knew that no lady would say it unless driven to distraction and lunacy, and the reins fell to his feet 39

...

"Won't you stop him, though?" he wondered, regaining the reins and

driving on again now.

"With what will I stop him? My rifle?"

Fully clear-eyed, after her vision having been clouded on leaving the old maggot's house, she Jumped from the van now before it had properly

stopped •.

.

I 'u be very surprised, Aiken, if I don't hear you're leaving within the

week! These leavetakings are contagious, you know." She cried goodbye to him.

He watched her run and disappear. He spat to the other side of the road as he said gee-up.

But Lady Bythewaite had turned back to watch the horse tender's van turn presently into the road that led to Wolf Stretch. She stood a long

time watching after the disappeared wagon.

So she was just like any other woman after all, so went her cogitations,

except that, like many smart people, she was in the end easier to trip, and fell harder when she did fall. So she was a fool, the way God, it was said, meant women to be, and her own circumstances were common as dirt, for like all women from the dawn of time she was thinking of one or ones who had gone away, would never be

back, or if they did come back

would have only so much of their time or their person to tantalize one,

making the second coming more a sickness than their going away in the first place, and the screams of the Big Four which tormented all the landscape now for miles round and about tore at her like some steel claw. Waiting for its demon voice to subside, she held on to the stone post which marked the boundary of her "estate," then sidled past it and, turning to the great high gate, closed it viciously, hearing it bang shut against the road, and against, it seemed, all other human habitations.

But she stood by the gate, the words from her monologue being fed back to her again. Since the beginning of time, the words went on, there have always been journeys of young men to cities of destruction, while someone waited helpless and wrung her hands-it was never his hands, she felt sure. She had thought up till now she was different, and would be able to rearrange the ancient pattern. She had never doubted this,

and now her eyes smarted from some disease she feared she had had from her father, and let out great thick tears like pieces of rock salt.

40

Then a slight ray of hope and pathetic optimism broke to shine for her. She could count on Owen's hating to get up in the morning, and

thus missing the train, which left at four A.M. from a desolate junction ten miles west of here. She would see that he never made that train, no matter how many mornings dog- faithful Aiken Cusworth stopped to

pick him up in his van.

"And what will they say, Owen, when they see you in New York?" she spoke to the moving shadows of the coming night. "That you look like you had just left the plow?"

Each morning, then, Aiken and his van came to fetch Owen and take him to the junction. I say each morning because do what they would,

they could not wake him between three and four of a morning. They slapped his cheeks, rumpled his hair, pulled his toes, to no avail, he slept on, driveling and whining faintly in his slumber like a newborn.

"Oh, let us give up, Aiken!" Lady Bythewaite announced in triumph on the last attempt, a frosty bitter morning in April.

Aiken, to her considerable regret, suggested that Owen and she and himself stay up all night, that the boy never approach his bed or take off his clothes, but sit by the grandfather clock which, wheezing in its extreme antiquity, would keep the heaviest slumberer conscious.

Flashing a look of malevolence at the bread boy for this inspiration, Lady Bythewaite could only say she would "see," and turned her attention to Owen, who that day had received an unusually peremptory letter from his brother Clarence, which Lady Bythewaite had stolen a peek at and which said merely H you don't come witbin the week, your place will be filled by somebody more devoted, and I will be through with you forever. Your formerly loving

Clarence

"He and the Pope!" Lady Bythewaite snorted. "Well, Owen," she

began-glowering, however, in the direction of Aiken, "you've heard what resourceful bright Mr. Cusworth has thought up for you, and as I have nothing to do tonight but go through some old ledgers, we will all

sit up together, and then if the improbable should come to pass, you and I and Aiken will go catch you the fast train

" ...

Owen gulped and nodded. She looked away. This time she would not be herself, would allow him to depart. She would be, that is, somebody 41

who never was. Well, in any case, Owen would be back, and she

began to

whistle. which startled the two young men. She had not whistled since London.

A night of pure heavenly beauty with every star and planet revealing its splendor was above them as the van drove up, and mother and son seated themselves inside. At the very last, she pushed a luncheon basket into Owen's hands, ample enough in its provisions to feed four men.

Even at this late moment, in their parting, she had hoped

against hope

that as the trainman swung his red lantern, Owen, who had never been on a train

before, would lose heart, and that the ferocity of the great

wheels. the steam, the unearthly cries heard now directly from the iron monster, the black smoke and stench would strike it into his mind for­ ever that he

belonged with his boots here in the mud, and, if not with Oarence-and her eye roved then toward the horse tender-yes, with Aiken Cusworth.

But Owen had got on the train. And then she saw him waving his blue

handkerchief to her, and then she knew nothing until Aiken was

rubbing her wrists with one hand and holding the smelling bottle to her nostrils with the other. She was indeed lying in Aiken's own ramshackle house, presided over by an elderly housekeeper, who watched her and Aiken with helpless awe from a great rocking chair.

"He'll never be back," Lady Bythewaite was saying, "and if he does come

back, he'll

" ...

But from her nose came a thin stream of blood, which restored her

brain to clarity. She offered to stand up, but both Aiken and the old woman, who had left her chair, commanded her to be still, in combined

voices so stern and emphatic that she was carried back to many years

before in England, and her mother's sorrow over her own disobedient heart.

Then from the back of her throat she uttered one solitary incompre­

hensible word like that of a raven. Then silence. Strive as he would, Aiken Cusworth could not get her to pronounce the word again.

"What is this I hear, that Lady Bythewaite has suffered a 'mild

stroke'?" Mr. Skegg was cross-examining Aiken, who had entered the great front room of the old maggot's mansion without properly wiping 42

his feet, for he had been "summoned" like so many countless others

before him and, being summoned, he had come with not only his feet in

filthy condition but his trousers and shirt put on in such haste, he stood squirming before his interlocutor like one caught in a variety of compromising positions.

"Yes, 1 do believe she has had one!" Aiken managed to get out this number of words in response to Mr. Skegg's renewed demand for a

information.

The maggot was walking fast about the room, very much like a

trapped-well, Aiken could not remember now in his mental confusion what the animal had been he had trapped some years ago, for he was not only in a state of confusion owing to Mr. Skegg's cross-examining of him about Lady Bythewaite's stroke (her copious nosebleed had saved her from death, the doctor, finally summoned with the greatest diffi­ culty from twenty-five miles away, had said), he was thinking endlessly of the words she had used to describe the person of Mr. Skegg.

"I suppose she continues to blame me for having sent away her son Owen

" ...

"Your son too," Aiken muttered inaudibly, whilst placing his hand on the back of his trousers and

attempting to adjust their faIling

condition.

"Now, then," Mr. Skeggwas aboutto go on when he saw Aiken ad­

justing his clothing. The old man looked away confounded, then with his usual magisterial pomposity went on. "Has her stroke, 1 say, impaired any of her many faculties?"

Mr. Skegg had put this question with the anger, irritation, and extremely short patience of a man who wants to know the damage a recent cyclone has caused to his out-buildings.

"As she lay so sick and still, she spoke one word, a word that sounded like 'whippoorwill,'

"

Aiken, almost without being aware he did so,

spoke aloud. He had hardly gotten this statement out, and seen the effect of it on the astounded countenance of the old man, when his trousers fell with the rapidity of a curtain to his big soiled boots.

"Aiken, do you mean to tell me you came here dead drunk, when 1 summoned you?"

Aiken was too astounded to pick up his trousers, but stood as immo­

bilized as one caught in an unusually ingenious net.

43

"Will you dress yourself, sir!" Mr. Skegg's anger began to take pre­ cedence over his slight horror and distaste.

"This lack of attention," the old man went on, having turned his back on the horse tender while the latter

endemic to country folk

brought up his trousers, "must be

" ...

"Between your hasty summons, sir," Aiken's voice rushed against Mr. Skegg's back, "and Lady Bythewaite's need for care and attention, I have been running hither and yon ..

" ...

And so she used a strange expression with youl" The old man now

faced a properly clothed Aiken Cusworth.

"Ah, so," Aiken closed his eyes, and nodded. "lust after she had her stroke. she did indeed use a very strange word which I have never heard

anywhere before

" ...

To the horse tender's astonishment, the old man showed a decisive and lively interest in all this, resembling an attorney who, having long

since given up any hope of finding a shred of evidence to convict the person he is prosecuting, is unexpectedly handed from nowhere a damning bit of irrefutable and concrete information.

"Sit down right here, why don't you, Aiken? maid will clean up the floor from your boots, and trousers, after you've gone

...

That's all right. The your soiled

What did she say, now? What did Lady

Bythewaite say?" And lowering his voice: "Do you think she was in her right mind, by chance, also, when she said it?"

"I had never heard this word before." Aiken spoke bashfully, sitting on the chair in the manner of one who settles down into broken

glass.

The old man's eyes had brightened.

"You may tell me the word, Aiken. We are alone here, my boy." The

old maggot came near to bending over his witness, and watched the color come and go in the young man's face • ,

.

I have, sir, been trying to recall it ever since she said it." Aiken was

always too truthful to be doubted. His truthfulness was only equaled by his skill as a horseman. "But for the life of me, I can't recall the word "Can you think of maybe what it might have sounded like?" Mr.

Skegg was most patient. He patted Aiken's grimy knee.

"Ah, well, sir," Aiken spoke averting his eyes from his questioner, "it did sort of sound like whippoorwill. "

44

This statement did not please Mr. Skegg at all.

"The word," the old man began, after furrowing his brows and

digging his hands into his trouser pockets, jingling what sounded like silver dollars there, "the word which you have so conveniently forgotten -must surely be connected with whatever caused her to have her stroke, if stroke indeed it is. She has no control over her emotions!" Going back, however, to his curious preoccupation with the word, and which Aiken wished a thousand times, then and later, he had never mentioned, "I "

mean this unknown word is

probably the key to her worry "I believe it is a bad word, sir," Aiken replied to this, looking into a crack in the molding of the wall. "I do think it was."

Mr. Skegg looked dumfounded at this suspicion of the horse tender.

"A bad one, you say?" the old maggot spoke in silkily soft tones­ for fear, doubtless, he might frighten Aiken from unburdening himself ...

of the truth.

Aiken colored violently and backing down almost completely begged Mr. Skegg to consider the possibility he had not understood the word

aright from the outset, and had probably not even heard it correctly.

"A word which sounds like 'whippoorwill'," the old man went on with his cogitating and, walking over to the great bay window, he turned his back to his witness.

"A bad word that sounds like 'whippoorwill',

"

he went on

muttering and shaking his head.

Then to Aiken's complete astonishment, confusion, and even fear, Mr. Skegg, wheeling about without warning, and also without prepa­ ration, began rattling off one unprintable and indelicate word after another, many of which the horse tender himself had only barely heard pronounced in his twenty-some years of life.

"Not one ofthose words, eh?" Mr. Skegg finally cried after his cata­ logue of scurrility, and only his own intense hankering for the divulging of the word itself made him fail to notice the deep shame and embar­ rassment his spieling off so many obscenities had given to the horse tender.

Deeply disappointed, with his energy and enthusiasm for discovery spent, Mr. Skegg could only mumble: "Then you must have been mis­ taken, Aiken, my boy." The old man was severe. "If she did not use one of those words which I have pronounced here before you, then it is clear 4S

that what she said was not obscene, that is to say dirty, don't you see.

Also, bear in mind, she was in the aftermath of stroke

...

Now I know

you wouldn't deceive me, Aiken. Deceit is not in your nature. But you are, after all, dear fellow, a farmer, and horse tender to boot, and you

may be unaware, owing to your calling, that there is no word in our lan­

guage, no bad word, which sounds like 'whippoorwill,' although I want Now, Aiken, here's a silver you to think about it, as I will of course ...

dollar for your trouble

No, no, you must accept it

...

And go out the

rear door as you leave

Don't mind the mud you have deposited on and it's And don't floor, carpet quite all right and will be tended to breathe a word of this to anyone else, if you don't mind

Aiken, and much obliged to you

Good day,

" ...

To the considerable astonishment of the farmers of the neighboring

counties, Mr. Skegg was now paying them unexpected visits. Theyas­ sumed the maggot had come to purchase their farms, or try one of his many underhanded tricks to dispossess them. The rumor, however, soon spread around that he had come to talk about "words," and more

specifically to ask them, all and sundry, if they knew of a particular word which they would not allow themselves to say in front of their women folk but went something like "whippoorwill."

Mr. Skegg is said to have called on some forty farmers. This was the beginning of a serious change in his reputation. Hitherto he had been known as one of the greatest speculators in real estate throughout this part of the nation, and still, in these people's reckoning, a youngish man. But from the start of his coming to inquire about a word (which nobody had ever heard pronounced let alone mentioned or discussed) dated the true beginning of his being known as the maggot, the lonely maggot, who was no longer thought to be of sound business practice, and beyond the shadow of a doubt showed the signs of old age and his hermetic years of isolation.

Sounding like' 'whippoorwill."

Where his researches would have ended, nobody can guess had not a

somewhat serious thing happened to the maggot. At night now, farmers and tradesmen heard, passing, heartsore, terrible, muffled moans and cries coming from his great house. Since he was too stingy to sit up 46

wasting light much past bedtime, his mansion was usually an inky battlement after sundown, but now during the period when his moans and cries punctuated the night, all the lower chambers were as blazingly illuminated as if some sumptuous banquet were in progress.

Though people seemed to have forgotten that Lady Bythewaite was once human enough to have been intimate with the maggot and had become the mother of sons by him, a kind of memory of some connec­ tion between the two caused a particularly intrepid farmer to stop at her house, and report through an only half-opened door that cries and moans were constantly coming from the old speculator's mansion.

"Yes, yes," she cried, speaking in reply through a mere crack of the mammoth portal, "I have heard them, and they have heard them

certainly to the ocean's shore! Yes, 1 am alarmed. 1 live in a state of alarm

" ...

Then as the farmer began to retreat down her interminable front path across her interminable

yard, Lady Bythewaite, coming out from the

shelter of the portal, cried out to him, and the words of this cry were soon

reported in many other farmhouses: "I hope God is about to see reason and take him! Perhaps," she coughed out into the night, alarming birds in their nests and disturbing other wild life which prowled about her acres, "perhaps there may be a God indeed, and He is punishing him at last for all he has done to me and my boys!"

She saw, she fancied she saw, the farmer looking back at her from his wagon, and then she heard his whip and wheels, and he was gone with her words to tell all whom he met.

Then there stood before her the inevitable Aiken Cusworth, his horse and buggy waiting outside.

Nora Bythewaite threw on her heavy cloak, arranged a flowered hat over her dark

hair, and without even bothering to inquire of Aiken why

he had come or where they were off to, she followed him to the buggy and they drove the short distance to the house of the maggot.

"Yes, you're bad, Mr. Skegg

" ...

Lady Bythewaite laid her hand on

the forehead of the sick man. "I doubt indeed you 'II recover, but of course we can do our best for

began taking his pulse.

47

you." She shook her head dolefully, and

"What is this you've been saying to my horse tender about whippoor­ wills?" the sick man exclaimed, rising up in his bed, his mane of white hair sticking up at all angles as if lightning were passing through it.

At her first astonishment at these words, Lady Bythewaite looked no­ where in particular, and then her gaze settled down on the impassive

face of Aiken. That faithful young person was ready, she saw by his downcast eyes, to receive her accusation of revealing secrets-how many had she not crammed into him against his wishes?-but Lady Bythe­

waite only said. "Our patient is delirious, Aiken," and the horse tender breathed a sigh of relief.

"Now where do you hurt, Mr. Skegg?" She lifted the patient up sud­

denly and felt of him with rough professional reconnoitering.

Mr. Skegg, after giving her a wild look which may have conveyed fear that she had come to murder him, could get out no words in reply, and pointed instead to one of his back teeth.

"Fetch the little lamp from over there, Aiken."

Mr. Skegg was reclining on the same kind of ottoman which he was later to lie dead on, so many many years afterwards, but minus the lap robe

...

While Aiken held the kerosene lamp over the suffering man, Lady

Bythewaite looked cruelly and long into his mouth, which was not, as one might suppose, cavernous, and his lips, drawn back, showed now somewhat small and mean, as one might expect. He was in possession of all his teeth, she soon saw, despite the fact that, owing to his extreme stinginess or perhaps because of his suspicion of all other human beings, he had never paid a call to a dentist.

Waving back Aiken with the lamp, Lady Bythewaite cried in vocif­ erous triumph: "You have an abscessed tooth, Mr. Skegg."

"Won't it correct itself, Nora?" the old man asked casually, and began fastening one of his gold cufflinks which had become undone.

"Never. It's quite full of pus, and the poison is coursing through your entire system

...

Hence your delirium, and your irrational speech."

"I beg your pardon, Nora, my dear," the old man spoke respectfully .

,

.

I know perfectly well what I am saying, and know furthermore to

whom I am speaking."

"You have been talking of birds," she exclaimed with such anger and

authority he was silent, and looked away from her to Aiken for some 48

comfort, to whom he now delivered a speech quite commonly given in Prince's Crossing by nearly all its few inhabitants concerning the

anomaly that there was no doctor, or dentist, or other medical assistance for miles and miles about.

"You want me to pull this tooth, of course!" Lady Bythewaite spoke in loud ferocity like one addressing both a deaf man and idiot at the same time. She

had, without waiting for his assent, begun to roll up her

sleeves, but had forgotten she was wearing her hat, until Aiken indicated she might wish to remove it.

Then, preparatory to any surgery, she took out with great slowness and caution a small bottle from the deepest recesses of her dress. Mr.

Skegg's eyes fastened on the vial in the manner of one who had been waiting for it and it alone on all those nights he had howled, those howls which, together with his interrogations concerning an unknown word, had destroyed in effect his reputation.

"Now, Mr. Skegg, this is quite strong," she cautioned him in a wearied angry and highly edifying tone. "It is opium."

Where Lady Bythewaite had learned medicine nobody knew and indeed nobody cared any more. but all who were still among the quick and still of sound wit could recall that she had set broken legs and arms and delivered babies, in those contingencies (common) when no­ body else could be fetched. And she had pulled many a desperate person's aching tooth.

But the kind of instruments she now assembled from a little satchel, which even Aiken had not noticed she had fetched with her and which she made no motion to purify with flame or alcohol,looked even to Mr.

Skegg, settling down under the strong sip of opium, yes, a little large for a human mouth, a little dull and brown with age in the flickering kerosene light.

People talked of the screams and moans coming from the great house that night for many a revolving year to come, and if the hearers were alive now they would be talking still of it. Some of the listeners even thought that the wolves might have come down from the north again, as they occasionally did, so barely human were those cries.

When she had only half yanked his tooth out, and a swelling rivulet of pus and foul-smelling gouts of blood had, so it seemed to Aiken, un­ necessarily stained the maggot's fine cambric shirt, both the horse 49

tender and Mr. Skegg heard a voice coming from an ill-defined place, not recognizable as a woman's or indeed human being's:

"Mr. Skegg, you are to call Owen home

" ...

The voice paused. while the owner of the voice pressed the knife close to her patient's swelling jugular.

Then. closing his eyes. Mr. Skegg nodded in agreement to that voice.

"In writing. Mr. Skegg." The patient waited. eyes still closed, then he

nodded even more energetically in assent. Then she put in the forceps,

there was a suffocating scream, the tooth fell out.

"They have had the doctor to set his jaw, which was badly dislocated if not broken." Aiken was speaking, his eyes fixed on a short thick

notebook. so that he appeared to be reading to his employer, a few days after the incident of the tooth pulling, "And where under the running sun was a doctor fetched from?" Lady

Bythewaite wondered. Though she had three, perhaps four, servants in constant if almost invisible attendance on her needs, Aiken had found

her shelling peas in the parlor. He consulted his notebook of accounts

again. His delay in reading the wanted information caused her to raise her eyes; she recognized the notebook as nothing less than the ledger in which he kept his bread accounts, the cost of the oats and other feed for the horses. etc.

"A doctor was fetched from round the vicinity of Stotfold, rna' am."

"You come to me with reports of a wayward old man's having dis­

located his jaw when I am sick to death with apprehension because there is no word from New York

...

Or is there? For you, in your ceaseless

rounds in your buggy, see and know more than the sun in flight!"

"There is no word of Owen Haskins. rna' am .'

,

The sound of her son's name brought her up short. Two weeks had

passed before she had received his first postcard with the words: I'M HERE. OWEN. Over a month had passed since and there had been no additional word.

She had not been able even to give her boy a legal name, she was

musing, while Aiken stood as mute and insensible-seeming as a caryatid. Owen's name was, so to speak, invented. She had, she went on thinking, for she felt alone, invented Owen's life. She had dimly deeply so

cherished his bastardy. She had not been able to do anything for him.

And she had allowed a coarse, cunning, really insane man (maggot also, you see, meant peculiar person in the lingo of Prince's Crossing) to send her boy away. Why hadn't she stopped the train that night, yanked

Owen off it, and then gone over and burned the maggot's house to the

ground, with him in it?

"He dislocated his own jaw, Aiken!" Lady Bythewaite made this

sudden outburst, catching Aiken unprepared for it, causing him to stammer and flush. "He dislocated it because he wouldn't keep his

mouth shut and bear the pain with calm like a man

...

It's the easiest

thing in the world to dislocate one's jaw by talking too much. Remember that. And his screams! Can he, do you think, face me again, after his whimperings, squawlikeyells, and ki-yi wolf howls! A mourning dove can stand pain better than he When pain's to be endured, go study women and boys, for these strong men we have nowadays turn into mewling infants on seeing blood drawn."

But Aiken Cusworth paid no more immediate attention to her sudden unexpected cries, her tempests in which she broke expensive furniture ...

and china than he did to the peremptory commands of the maggot or, in

the more recent past, the imperious injunctions of Clarence Skegg, now

Maynard Ewing.

"Mr. Skegg has no intention of bringing back Owen, despite his pledges!" Lady Bythewaite was going on.

Mr. Skegg had become aware of the fact that he had dislocated his

jaw not after her brutal pulling of his back tooth but on the day he had got word that two of his finest farm properties had, during his illness and inattention, been purchased by Lady Bvthewaite, He had let out a great cry of vexation, and his jaw had slipped down, causing intolerable pain, or perhaps at that precise moment the opium had worn off and his jaw, dislocated during the "operation," now informed its owner of its true condition.

At any rate, he did not need this fierce physical pain to remind him of the way things were changing, or preventing him from seeing the hand­

writing on the wall, or on the barn door. He had an implacable enemy in the woman whom at first he had refused to marry and who herself, later, had refused to marry him. She had maimed him while he lay helpless, 51

and while she was tearing out his back tooth with the fury of a savage

chief, at that very moment, by bold if not underhand means, she was in the process of depriving him of some of the finest farmlands in the nation.

A few days later Mr. Skegg came to her. His jaw was bandaged, and he had lost weight, a great deal of weight. Studying his flat stomach and where his jowls had been, she calculated he had parted with twenty-five

pounds. The loss of weight did not become him because, she knew, nothing became him. From looking like a bull he had changed in ap­ pearance to resembling a mangy stag.

He removed his hat and held it over his heart, a gesture which in­

furiated her ..

.

You're not in a mortuary. Put on your headgear, you'll catch cold in

here

" ...

Despite the approach of summer, it was almost freezing in her house, always poorly heated, probably owing to her custom of stomping and stamping about so much that she needed little if any heat except that coming from her own body.

Mr. Skegg was in the act of explaining how he had tried to locate Owen Haskins in New York ..

.

I've telegraphed and even gone to the town of Stotfold to try to

telephone for information waite, of Owen Haskins

There is no trace, my dear Lady BytheI have spoken with Clarence through the

very unsatisfactory operation of long distance telephoning. He denied, however, there is such a person as Clarence Skegg, though he conde­

scended to speak with me under the name of Maynard Ewing

" ...

The hurt of his one legally recognized son's changing his name, she

genuine. His voice trembled. But Nora Bythewaite was implacable. She looked about wildly, in search, perhaps, of some chisel or pair of pliers to remove more of his white teeth.

"We will, nonetheless, continue the search for him." Mr. Skegg raised his voice now to catch her wandering attention, though the effort to increase the volume of his speech must have hurt him, for he clapped his hand to his swollen jaw.

Aiken, at a peremptory movement of Lady Bythewaite's eyes, opened the door for Mr. Skegg to take his departure. saw, was

52

"Don't come again, Mr. Skegg, until you have something to report!

And Your sorrow over having robbed me of my son is not convincing ...

jaw, beware of the contingency of blood poisoning! You are not out of the woods at all, by any measure of means."

But he had been gone only a few moments when she rushed out the door after him and pursued him down the long path to where he was seated in his new automobile, and almost pulling him away from the steering-wheel, she shouted, "Do you have any conception of how old as to your

Owen Haskins is?"

He gazed at her, used though he was to her carrying on, with a marvel

of complete disbelief at what he saw in her face.

"Tell me how old Owen Haskins is, will you?" she vociferated.

He tried to start the motor of his car, but her hand pulled his arm

toward her. "He's barely fifteen!" she informed him. "And ifhe lies in a New York mortuary, I'll charge you with murder

" ...

"Clarence is fonder of Owen than of anyone else in the world, for he

only half-loves me, I sometimes think." Lady Bythewaite was speaking in a voice which carried easily to the lake nearby her property. "But his love for Owen is destructive He is quite capable At that moment "

...

...

she saw for the first time, as if his face had been handed to her for ap­

praisal, perhaps sale, like a farm, the countenance of Aiken Cusworth.

A shiver ran through her body. She felt as embarrassed as if she had come upon him stripped. He lowered his eyes, but it was too late, he had given up his secret. He loved not only her, but all of them, she saw, even---she feared-Mr. Skegg. But certainly, oh certainly Owen Haskins, his special pride. Because, she supposed, there was nobody else to love. There is only us, she thought, and so he loves us. She had always thought, echoing Mr. Skegg, in part, that Aiken was just a clodhopper, but she saw suffused over his face, along with his crude, roughly chiseled good looks and perfect health, something deep and intuitive.

She must be more careful, she must not hurt him too.

"I will not send you to New York," Lady Bythewaite thundered. "We will lose no more boys."

"If you change your mind, you know where to find me, Lady ,

Bythewaite.'

"Don'ttempt me, Aiken. Don't ever tempt me." Then with real fury S3

she added, "Clarence has always wanted to kill Owen because he is

perfect .....

Looking up a moment later, she saw that the horse tender had left the room.

Rushing out to the front gate, she called his name after him, called it with the deep feeling of one who understood the meaning of his name at last: Aiken, Aikenl She looked after the retreating horse and carriage, finally calling his

only in a silent moving of her lips. Up until now she had thought the horse tender was only a boy, and here he was more a man than the whole rest of the pack, and she had not known it. She had another son on name

her hands, she feared. another son to worry about, to fret over

....

But as

she pronounced the word "son," a kind of whirlwind overtook her, and in the whirlwind she saw the features of this Aiken for the first time, saw

them with blinding clarity. No. it could not be, she spoke to herself.

Aiken could not be her

...

lost

...

boy

....

The next day came and went, and Aiken had gone. She took to her bed. In the middle of the night following the day of his departure, she

lay under the heavy embroidered sheet which suddenly looking like grave clothes, she tore with a sweeping decisiveness as if she had cut it with a great sword. Rising, she was about to go down the hall on her way she knew not where when she heard footsteps approaching. It was Mr. Skegg.

"Yes, I admit 1 am ill, but I doubtthere is a name forit." Having said this she fell against him. He led her back to her four-poster where she had lain tossing and turning for so many years, celibate and burning.

He kissed her forehead and she cried out like one who had been touched

with hot coals. "I will never bear you more sons, Mr. Skegg touch me

....

Don't

" ....

After dozing a while she looked up at him, still there. The expression on his face chilled her. In the mild darkness of the room he was un­

recognizable, or perhaps he was recognizable as himself at last. Faces are always changing in meaning, as the mystery and deceit of light plays the soul, renders all faces upon them, until, she thought, death, freeing indecipherable forever.

"How did you know 1 was ill, Mr. Skegg?"

You left all the lights on downstairs."

• •

54

"I hope I am dying," she smoothed the quilt under her thin veined

hands, "for I have discovered something I had long feared to discover How can anyone fear 'death?" she went on, seeming to wander. "Oh, .

.

.

.

perhaps the pain a little, but how can one fear to part with something which never lets us be ourselves, always traveling, never arriving, always

footsore, never rested, always the future, never the goal." "

Aiken will find him," Mr. Skegg said after a silence.

"I believe if anybody can, he might," she replied, and she motioned

for Mr. Skegg to reach her her medicine.

Then just as the spring morning was lighting up the waters of the lake,

the van drove up, Aiken alighted, helped a young man down with two

pieces of new luggage; the two young men exchanged a firm handclasp, and Aiken had leaped into the seat of his van again and whipped up the reins, when they heard the great front gate open, and Nora Bythewaite came running down the long path, and presently stood beside the horse.

"Come down, Aiken. Come in."

But who was it he had helped alight from the van? For a split second

she did not know him. That is, she knew him only because who else was there whom Aiken would fetch and deposit?

Aiken hesitated to come down, and then she was imperious, though she avoided his eyes.

Inside the house they all sat down at a great many-leafed dining table, and the hired girl brought in a pot of coffee, steaming rolls, oatmeal, and then went out into the kitchen to prepare something more

substantial yet.

The best thing for Lady Bythewaite was not to look at him at all-that

is, Owen, for his pursed lips and wretched eyes kept pleading with her not to gaze at him. His hair had been cut short, and he wore a suit which must have been tailor-made, at any rate it was of shockingly expensive

material which her hands longed to touch, the early light caught the silk of his foulard, which set off his pure sea-island cotton shirt, from which

emerged scintillating cufflinks, and on his hands, which lay folded like those of a drowned person, were two gleaming rings, one gold, the other of some semiprecious, or who knows, precious gem.

She almost felt she heard a voice from heaven, not a voice of gold, but one of harsh ear-splitting trumpets, reminding her of how she should ss

have clothed and brought up her only acknowledged son. He had been

found, identified, and sent home to her as a lesson, a corrective of her own many

failings toward the boy.

"But it wouldn't have done for him to wear good clothes here in the

country, and you know it!" she suddenly spoke in reply to this imaginary trumpet voice, but her eyes, as she spoke, fell on those of Aiken, who looked at her with moved consternation.

Her strange incoherence restored the two young men to life, for up to now

they had sat munching the rolls and sipping the hot strong coffee in

acute embarrassment.

A thousand questions rose, questions which she saw she would have to

put to Aiken, for she felt that Owen had been tampered with and would not speak the truth; that is, he had been bribed, she felt. Where, for instance. had Aiken found him, and had he gone all the way to New York for him in his van? And finally, would Owen remain with her, or would he go back to where they had touched him with grandeur.

And so she wept. The great Lady Bythewaite, whose reputation was for hardness, cunning, indomitable will, who was, as everybody in Prince's Crossing knew, working night and day to overthrow Mr. Skegg and had herself become the "maggot" of the crossroads-there she sat,

ridiculous and rather ugly, certainly red and creased from her grief and recent illness, making a miserable homecoming for the runaway, who

might indeed never have been heard of again in these parts without Aiken's bravery and resourcefulness.

"And so this is all Clarence's doing!" She let out these words with a banshee scream, looking for some "reason" and happening to fix her eyes on Aiken, who immediately disgorged a large mouthful of oatmeal onto his plate, and choked on what he had swallowed the wrong way.

"Here I thought Clarence was penniless!" She rose, and, her dress trailing, pulled a fine plate to the floor with a bang, but being of the same stuff as its owner it did not break. The hired girl came in, picked it up, and walked off with it to the kitchen.

"And where then did he get the money to robe you in this finery!" She

turned her fury at last upon Owen. "How dare you come back. how dare he send you back to shame me like this! How could he clothe you so,

Owen, when he's been disinherited? I said disinherited. And he's

changed his name like any common forger, bankrupt, or crook. How 56

dare he clothe you like this!" And she went up to Owen and roughly handled the material.

"Oh, I'm not going to tear your garments!" She let go the lapel of his suit as if she had touched slime. "But you'll find little use for such

raiment here among folk like me and Aiken!"

Owen turned his full gaze wonderingly, if appreciatively, now on Aiken Cusworth, who bowed his head. Then Owen blurted out: "He is a great star, no question about that, Oarence is." Then he subsided into a moony silence, his pupils narrowed, his heavy lids closed for a moment, seemingly to contrast this breakfast scene with those days in New York.

"And when are you returning to this great star, pray tell?

...

You've

come home

only to settle your affairs before you join forces with him permanently?"

"Oh, I can never go back, Mother," Owen spoke still gazing intently at Aiken, indeed studying the countenance of the horse tender. "I've disgraced him, you see. He can never have me back. I'm not presentable enough, not the conversationalist he requires, to please his advanced circle."

"But this raiment!" She returned to the subject of his clothes, and, not able to keep her hands from his jacket again, her nervous fingers

feeling out the hand-sewn edges of the pockets, the skillful placement of the elaborate buttons, and the beauty of the lining.

Aiken had excused himself, dried his lips, was about to retire, when Lady Bythewaite motioned for him to follow her into the long hallway, where so many private, desperate, and serious conversations had taken place for over a hundred years.

"No, I cannot accept it!" Aiken's voice drifted back to Owen, who,

holding a solid silver spoon in his hand, looked into the soft purling water of the little lake. "That is all over," Owen sighed, speaking aloud to himself. "I was a paid messenger, and I failed to fetch him back."

He looked up out of his reverie to see his mother eyeing him narrowly.

"You'll never be satisfied here again, Owen Haskins, even if I were to

give up my life for you."

She leant over the breakfast table, and peremptorily put an entire hot biscuit into her mouth, chewed hungrily, like a woman who had

performed many chores without a morsel to sustain her since daybreak.

57

He had forgotten how coarse she sometimes was.

Mr. Skegg was scolding Aiken-it was just after dawn-for con­

stantly refusing to give up his bread route with the van when he might just as well be Mr. Skegg's steady hired man. This very usual complaint was followed by the peroration on Money, which went something like this: When man realized God was a myth, he came to know the comfort -not the worship, mind you, the comfort-deep meaning, and purposeful morality of money, which was the key to the modern world, which had made our country the greatest under the sun and our people the most self-resourceful, high-minded, and successful which the world had ever seen.

Aiken Cusworth was attempting meanwhile to adjust his sleeves, which were a bit too short for him, as the shirt he had on was not his, it was

Owen's; that is, Owen had had received it when in New York City

and had given it to Aiken as, one supposed, a kind of reward.

"You steadfastly refuse, then, to be my permanent hired man?" Mr.

Skegg inquired, staring with a look of deep personal humiliation at Aiken's improperly elongated cuffs.

And can't your confounded housekeeper sew better than she does!"

Mr. Skegg finally blurted out. "I refer to your sleeve length ......

I did see your son," Aiken finally responded, after a lengthy stare direct into his eyes, for he took it that all Mr. Skegg's long peroration about Money and God and America, and his peevish complaining about "

.•

his sleeves, was a mere pretense to get Aiken to turn and tell about his

trip.

Mr. Skegg now shook like a maple tree in a summer thunderstorm.

The more he attempted to stop his trembling the more pronounced it became. He finally, Aiken felt, resembled a fish that had been pulled to

land, and his convulsive breathing could be heard outside the house For a bread delivery boy and horse tender, you are deuced clever," .

..

the old maggot was finally capable of saying. "One would think you

policeman! Finding lost persons so easily, and what's more per­ suading him to return.

"But you couldn't persuade Clarence to come back, could you?" The old man's anger supplied the force which now stopped his trembling. He were a

was stilI as a sheet as he said this. "Didn't you tell him I had

58

disinherited

him

....

Didn't you tell him what 1 think of movie stars, actors, and the

rest of the bilge?"

"He knows it by now, Mr. Skegg. There was no point in my telling him

what he knew already to a T, and committed to heart."

"Are you sassing me, Aiken Cusworth?

..

By God, you are!"

Leaning over the floor, where he thought he saw an army of pismires marching out toward the mammoth kitchen, but which turned out to be, when he had put on his spectacles, small lumps of dried mud from Aiken's feet, he began one of his interminable "memory" speeches: "At the time of Lady Bythewaite's first arrival here, she had the bad taste to still do some of her theatrical presentations. This ruined both boys.

They are both, as a result, stagestruck. Owen has been too browbeaten by his alleged mother and his supposed half-brother" (here Mr. Skegg became very nervous again, as if having stepped in over his head), "I venture to think, to ever be anything but a wonderstruck fool, at home Aiken, she is entirely to blame for all our only in country landscape wretchedness! 1 wish I could merely call her a whore, as some do, but ....

she's far, far worse. She is a temptress of some other kind. A whore, after all, only tempts men's bodies. She will only settle for their souls.

She has also outstripped me in a land deal!"

Aiken had sat down, Aiken had stood up, and sat down again. The bread was waiting in his van outside to be delivered-late.

"I say, what did you see!" Mr. Skegg's voice reached him quite close

because the maggot in point of fact was standing right by him, having been roused to ire by the youth's inattention and come directly to his side.

"Why, 1 went to the movie studio, sir," he began like one talking in his sleep, but saw at once, with a start, he had made a mistake and failed to please. "I found him before those blinding lights, wearing, well," he went on in spite of himself, and he studied Mr. Skegg's mouth, "a sort of kimono and little else, and made up with rouge and lipstick which Clarence explained is necessary in the pictures Mr. Skegg hobbled off back to his rigid easy chair.

"Later," Aiken went on hesitantly, swallowing again and again, "we went to grand places, where there was nothing but chandeliers and big tables with flowers. A gentleman with a monocle took us all 'in tow,' I mean Maynard Ewing which is the way Clarence expressed it. "

....

"

..

S9

....

"His disinherited name, Aiken," Mr. Skegg cried out lightly, in the tone of one who is explaining a text which is being falteringly read by an

immature reader.

"His motion picture name, sir." Aiken spoke with thorough assured­ ness.

"I have disinherited my son." Mr. Skegg acted again as prompter.

"But go on, go on, your delivery route is waiting "

....

"Yes, I must be up and out, Mr. Skegg. I really have overstayed

" ...

He looked out at the position of the sun.

The old man, however, looked so crestfallen that Aiken, though he

dimly realized that what he was about to say might not please any better than what he had already said, went on with, "But coming back to where He lives Clarence, or Maynard Ewing, lives, was quite a comedown in a room no bigger than a shoebox. It has a sort of large closet, and in a this closet are all his motion picture clothes, for he dresses like a prince "And the studio supplies this wealthy wardrobe?" Mr. Skegg wondered in a faraway voice ....

...

...

"

....

.

..

I have no idea, sir."

"Well, what in blue hell do you judge, if you have no idea! After all you were there, were you not! You profess to have been there!"

Aiken, however, had had enough, excused himself, and was on his way out, but Mr. Skegg followed close at his heels ••

.

Do you remember the name of the place with the chandeliers, by any

chance?" he called after the horse tender. "After all, Aiken, I was once in New York, that is. went to Wall Street rather frequently."

Aiken gazed from the bread van in the direction of the maggot. Then somewhat weakly, almost languidly for so husky a fellow, with irresolute of his hand, he waved a goodbye as his only answer to his inter­

moving

locutor, and drove off

.

I walk in without knocking or announcing myself," Lady Bythewaite "because neither you nor your hired girl ever hears me told Mr. ..

Skegg,

Here's your money!" She spoke more disdainfully on the marble-topped table at which than ever, and threw an when I do knock

....

envelope

the old maggot was seated, eating breakfast.

"So he refused my peace offering?" Mr. Skeggsnorted.

60

"First you disinherit him, I refer to Clarence, although you have al­

ready disinherited your other son. And then you

" ...

"Owen Haskins is not my son. How many times have I told you that?

How many times have you tried to make yourself believe he is my son?"

"The day will come, Mr. Skegg, when you look closely at the boy, now he is approaching manhood, and you will see there some of your few better qualities

....

But to go back to the point we are discussing. First

you disinherit Clarence, then you send him his brother, with money, asking him to come back to the fold."

"I see nothing irrational in that.

...

When he comes home, and gives

up his depraved career, he can be reinstated. Not as fully as before, but to some extent.

" ..

Lady Bythewaite was lost in thought. She would have laughed at the a few weeks ago, for, having been an actress herself, she knew how false most of the tales about acting folk were. But she knew nothing about motion pictures. All she knew was that something

word" depraved"

quite fundamental had happened to her son Owen as a result of his visit to his brother.

"He is not himself!" She heard herself speaking without any prior wish to divulge her apprehension to Mr. Skegg's oversuspicious mind.

"Who is not himself, Nora Bythewaite?" the old man demanded,

putting down his coffee pot. "You were never yourself, some people have opined! I say, who is not himself?"

Owen." Her reply was barely audible.

"Owen, of course Mr. Skegg sat bent, gazing at the money. The one thing he could not ...

fathom in all this was how Clarence could turn down money. Was a

beginning motion picture star so rich?

"I always felt most unlike myselfwhen I went to New York," the old maggot began to speak now more cautiously, more pleasantly as he saw the turmoil through which she was passing, a turmoil he had not seen in her for twenty years.

"What is worst of all," she went on, having moved to seat herself at his marble-topped table, and, to his mild surprise, unbidden had begun to eat some of his muffins, helping herself to the gooseberry preserves,

using his own knife to spread the sweet, "what is inexplicable is he wears those clothes which his brother-I assume it was his brother-gave him in all his rambles about the countryside. Why, he has quite startled 61

everybody who knew him only in his gadabouts and glad rags. I myself did not recognize him the other day when I was driving past Fieldstone Acres. There he sat on top of the hill looking like he had dropped from the sky."

Mr. Skegg, rose, the coffee trickling down his chin.

"What do you mean by he has clothed him?"

"I have already told you he did so new suits of

....

He came back with at least five

clothes, all preposterous, shirts of an expensiveness which

makes my head swim, cravats of a width and elegance no one has worn

since Edward VII."

"Why, then, they're wardrobe castoffs, I reckon!" he spoke, relieved.

"No such things They're gifts!"

"Gifts, thunderation. They're bribes, and we both know it." He went over to w here she was eating, eating not through hunger but despera­ ....

tion.

"Don't you see, Nora," his voice was almost "petting," "Clarence "

bring both of us to our knees "I am too muddleheaded to know anything about that, but I know one thing," and now she rose, and looked straight at him, and his hand took the bread knife and put it in its leather sheath, "he will be asking Owen to come back for future visits unless you do the one thing that will means to use your Owen to

stop him

....

" ....

He was at a complete loss to know what she meant, and his staring at

her with mouth open gave her more assuredness as she went on: "You must recognize Owen legally. You must make him one of your heirs. If

you've disinherited your only elder son, you can inherit your illegitimate son."

"The only way to do that to the law's satisfaction would be for you to marry me, Nora

And we all know that you would not do that years

You wanted your freedom, didn't you, precious ago when you could girl? and don't say you don't have it! But Owen has paid the price. Don't rich clothes driving your son mad, or a visit to his talk about

strange

lipstick before the cameras!"

"Who in God's name told you that?" It was Nora Bythewaite's turn to be dumfounded. She rose from her second breakfast, her jaw re­ brother,

even if he does wear

sembling his when dislocated.

62

"I am not as entirely in the dark as you have always made out," he

began. "You've taught the world I am a rustic idiot, but, my dear, the world has long since passed you by, since the days when you came here as some sort of dethroned queen from London

....

You can marry me, and

restore your son to sanity, or you can let him rove the countryside in the

company of your favorite clown Aiken Cusworth until his New York There brother decides it's time for another dose of high life for him ....

is, after all, only one person he really loves, indeed worships. It's not you, or Clarence, but Aiken Cusworth."

One morning Mr. Skegg had come up to his cupola too look out upon the lake with his field glasses when he spied, on the top of the little hill which rises and then slopes down to this body of water, an extraordinary

happening which he could not credit his eyes with seeing. His throat be­ came painfully dry, and his old vertigo came over him so that the field glasses fell from his hands. Gradually his brain cleared and he was able to look again, but only one of the two persons who had been engaged in the struggle which he had thought he saw still remained on the top of the hill, and that person was stained with blood, he perceived, as he scruti­ nized him with the glasses, and furthermore was now wending his way in the direction of Mr. Skegg's house. It was Aiken Cusworth, and he carried a buggy whip which his assailant had struck him with again and again, over the face, over the body, ripping his shirt and even his tough cord trousers.

In his confusion, Mr. Skegg had thrown the heavy bolt over the door instead of removing it, so that the attacked man had to hammer again and again before the old maggot could remember to unbolt the door.

"Shall I call Lady Bythewaite?" Mr. Skegg addressed the bleeding man, but the usually gentle Aiken let out a string of God damns and Almighty Christs.

"I may not be the surgeon she is, I'd have you know, but there are

carrying little black bags than me."

Even as he spoke, Aiken collapsed on the floor, and small rivulets of

worse ones about

blood found their way from his torn work shirt onto the rich carpet of the hallway.

Unable to lift him, Mr. Skegg let him lie for the moment, and went 63

upstairs to fetch blankets, then down again to a medicine cabinet largely stocked with Lady Bythewaite's drugs and nostrums.

But Aiken had come to by the time the maggot reached his side again.

He refused the whiskey, the smelling bottle, every token of aid and

comfort.

"I'm not hurt bad, Mr. Skegg. More surprised and sick than

anything."

Was it an almost animal curiosity, sympathy, or the beginning of some dawn of

recognition that made Mr. Skegg so considerate of some­ many times a dirty groom, brute, and

one he had called to his face so

simpleton?

"I could not quite see who was giving you this beating," the old man

averred, watching his guest with the most complete attention, almost

whispering these words lest the volume of his questioning might check a reply.

Aiken Cusworth's great sides heaved as if they would burst their rib cage, drops of sweat stood motionless on him like those seen on freshly churned butter, the veins of his hands and wrists looked ready to burst,

his hair, which had always looked short, now fell easily about his ears. A

strong, pungent odor like that of horses rose steaming from him. And

though Mr. Skegg wiped his face and chest with rags dipped in warm water and alcohol, again and again the rivulets of blood came as if from every vein in his body. He seemed to be weeping blood, and yet, curiously enough, there was a look of relief, of some strange knowledge, on his mouth and in his eyes, like that of a great athlete, who, though within the jaws of death from exhaustion, is assured winner, sole victor.

"I say," Mr. Skegg spoke gently, coaxingly, like one who is to be entertained, not entertaining, and himself far from home, "I did not quite see your assailant."

"You saw it all?" Aiken wondered, incredulous, after being perhaps unsure whatto do with the word" assailant."

"We don't have this sort of thing around here, as you know," Mr.

Skegg philosophized, but without any conviction or emphasis. Then with some impatience, almost anger, and more like himself, speaking just above a whisper, "I'll have to have the details, nonetheless, for it was taking place on my property!"

64

"I am entirely to blame," Aiken murmured.

To Mr. Skegg's even more considerable astonishment, great snorts of

grief-more like that, again, from his horses than from a human being �ame out, quickly suppressed by Aiken's biting his lips, and at this exertion of force, as if from a signal, his wounds opened to give off more running crimson.

"Since you've ruined my furniture and rugs, though you've refused to drink my whiskey or sniff my smelling bottle, by Christ you owe me the honesty to tell me who gave you such a thoroughgoing horsewhipping I horsewhipped myself, you nosey old skinflint!" Aiken bawled out.

"Look at me!" he cried now in maniacal fury, and painfully rising and struggling up to a pier mirror, he gazed in disbelief at himself. In his mounting anger, he tore off the few remaining shreds of his shirt. Mr. Skegg drew back, not only at the obscenity of Aiken's appearance, but at the insult he had received from a hired man and stable boy.

At the same time, Mr. Skegg looked considerably pleased and "

....

,.

animated. The insult had caused the blood to rush to his own head,

clearing his brain, and he felt spryer, and indeed quite satisfied with life for a change.

"I will not pry, Aiken," the old maggot spoke sweetly. "But you must go upstairs and rest."

"On your lilywhite sheets? To hell with you and your hospitality! To cruddy hell with everybody!"

Then plumping himself down on a great chair which he immediately stained, he said in the softest tones: "I've lost him, Mr. Skegg."

Mr. Skegg seated himself now on a stool, which he did not observe until too late was also stained with blood and so he had ruined his own

trousers, possibly, but no matter, seating himself as comfortably as

possible, and with one of those angelic masks which criminal lawyers sometimes don just before making the suspect name the time and place of his felony, Mr. Skegg said, softer than a spring breeze, "So it was Owen, little Owen, who horsewhipped you?"

"So it was, sir, and nobody ever deserved it more."

"But how could he whip someone whom he worships, shall we say, next to, if not above, the former Clarence Skegg?"

6S

"Clarence Skegg be fucked, begging your pardon, sir. God damn it a1l!" he howled in a volume of fury whose equal Mr. Skegghad togo back years and years to recapture.

All this passion and stench of animal heat and blood had consider­

ably altered the old maggot since the moment Aiken had put his foot within his door. The old man had, one might say, come into his own realm again, after so much work with mortgages and foreclosures, and the ru i n rained down by banks, and he was no longer with Aiken Cus­ worth the horse tender, but with his Scotch ancestors in the highlands a century or so before, and like them an outlaw from justice.

"It's that old whore on the hill who's behind it all, make no mistake about it," Aiken went on, for now that he had stripped himself of all

shame, he could speak as himself even before this gentility and quality, and after all what more could they do with him than send him to jail.

"Oh, how Owen shamed me, sir told him to horsewhip me

....

He shamed mel And 'twas me

" ...

Then as the old maggot leered and almost licked his fingers, the

pleasure of Aiken's story being so keen, Aiken went blithely on, telling of how Lady Bythewaite, in her morning wrapper, had summoned him (and in all innocence he felt, too), to go with her to the cellar and help repair a broken part of the basement where the rats had come in, and that seeing her standing there with so very little on-well, they had both forgotten themselves, and they were, "forthefirsttime," he swore, "having "Having what I Mr. Skegg suddenly raised his voice in a fury as great at Aiken's at his bull-force height.

"I was letting her have it, sir, when Mr. Skegg offered to strike the horse tender, then thought better of it.

Go on "I exculpate you, Aiken, for anything you did "The cellar door opened, sir, and there stood Owen Haskins watching "

...

"

"

...

"

....

...

"

us

....

The entertainment of Aiken's narrative proved too much for the

maggot, and absentmindedly he drank some of the concoction he had

prepared for the beaten youth.

"Then folding his arms," Aiken went on, "this boy who had looked me in that helpless state where we are not up to me, this Owen, catching Oh, Mr. Skeggl" masters of ourselves ...

66

"Go on with your God-damned story I

"

"Isay," Aiken struggled on, his eyes filling with water, "he folded his arms like an angel sent by the Lord, except, sir, his mouth was foul, he spoke most foully "Give his exact words, and quit your sniveling ......

"He said, Why, Aiken, my lad, you're not equipped like a man, you've got the pizzle of a countyfair bull, and we'll have to put you on display.

You've impaledLady Bythewaite with your prize cock, and we'll have to Or something like fetch a surgeon tofree herfrom your bull hide "

...

....

that. ....

"And that is all he said?"

"Yes, by God, and don't tell me you wish he had poured out morel" While Aiken paused, wiping his eyes, the old maggot mused. He had

pleased, nor so satisfied.

"I "I ran after Owen with the buggy whip," Aiken began again him on hill near mansion.

I said with the little to him, your caught up Owen, you can whip me, and I want you to. And he said, I never harm a farm animal Eitheryou hide me, or I'll hide you, Owen, I told him.

It's as simple as that. Whip me or I'll whip you tillyou drop in your tracks. And Mr. Skegg, I had forgot he was mad. No, amend that, sir, he's the sane one, the only sane one. The rest of us are mad, and so he never been so

....

....

seems odd. I drove him crazy, when here he looks up to me more than

...

than .....

A look of almost royal, insolent command from Skegg made the groom go on.

"Then Owen raised the whip I handed him, but I never knew he would

hide me to within an inch of my life

....

For I had to take it out of his

hand at the last, though I damn near was unable to

" ....

"And where is this poor mad child, as you term him, now?" Mr.

Skegg almost screeched from sheer excitement.

"I reckon he's run away." Aiken looked down atthe floor. "I judge he's run off back to New York, worseluckl" Mr. Skegg helped the hired girl clear up after the traces of massacre

about the house, even getting down, to her real consternation and resentment, on his hands and knees to "tidy up" with her, a procedure

utterly unknown in this house or indeed in Prince's Crossing, and as he 67

was in the midst of these menial

labors, she saw, puzzled, a kind of surge

of renewal sweep over the old man. There was no trace of his rheu­

matism, to judge by his quick thorough movements; his heart, often so

irregular in beat, now pumped steadily and rhythmically if his breathing and color were any indication, and he babbled to the girl about the old times when Indians had still lived about here and, on occasions, visited his mother.

No, "fine, stalwart" Aiken Cusworth had not been whipped in vain for several persons that cold, uncertain spring morning.

"I hope nonetheless, Aurelia. you will keep your mouth tightly closed over all this sad affair."

He had risen almost with no difficulty,

whispering his caution to her.

"Oh, Mr. Skegg," Aurelia whined, "you've gone and ruined your

good trousers, sir!"

"Now, mydear," he edged up to his servant, oblivious that she had spoken of ruined trousers, "we don't want young Aiken Cusworth to suffer from this any more than he has. Understand my meaning?"

"But what has he suffered, Mr. Skegg?" Aurelia wondered. "Has he been throwed from a horse?"

Mr. Skegg laughed in many keys. Aurelia lifted her apron to her face,

and wiped her brow with its hem, and wondered if he had begun to drink

owing to his rheumatism.

"We have some wonderful men left in this nation after all, Aurelia!" he intoned. Drawing near the girl, arresting her attention so that she

thought he was wishing her to hear some unusual sound coming from the house or the woods behind it, all he did finally was place his finger to his lips in adjuration of silence, and then from his pants pocket he took out a silver dollar and put it in her palm, though she made every sign of not wanting it.

"Tell no one what has occurred here, Aurelia. Not a breath!"

And he gamboled off into his study, where for so many years he had

planned and plotted, where he had made and destroyed fortunes, and ruined lives.

"I've got Lady Bythewaite, I've got Owen, I've got all of them!" He aloud to himself once the door was shut. "And blessed

began speaking Aiken. Why, he's only now come alive, after I'd put him down as no 68

more than a horse himself

....

He's no horse, no horse," he kept

muttering.

But the thought of how Lady Bythewaite had scalped him kept coming back.

"She'll crawl here before me," he went on to himself while opening a big ledger and touching the lines here and there written in different color inks, while still muttering, "Clarence will come back with his tail And I'll put Aiken Cusworth in my will. between his legs He relived the keen pleasure of the morning. In a kind of delirium unknown hitherto to him, the hours swam by while he went on thinking "

....

...

of how he had risen from entire weakness, imminent old age, and death to a summit of control and jurisdiction again over all who surrounded

him. He had suddenly, by means of a horsewhipping on his own

property, become again, however briefly, the great maggot whose name was once

whispered in Wall Street.

His peals of laughter reached finally the kitchen, where Aurelia and the cook exchanged looks of helpless wonder, shaking their heads at first and closing their mouths tighter and tighter, but finally, since

laughter is catching, even when its source is unknown, they too began to giggle and laugh, perhaps at the thought that Mr. Skegg's secret, whatever it was, and whatever had happened with regard to poor Aiken Cusworth, would spill itself, and that all would be talking, in church and out, of the old maggot's latest wickedness, and more mud would be thrown at the gown of Lady Bythewaite, who once had said of all this: "The dung they have thrown at me, you see, has now dried, the fabric is intact, and brushed clean, the owner of the garment spotless "

...

Single for tonight M. D. Elevitch

"Single for tonight?"--expressed with surprise, he hadn't noticed her slip, glide, or whatever into the lobby; he was adding receipts. It was late afternoon, an off-time when tickets rarely sold, the sun leaving Shaftes­ bury and the high buses passing steadily, darkening red. He muttered as though there were none, and then he "Single, single for tonight remembered: "At what price, madam?"

"What have you please?"

"It'sposted-" he began, then pausing, the dark face now closer, he knew she saw him, they didn't always get above his hands and the ring, the fasttumed under heavy brass ring. "

...

"Could you show me," she said, "where would I sit."

An outland accent, she spoke as though following a lesson, perhaps a New Zeal ander, anyway a foreigner, they often assumed it, the still, sure pace of the language, in only a matter of days. So he explained to her,

patiently, on the diagram until she knew he had made a concession. He found her a place, one from the aisle, finishing" Seven-thirty sharp, madam," and she lowered her eyes, luminous green, faintly lined beneath; her face he realized not dark-rather shadowed by hair falling thickly down each side, and nearly to her brow. He took the bills, re71

TrlQuarterly

tu rning the necessary coi ns which she held not

glancing to count them,

while they shared a curious silence. She remained there. The white

envelope lay on the ledge, the ticket protruding between them. He saw the number upside down retreating, she'd taken itthen, and he smiled but she'd gone to read a broadside of the play and he could watch her, his fingers seeking the compartment from which her ticket had come, withdrawing them all, the crisp edges, in his tightening hand. She stood at the door with no one approaching, hunching her shoulders slightly as she read. She was tall, he surmised, though he couldn't determine much, the contours in shade against the street=-she was young or at least no more than well in her thirties with a trace of dash and bearing in her slim ankles. He grasped the tickets, flipped them with a thumb like pre­ dictable cards and found it-the seat marking that would place the owner, that night, beside her. She seemed to turn. He quickly thrust them back. Except the one. Why wouldn't she go-in a minute he'd tear it to bits. Now she had him seething and unnerved-it didn't happen often, a mouth like hers on his window-there'd have to be more. He forced it into his folder of bills, freshly paid that day, for this night. She was gone, of course, but he looked into his

receipts; he didn't want a

reencounter then.

His relief came, and they talked, the two of them, he and Esketh,

warmly near in the booth, examining with not much interest the crosses on his chart. Wouldn't it be a good house. Oh, it would. You say that with some agitation. You're wanted at home, Esketh concluded.

"Yes," he told her.

"How is Mrs. Sables?"

"Very well, thank you, Esketh. Just the other day she was saying, mind you bring that Esketh round to tea."

"Oh, sir."

"I said 'Now don't you interfere. Esketh and I see one another two or

three times a week, sometimes while I'm going in or she's going out, or sometimes together on the spot. If we met under any other circum­ stances we might not know how to behave.'

"

"Oh, Mr. Sables! You'd besttakehertotheshow."

"How's that, Esketh?"

"Yes, here are two lovely seats."

"Let me see that."

72

"There."

"Those are taken-" He canceled them with a wiggly line, but she

backed him out, turning to a purchaser, formally in charge. He saw the whole scene as it had been a moment before and took it with him on his way home.

Rhea was waiting. She hallooed, banging something. "Was it fierce-in the tube?"

"No, I came on the surface."

She faced him from the kitchen. "We've a good chop. It's soon done."

"By the way," he said, "I'll have to dress. I'm to return to the theater."

"To play the fiddle?"

"No, stop that. You know that's over." The gramophones had long ago displaced him in the pit. It was Friday, of course, he hadn't for­ gotten it, they had wine sometimes on Friday as they'd done before when

the old show closed, the new opened.

"I didn't stop for anything, Rhea. You know, I had to hurry." "

Hurry? You said you took the bus."

"Leave off it, will you please. I knew I was to be back inside. I've got to have a chance to be above things."

"Yes, all right, Dudley." "

Afterwards, perhaps, that's it. I'll ring you up if I'm late and come

along then.

"

He dressed quickly; now he'd begun he couldn't risk composure, even for food, or he'd be stale before he was gone. He changed his shirt, not half bad, but the suit-absolutely tarnished. Or maybe it was the light.

There wasn't much of that. Probably the curtains. There were plenty of them. Well, it fitted him well enough it was easy to see; that was the

compensation.

She had put on lipstick. She exclaimed, seeing him: "I can't help

feeling you're playing, and afterwards the whole orchestra will come, thirty of them, and fill the room, end to end."

"This room? Not likely."

She curled her fingers over his belt. "You don't get away like this, often."

"I know that. What will you do?" ..

73

I think I'll play cards."

He softened: "Chop done? I'll have a piece of it, after all."

That would suit her. He suited, she-he could afford it. So he

managed it somehow. He had an hour; a corner here was as good as anywhere else. She gave him a glow, too, Rhea; he overbore himself about it, took away some of the lipstick, more promptly gained his release.

He reached Soho at quarter past seven, walked up Dean Street, his

face smarting blood, tight under his arms. But the ticket pricked him on when he paid, moments later, for a drink. He had no idea who might be

present from Staff; it didn't matter, he'd go in unobserved when the crowd swelled. Or perhaps he would linger, gain a vantage point-he wanted her seated first, established, in place, when he arrived. Or, even

better, his seat could stay empty and beguiling until after the curtain was up. By intermission. he'd know why he was there and what he was about. He'd devise an opening line.

Outside, he had a look at the posters, much as she had done, though he had seen them all before, giving the strictest attention to the notices, and the source of them, until they seemed little more than composition

patches and streaks of weather on the glass. When he went inside, everyone went flat as cutouts from the change. He blinked. His office blazed. In it, head down, was Esketh.

He went to the lavatory, pummeled the shine from his face and

parted and parted his hair. His collar sapped him like a leech; he gave it a

tug; he couldn't do more.

He ran at the sound of the bells. Others did not; why should

they-bother the time, this was a social occasion. He slowed, or so he judged. By the time he entered, it was already dark. He advanced without an usher. He saw himself on his diagram, he wasn't inside after all, but upon it, rattling over the squares until he was lodged in his seat.

Beside him, then, he saw a man. He sprang into the aisle, and remained

by the seat, obviously it, the only one possible. He bent low to find the light and scrutinize his ticket. It corresponded with the number on the seat. What had he done. He sat down to think about it. Brittle voices came to him, rang aloud. There was a murmur of response. Luckily, on the aisle

he could, without heaving, disturbing, remove himself when he pleased,

and he tasted chop. And the bubbling, somewhere, of drink. What a 74

seat. It gripped and repelled him. Nothing to be done: he'd stay and face

it through. He even applauded, somewhat wildly, at the end of the act, and caught the man's glasses upon him. He followed him into the lobby and lost him. No, not quite. He pointed the way to the convenience, but it was

something else the man wanted. The telephone. He spoke broadly, an

American doubtless, and took away a penny. Afterward, it was easy. He had only to wait. The man approached, his brow bright. He supposed it

good play, but he hadn't concentrated. He'd called his wife.

"She had a headache," the man explained.

was a

"That's too bad."

"One of these womanly things, you know. They come and they go."

"That's good."

"What?" ..

I was congratulating you on your wife's deliverance from pain."

"Thanks-I'm not sure. The phone didn't answer."

"Well, she may be asleep."

"It's a loud phone. The room isn't very large, either, although it's

larger than a hotel room, one of those bed -sitting rooms, not very much when you look at it, but more comfortable than a room you'd get at a hotel. I didn't ring too long, because it wouldn't be good for a head­ ache."

"No doubt."

"The fact is, I don'tthink she's in."

"Excuse me, might she be in the bath? Faucet running-e-'

"She had one before supper. She was coming here."

"Here."

"Yes, she wanted to see this show. You'd have seen her, right next to

you."

"I would, wouldn't I?"

"Yes," he began to chuckle, "wait till she hears about it. It was her

night out."

They chuckled together.

"Now, then, did you say it was her night out?"

'Yes, we find it sensible. We each like different things so every week ,

we have a

night out."

"Oh, bravo, well planned, very well planned."

7S

"But I came instead. She was getting this headache, she said, and would stay in and rest."

"Is that what she told you?" Dudley Sables said.

The warning signal began. Into the man's eyes, enlarged behind his

glasses, started a look of new alarm.

"Ready," Dudley said. "Next act."

"You goon. I've got to find out about this. That girl's restless." ..

I'm sure it can be explained.

"

The man retlected, hardly a movement on his wide, smooth face.

"Don't let me keep you. You'll miss the play."

"It doesn't matter, really. Because you see I'm in this too now aren't I? We've both missed her."

The bells dwindled, the crowd left them. Esketh, too; she had gone.

He was thirsty again. They edged to two high, thin chairs and sat, knees

adjacent, at the wall.

"Listen to me," the man said. "Taking your time. You're English?"

"Yes."

"That's fine! I'm Charlie Macon, from Seattle. Consulting engineer.

Lorraine, she's from Canada. Vancouver."

"My pleasure."

It started simply enough. I was going over income tax. If you're overseas you don't have to send the return in on time but they charge you ••

interest on what's due."

"So you've been thinking ofthat."

"No, no. I like a good show. But with poor Lorraine-" "Here's an idea. Go another night-together."

"No, we're leaving. We've had five days here already. We have five in Paris too."

"Then," Dudley said carefully, intensely, "if it's true, as you say, that she really wanted to go, she'd have gone tonight."

He heaved to his feet. "I must telephone again." He hesitated,

groping, in sudden anguish: "No pennies. I have no pennies."

Dudley had them. Briefly, they touched.

He was left alone, everything in place: first, closest to the street, his darkened office; then Charlie, jerking his head, whom he could see but couldn't hear; then, to the back, the stage, which he could hear but couldn't see.

76

Or could he. He covered his eyes. At the center, saluting her smartly,

making earnest suggestions, he reached for her hand but found only wrinkles and convolutions on the face of another.

He took away his fingers and there was Charlie. "I'm a fool. You were

right. She was sleeping."

"Headache gone?"

"My God, I forgot to ask-she sounded so sleepy. Come on, we haven't missed much. I'm kind of enjoying myself. And afterward we'll have a drink. With Lorraine."

"She's better then."

"I suppose. Could you make it?"

"I don't think

" ...

"Oh. Well." He started in.

"But don't be offended. Don't be offended." Dudley brought up his

ticket. "Take it-it hasn't been touched-and call her again."

"Call again?" He was incredulous.

"Yes, yes. She'll wantto go, won't she? It's only right. Ijust remembered something. I'll leave. "

"Well

" ...

Charlie pondered. "This is one curious evening, Mr. -?"

"Certainly. Excuse me." Dudley thought. On the back of the ticket he wrote Farley Lodge. It was a quiet place, with timbers and a huge fire.

Known to be discreet.

Charlie Macon read it carefully. "All right, damn it," he said. "I

accept, Farley Lodge."

"Then it's all settled? You mean that, don't you-you and Lorraine---"

Charlie laughed, he rippled and shone. "Maybe, maybe no." He held up the ticket. "You gave me an idea. I might make a night of it!"

They exchanged glances.

Charlie turned, whistling, to the play.

Dudley, after a moment, went out into the unseasonable cold, passing the still lit marquees. He met no one. Near Oxford he found a flower on the curb. He could send it to her c/o American Express, but if she were

leaving-who would forward a flower? There'd be storage to pay and it would be dead. He held it, took the underground at the Circus.

Rhea had the gas fire on. She came to him, with an open deck. Told '

him he looked tired. 'You weren't gone very long," she said.

77

He put the flower between the cards and she stood looking modest and foolish not knowing what to do. "Preserve it," he told her. Preserve

him too. He could snap between her arms scattering diamonds and

hearts.

He said: "The fire's gone low."

"Yes, I expect you're right." ..

Why' d you let it do that ? You know it's no good. If it goes out the pilot light will go off too."

"I'll put it right."

"No, let me."

He went as fast as he could into the kitchen, stooped, bruising his

fingers to stuff the coins into the meter. Always the same clank, never seemed to fill. He returned, saw the light coming up, lay on the sofa, loosened his things; and, while Rhea watched him fixedly, he clamped an arm across his groin and fell asleep.

Hans Cassebeer and the Virgin's rose Arthur A. Cohen

1 Count Viktor von Preissendorf, who had profited from the advice of Adam Cassebeer respecting a splendid mare he had recommended for the Count's purchase some years before, repaid the modest debt by sug­

gesting his son, Hans, for the appointment. Adam Cassebeer-the shrewd connoisseur of horseflesh, by training and avocation an agron­ omist, a specialist, in fact, in the nurture of an alfalfa strain resistant to the cold winds of northern Prussia-had but a single son, who proved not nearly as resilient as his alfalfa.

Young Cassebeer, lately of the University of Berlin, more recently a docent at the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Museum, a very junior col­ league of the great Von Bode, had just recovered from what was called at that time extreme exhaustion. We know, today, of course, that such exhaustions are exactions of the mind, but then they were still regarded as languors and humors, flaggings of the spirit, fissiparations of incle­ ment environments, unsuitable companions, excessive or deficient self­ abuse--and the result, poof, extreme exhaustion. But after four months at a seaside resort near Danzig and a winter of skiing and taking the 79

TriQuarterly

baths at Bad Gastein, Hans Cassebeer was restored. Or so it was

thought until the great scandal.

Hans's father never learned the cause of his son's illness; and being a

widower, his wife having died and left him to care for his growing son and an older daughter, he had no one with whom to share his conti­ dential anxieties. It is quite possible, moreover, that young Hans himself

inquired profoundly into the source of his startling behavior.

Nonetheless, early one morning-it was during August 1919-he quite simply took up the palette knife with which he was mixing an Umbrian earth color to execute a stroke on a copy he was making of a cinque­ never

cento masterpiece in the collection of the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm

Museum-it being his custom. before his duties as docent began, to

paint before a masterpiece-and was about t() plunge it into the eye of a brooding Virgin when a large hand seized his wrist, twisted it, and, knife falling, young Hans collapsed. He foamed a bit, thrashed about, and fainted. It was two months before he spoke again, and by the time of his return to Berlin the following spring, he had determined to leave the museum and assume an entirely new vocation. He decided to become a restorer of paintings rather than an art lecturer and copyist.

It should not be thought that someone who had come close to muti­ lating the eye of a Virgin would be for that fact unsuitable to the vocation of restorer. Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact! At that time in the history of the conservation of art, the mutilator in spirit was quite

often the most promising restorer. Or put another way, one who was so

profoundly ambivalent about masterpieces of art-he who would sit day in and day out seeking to reproduce exactly the tones and textures of a painting {and often succeed in making more than a likely copy, but a splendid fake)-acquired in the course of his diligence an almost incan­ tatory competence. He could prepare the panel like a medieval crafts­ man; he could make colors from the powders and mix the paints like an adept; he knew which colors were used where and what subjects were most likely to inhabit whose imagination. He could, in fact, so come to love another time, another culture, another sensibility that he could restore a masterpiece but could not create one. These Hans Cassebeers,

and they are even today seated on little campstools in the Prado, the

Rijksmuseum, the Academia. the Metropolitan, the Albertina. every­ where in fact, diligently copying with a faithfulness and commitment80

may seem to all of us who observe them no different than drones and craftsmen anywhere. But wrong! What you miss, if you conclude thus, is

the secret fantasy, the fantasy nourished, for instance, by Hans Casse­ beer. Would you believe it? HansCassebeer, that day in August,

repainting that masterpiece, hoped not only to copy it so that it would be exact but, in his concentration, to prise the image from the wall and stick it to his brain so permanently that when it emerged once more onto his canvas, his would become the masterpiece and the original the faith­ ful copy. What a reversal of divinities and what a delusion! Delusion?

Exactly. But that is what Cassebeer confessed. He wanted to be Sasseta, to be Cimabue, to be Mantegna, and his talent was insufficient to be

Cassebeer. No wonder that when Cassebeer recovered his senses and re­ turned to Berlin in the spring of 1920 he should decide to put his extra­

ordinary fund of information and knowledge of technique to a more prudent and wholesome work. If he could not be those masters, he tem­ porized, he could at least restore them.

2

Young Cassebeer was welcome in the homes of Berlin society, the homes of the wealthy, and the homes of the aristocracy-not always the same homes. His father had made for himself, and thereby for his son, some­ thing of a reputation. Adam Cassebeer was a Tolstoyan character, a true Levin, though not a Levin of great means. But he had Levin's theories and Levin's grave crankiness, and for Germans gravity and crankiness were what eccentricity had become for the English, marks of serious purpose embedded in unconventional behavior. He talked grains the way other men discussed events of the day. Wheat, soy, alfalfa had per­

sonalities, and to signify his intimacy with them he habitually inserted in his hat band a tasseled stalk of wheat whose full grains not infrequently tumbled over the brim of his hat as he discoursed with his friends. His

serious purpose and his somewhat unconventional behavior were en­

dearing--he did not threaten power, not at all, and he was therefore welcomed as an original contributor to the race. They-the bankers, department store magnates, war department officers, estate managers, and landed aristocracy--called him Alfalfa Adam.

Count Viktor von Preissendorf ran into Adam Cassebeer as he was

walking down the Unter den Linden one morning shortly after Hans's 81

return to Berlin. "Alfalfa Adam," he called out cheerfully,

slapping

Adam's arm with his gray suede gloves, "how are you, old friend?

Berenice is doing splendidly, although she is out to pasture now."

(Berenice, it should be obvious, was the mare which Adam had brought to the Count's attention. That mare had foaled a half-dozen times,

pro­ four saddle a lame and one cele­ horses, creature, ducing good poor

brated racer.)

Adam beamed with pleasure at the chance encounter. "I haven't seen you since the war ended," the Count continued. "How are you now?

Enduring these times? Hardly, I should think. Foolish times, foolish country," he expostulated, turning his pink nostrils toward the sky.

"Come round, Sunday afternoon. Many old friends. We have missed you, the Countess and myself. And bring young Hans. He's recovered, I'm told. I have an idea for him. Perhaps? Perhaps?"

Adam Cassebeer nodded acceptance. The Count used his "perhaps" more as an inducement than as a disguise of indecision. Most men said "perhaps" when they possessed no clear idea of their intention, but Count Viktor was a Count-a Count, moreover, of many generations of authentic standing and service. His "perhaps" was therefore more in the manner of a lese majeste, an expression of mystery and disdain and therefore to be taken quite seriously.

The following Sunday, Adam Cassebeer and his son Hans drove up the curved pathway to the mansion of the Von Preissendorfs, situated on the outskirts of Berlin amid a thinning forest of birch, ash, and maple trees. The garden was unkempt, wild with a baroque aspect of arrayed disorder, small fountains with urinating cupids and satyrs fluting water into marble basins spilling upon goldfish in the concrete pools below. The spirit of the mansion was adumbrated by the grandeur and slight madness of its exterior flora, and Hans, having heard his father's interpretation of the Count's "perhaps," shuddered as the liveried footman showed them into the conservatory where tea was being served.

The conservatory. The glass, the crystal, the ormolu, the marble, the

china, the tapestries, the silks, the heavy chintz, the flocking-each chair, each table, each secretary, each music stand, lamp, each and every chandelier (there were eight----cascades of glass breathing like a 82

rainbow in a clarified sky), all were of exquisite refinement, but of the ensemble one could only gasp enough, too much. Each stood by itself in

magnificence, but at the tout ensemble one was appalled: heaviness, no grace. The craftsmen were extraordinary, but the patron was merely rich. In a word, the Count (or perhaps it was his Countess-but one thinks not, for she was a small and, one thinks, a timorous woman) had a taste for auction rooms and for collections; but he lacked measure, and

without measure even magnificence is slightly vulgar. At all events, Adam and Hans, father and son, disappeared into the large room and

by the sounds of clinking glass and cups, riffles of fans, clucks of guttural contentment, and the swirling pleasure of a Mozart Divertimento offered by a rigorous troupe of hired musicians, complemented by the Count's youngest daughter, Adele, playing clavier

were soon swallowed up

in the corner.

Shortly before seven 0' clock, when Sunday teas languish to their con­ clusion, the Count approached young Hans and, pincering his elbow, guided him to the fireplace; and their conversation began. "My young friend, I have an idea which may be to your liking. You know Kastein?"

Hans did not. He had never even heard of Kastein, though it is a commonplace of aristocrats to assume that everyone of their acquain­ tance should be known-and if not known personally at least be bruited abroad, discussed, and considered. Hans nodded as though the name were familiar and the Count rushed on. "In any event, Kastein-would

you believe, Cassebeer, his amusing Christian name (if one may say that

of a warty little Jew) is Lazare? Heaven only knows how he came by such an elegant name. He's from Riga, a cosmopolitan Balt, but then you know him, so I needn't rehearse his credentials. In any event, our Kastein

is an art dealer. Terribly clever, some say wise, and most certainly shrewd. He's a specialist, among other things, in Old Master paintings and drawings, although he personally collects contemporary pictures.

He sells only what he doesn't collect. He says it keeps his hands clean.

What a clever little fellow he is. Well, then. Our friend Lazare has at this moment a little Giorgione. It's a ravishing picture, but I'm afraid the poor Virgin looks a bit dissolute; her face is blistered and the paint is

flaking from her forehead. She needs a bit of brightening. Do you think you could turn your hand to this? There's a first -rate fee and I'll pay it, 83

since I've bought that Giorgione for my collection. She is already mine, you see? If you think you're up to this sort of thing, ring up Kastein to­ morrow and tell him 1

suggested you."

Hans became nervous. He drummed his fingers on the marble pedi­ ment of the fireplace as the Count spoke. He saw the wriggling eye of the

Virgin falling from the socket where Giorgione had emplaced it, and he became slightly nauseated. But the feeling passed. His lips opened into a

smile, half disbelief, half irony. "1-1 restore a Giorgione?" he replied

modestly. "Can 1 do it? Can 1 leave the Giorgione a Giorgione?" he thought to himself and his heart raced. "May 1 think about it for aday or two?" he asked.

"Of course, dear boy, of course," the Count replied amiably, con­

fident Hans would accept the assignment. "The Virgin's waited now at least a hundred years for such a treatment; she can wait another few

days," he chuckled, and left Cassebeer's side to join a young cavalry officer in red-striped britches and high black boots who bowed and clicked his leave.

3 The following day Cassebeer visited the library of the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Museum. He had not entered that vast neoclassical complex since his abrupt departure nine months earlier. The sleepy doorman

greeted him lazily, as though he had never been gone. "Guten Tag, Herr Cassebeer.

"

He made straight for the library, not looking about, avoiding the hall

in which the nearly mutilated Virgin hung, unenvied. The library had

just opened its doors and the chieflibrarian, pince-nez in place, was peering over a large portfolio of steel engravings. "Herr Gimpstedt, good morning. Cassebeer here, restored," he added nonchalantly.

Herr Gimpstedt looked up, smiled, but did not extend his hand. "And what can I do for you, young Cassebeer?" he asked.

"Giorgione. Giorgione of Venice. Books, reproductions, photo­ graphs. Anything. Everything," he replied enthusiastically. The reading room was empty, but Herr Gimpstedt put a finger to his lips and squinted his eyes to censure Cassebeer's excessive, and theoretically disturbing, exuberance.

"Yes, indeed. Giorgione. Do we have one here?"

84

"I'm afraid not, but there is one at the Stattliche Museen, a 'Portrait of a Young Man.' No, my dear Professor, I wish a Virgin, a most par­

ticular Virgin of Giorgione. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I have some business with her," he replied, bursting to tell the news of the Count's

invitation.

"Very well," Gimpstedt replied, removing his pince-nez and squeezing his eyes. Cassebeer was familiar with Gimpstedt's deliber­ ative mechanism. Beginning with eye pinching and brow wrinkling, thoughtful and distant gazes and slow speech, Gimpstedt was merely borrowing time while he consulted his vast mental card catalogue. His mind, unlike the minds of ordinary forgetful creatures, was composed oftens upon tens ofthousands oflittle index cards on which author,

title, and annotation were neatly printed, accompanied by judgments and valuations which he appended, having consulted in fact all the books to which he made reference. The prodigious Gimpstedt was

warming to the subject. "Giorgione, is it? Well, then, you must have our own Von Bode's study ofthe 'Portrait of a Venetian Nobleman' in the Altman Collection-if only out of courtesy. I am sure the Venetian nobleman was no virgin, but still it is by our own Von Bode. And then the volumes by Frizzoni. Several tendentious and opinionated essays by that interloper Berenson, but still suggestive and not to be ignored, even if he's good for little more than a general viewpoint of the period.

Camavitto? No. But most certainly, indeed most certainly, the second edition of V asari' s Lives, the edition ofl568. It contains much that he learned after another visit to Venice in 1566. Most assuredly Vasari.

And then, dry though it is, a mere inventory but useful in its way,

Marcantonio Michiel's Notizia. These should start you." Gimpstedt smiled knowingly. Indeed he did know. He knew all the complexities. A

good librarian, an even greater bibliographer, he knew the controversy surrounding the name and production of Giorgione da Castelfranco, born during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, dead in the Venice

plague of 1511 or dead of a broken heart in 1510, but most assuredly dead in either the dramatic thirty-third year of his life or the more

pedestrian and unmystical thirty-fourth.

Gimpstedt disappeared and left Cassebeer to make himself com­ fortable at one of the vast oak desks which filled the library. An hour later he returned with an assistant and put down before Cassebeer some 8S

twenty volumes, several illustrated with engravings of the pictures in question, others, many fewer, with early photographs of the works. The remainder of the day-that is from ten-thirty in the morning, when

Gimpstedt had returned, until the late afternoon, when the west light began to wane-Cassebeer applied himself. During those hours he requested other volumes, principal sources about the Bellinis and Titian, the former having been colleagues and teachers of Giorgione's youth, the latter a young disciple-younger by some ten years-of the mature Giorgione. Hans had begun to draw certain conclusions.

Clearly, most assuredly, though he had not seen the Virgin in question, he already had doubts that she was painted by Giorgioneor if she was, neither his judgment nor knowledge would ever be suf­ ficient to demonstrate her provenance. It was indisputable, he knew, that the Virgin and the events of her life were a favorite subject of the artist; that Giorgione, like the Bellinis, was charmed by the intense loyalty of her life and work; that her glow and passion came from the inside; and that Giorgione, master as he was of what was regarded by Vasari as "the modern style," had managed to give her the radiance of pearls rather than the glitter of diamonds. Giorgione was the master of a soft and harmonic internality, whereas the Bellini, in Vasari' s cutting­ Iy unsympathetic phrase, was "crude, dry, and forced." He knew, then, something about his artist, but he knew that Giorgione had been so beloved and honored in his abbreviated life that no one had taken the trouble to record with matter-of factness that he had painted such and -

such a picture, that his workshop had so many artists by name, that these attended him, applied their hands to backgrounds because the artist preferred the subject or to anatomical appendages because the

artist preferred to detail the grand motions. In a word, nothing was known about how Giorgione worked and as a result, now, four centuries

and a bit after his death, the warring scholars took the extreme posi­

tions, crediting his hand with either too few or too many masterpieces. It would be impossible to know if the Count's Virgin were by Giorgione and most certainly the Count, already behaving like the owner of uncertain goods, had fallen into the familiar habit of speaking of "my

Giorgione." Of one thing alone the Count could be certain-that he was authentically Count von Preissendorf-but his Virgin might not be by Giorgione da Castel franco.

86

Cassebeer was not in the least alarmed by the state of Giorgione

scholarship. Finally, it didn't matter to him. What mattered only was that the work was a genuine work of the period, that it was a work by a Venetian master of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, that it bore the marks of the incomparable Giorgione, that its subject was wasting from inattention and ingratitude, and that he, Hans Cassebeer, was being asked to put things right. A fake, a vulgar copy, would have bored him. Since he was without avarice, much less cupidity, he could not have been bribed to make a crooked path straight, but whether the work was a contemporary copy, the work of another hand, the work of many hands-the left hand of Giorgione and the right hand of Titian­ a work by Titian ascribed to Giorgione, or simply a work fought over by

scholars constantly changing their minds as they struggled to feel their way back into the Renaissance did not matter to him. He was a restor­

ative artist; he was a member of the atelier of Giorgione or, as he later

hoped, of Rembrandt, whom he adored, or of Delacroix, whom he had just discovered. He was an itinerant, a vagabond of the painting arts, who had brushes and pigments for all works, and that flexibility of spirit which is genuine to craftsmen who lack the temperament to be creative in their own right. Who needs, he had taught himself to say, another second-rate painter when the world needs first-rate restorers to conserve and perpetuate?

The next morning Hans called Lazare Kastein and his secretary ar­ ranged that he should present himself at the dealer's home the following afternoon at three. He was somewhat put off by the secretary's manner for when he mentioned the purpose of his call, the young man-and Hans mistook his rudeness for youth rather than any more serious mal­

adjustment-had snorted and referred to him no longer as Herr Casse­ beer, but as a workman would be addressed, simply as Cassebeer.

4

Punctually the following day at the agreed hour, Hans Cassebeer ap­ peared and a houseman answered the bell. Cassebeer entered a generous waiting room appointed with furniture which he recognized to have affinities with the still popular Jugendstil movement and Art Nouveau: chairs whose back rests reminded him of drowning Ophelias, and desk tables decorated with mortal and decadent conceits (entwined 87

snakes and ivy), a settee covered in mottled green leather, and ink sets curlicued with leaves and flowers, pots iridescent and opaline, lamps

faceted with cut chips of colored glass. But the walls

...

the walls were

indescribable: alternate panels of cut velvet and mahogany, and upon each velvet panel was hung a picture-a still-life by Cezanne, a Moroccan landscape by the dead soldier Macke, a ballet dancer of

Degas, and many more, some by artists he did not know (a vivid cavalier, for instance, in incredible color by a Polish artist, he imagined, or Rus­ sian perhaps?); one by Egon Schiele. He sat waiting for half an hour.

A young man, his youth was palpable, with a delicate mouth and his hair in either natural or enforced curls-put his head through the door and examined Hans from foot to head-beginning with his boots and ending with his straight black hair (indeed, Cassebeer thought, from foot to head; what a curious young man, he scoffed++and then with­

drew, closing the door silently, without saying anything.

A few minutes later he heard laughter, marvelous laughter, the sound of tumbling gaiety, perfumed like the laughter of radiant women, and the double doors were thrown open and the most beautiful woman he had ever seen entered through the doors, held open obediently by a

startlingly unattractive middle-aged man. The woman dominated the room, but her attendant spoke. "Good of you to come, Herr Cassebeer. I am Kastein." Cassebeer rose and shook the man's damp palm. "Thank you for inviting me," Hans replied politely. The woman had taken up a position behind Cassebeer, her hands resting on the back of the settee, one to either side of his head, and a single rose index finger scratched at the yellow damask with which the settee was covered. "And me, dear Kastein, what of me?" she rebuked with a renewal of laughter, "He's so of very funny," she said to Cassebeer, as ifto explain Kastein's neglect her presence. "Forgive me. My dear Cassebeer, I have the pleasure of presenting you to the redoubtable and singular Lily Schwann, singer, dancer, friend of Reinhardt and Jannings, and my adored beauty, whom I love most tenderly and faithfully." Kastein bowed toward his mistress, and she acknowledged his introduction with a toss of her head, raising her chin to reveal that most fatal of beauties, a long and slender and magnificent neck on which glittered a thin strand of diamonds.

Hans Cassebeer, flustered by the intimacies unfolded in his presence,

bowed and kissed her hand, his lips closing over the scent which rose 88

from her white knuckles. He lingered a moment, her hand grazed his

hair, and he lifted his head, stepped back, and bowed once more as

though having completed a reverence to royalty Dear Herr Cassebeer, it has been agreeable meeting you, and I am certain we shall meet again." She smiled and her even teeth parted once more in a smile. She was all energy and joy. As she passed Kastein, who held the door open for her, she brushed his forehead with her lips and her hand rested a moment on his shoulder. She whispered something .

••

which Cassebeer did not hear, but her eyes moved back to him and nar­

rowed for an instant. The door closed and they were alone. Kastein re­

turned to the settee and invited Cassebeer to make himself comfortable.

"The Count tells me he believes you have the gifts of the witch,"

Kastein began peremptorily.

"Me? A witch?" Cassebeer replied quizzically, though not at all

offended.

"Indeed, the witch. Or shall I say, more accurately, witch in the

making. You've not joined the coven, but you will, he believes. Let me be precise. We all regard-we dealers in art, we collectors of art-we all regard restorers as witches. You've heard of Prezniewski, the Pole, the dean of restorers, the dean of witches? No? Excellent. That proves the

point. Prezniewski is a true witch. No one has heard of him. No one has met him, but I can tell you something: he is the Raphael master.

Raphael is his guardian demon. He has restored virtually all the Raphaels in the world, but no one has met him. The first Raphael which he touched, more than forty years ago now, was brought to his sister by an old Italian Prince in whose family collection it had been for more than three hundred years-a fabulous portrait, and one the Prince had adored since his childhood. Indeed, he confessed he could find no one in

the world whose majesty and arrogance equaled that of the young cavalier and, lacking brothers and sisters, he had made that young

gentleman his consort and friend, often taking counsel with him. The Prince was, of course, quite insane. Rather like the fairy tale of the Princess and the magic mirror, he looked to his Raphael to requite his own diabolic self-infatuation.

"One day, late in the dry summer of 1877, when the fields were

parched, the roads of the north dusty, his country estate infested with mice and locusts, the Prince observed that his Raphael had begun to 89

peel. The greens in the background of the canvas, and the rose pinks in the doublet of the cavalier, obviously responsive to the deadly sun of that summer, gave up their struggle to adhere and began to peel away. The darker colors, the shining blacks of night which surrounded the

subject,

held firm; only the lighter areas were afflicted. Prezniewski had settled in Florence with his sister several months earlier and had busied himself with small jobs of cleaning and freshening some mannerist in

pictures

the Pitti. He had heard of the Prince's predicament and knew, since he was the

only restorer in Florence at the time, that the Prince would seek him out. In due course, the Prince his card and that

presented

requested

Prezniewski visit him at his estate. Prezniewski sent his sister with a brief but uncompromising message. He would come, but

only on the condition that he met no one, that he was neither seen nor interviewed, that the picture be placed in an empty room from which all

light but that from a single window had been excluded, and that, should he undertake

to restore the work, he be allowed to determine the hours and the fee

without negotiation. The Prince, for obvious reasons, had no choice but to accept.

••

Prieznewski worked never more than three hours a day, arriving by

coach in the late afternoon and departing at nightfall. The restoration was

completed in seven months, and the Prince was charged a

considerable sum which was still modest for the achievement. The Prince returned to his beloved and Prezniewski was launched. What was

it, all this shrouding and mystery? We modems would call it style,

perhaps salesmanship, but I think it was something else. The restorer's art is alchemical. Is it any different from the distillation of gold to be able to make a Rembrandt cloak, a Virgin's drapery, the green of a velvet not simply resemble but resume the actual life of the work? The restorer is a vitalizer, a spiritual elixir of culture, and hence a witch. So, my dear fellow, I ask you, are you on your road to witchcraft?"

Cassebeer had listened to Kastein's story with utter fascination; for he could not hel p but regard Prezniewski as a pretentious Pole and

Kastein as a necromancer who undoubtedly loved the drama of pictures

pictures themselves. But Kastein spoke with a spittled rapidity and enthusiasm which could not but impress the lean and somewhat austere young Cassebeer. When Kastein stopped, Casse­ more than he loved the

beer's eyes widened in amazement, for he realized at that instant, then.

90

for the first time, that the restoration to which he had been called was

really the beginning of a new life, that he had ascended to maturity. All the precocities of childish talents and pursuits, the idle fantasies of self­ glorification, indeed his near self-immolation before the Virgin of the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Museum were simply diversions preceding adulthood. But here before him, this warted, sad face, speaking to the rhythm of moving hands, expressive and veined like a violinist, was beckoning him into manhood.

Are you ready to assume your secret vocation, young Cassebeer?" "

Kastein asked after a reasonable silence.

"I think I am," Cassebeer replied gravely.

"Splendid. Look over your shoulder." Cassebeer obeyed and saw, to the right of the draperied window, a music stand on which stood what he took to be a small picture, covered with a heavy silk shawl rosetted with pink and yellow flowers. He returned to Kastein's glowing smile, "Yes, that's it. Examine it. Be a professional and examine it. Let's have your opinion."

Cassebeer approached the stand and lifted the edge of the shawl, rolling the fabric tentatively over his index finger, not daring to make contact with the surface of the picture. At first he saw the brownish­ black stones of an interior floor, then the drapery of her robe, rose-red, the window to her right, the glazed landscape beyond, miniaturized and detailed, but set off in the distance; and the Child, her finger touching his toe, not holding it, not caressing it, but merely in contact, the wrinkled body, the small head with curly, matted hair; her tightened bodice of rich green velvet, bordered with an intricately stitched yellow silk, the cream-white neck, the face of unearthly gravity and beauty, her hair invisible beneath a yellow head -covering which dropped down about her shoulders.

"Not a large picture. So much there and so little," Cassebeer spoke, amazement dropping his voice to a whisper. "A cabinet picture. He was

fond of them. He painted so few that scholars accredit, perhaps because he rarely sought large commissions. But I don't know. It seems so unlike

Giorgione to redo a picture. It's a version of two pictures, I should think.

The intimate ease of the portrait reminds me of the 'Madonna with a Book' at the Oxford Ashmolean, yet the hieratic sadness of the face and

the position of the Child are so much like the Bergamo 'Virgin.' But my 91

opinion is really worthless, Herr Kastein. I'm not a Giorgione expert.

I'm not an expert at all. I trust one thing, however. My instinct. My instinct says it looks right. It looks the period, the mood, the grace of the time. It's nothing but north Italian. It's nothing but the grand Renais­ sance. And why not Giorgione? Why not? Proto-Giorgione? Mezzo­ Giorgione? But not mock-Giorgione, not a fake. Absolutely not. There are none of the trivializing gestures of the fake-not the dullness of a dreary fake nor the creative effusion of an original fake. Whether it's real. real Giorgione who could ever tell? Certainly not I. But one thing is certain. The picture's filthy and unless something's done soon, the poor Madonna is going to look like a ragpicker in a few more decades. She needs a cleaning. So does the Child. He looks sickly already. So there.

A cleaning first of all. Some caretaking in the corners, filling in the drapery, and most of all serious restoration on the Virgin's face. Well, you know already. The paint is lifting. It needs to be rebound and sealed."

Cassebeer paused. He stood back from the little picture, resting his

weight on his right leg, his back curved, his head tilted to the left, finger to his lips, and smiled at his Giorgione.

"Such a joy, this picture." Kastein had come up behind him. "You will do it, my boy?" "

Yes. I will do it.

"

"And how much time do you think it should take?"

"Did Prezniewski tell the Prince?" Cassebeer replied, inspired.

"Of course, of course." Kastein was delighted. He deserved the

reproof, but he was delighted nonetheless. "And compensation?

Certainly, we can wait and see when it's done, since you can't estimate the time it will take." Kastein had regained the initiative, but Cassebeer was indifferent. He was still absorbed by the picture.

"Now, then, Herr Kastein, what will I need? Cotton, the finest cotton.

Surgical sticks, no more than a half inch in width, preferably round, not flat depressants. And the cleaner? Alcohol and perhaps linseed oil. That should begin the work. When the cleaning is done, then we can see what we have. I can see the picture was varnished much later than it was painted, very much later. One hopes it isn't copal (nearly insolvent, you know). I doubt it. More likely Dammar resin or mastic. Did you know, Herr Kastein, that mastic comes from trees grown on the Greek island 93

of Chios?" Cassebeer was pleased with himself. The Giorgione was

filling him with a kind of life he had rarely known, a sort of confidence and conviction which all but overwhelmed his tentativeness with an

authority he had almost despaired of possessing.

Kastein had been making notes while Cassebeer spoke, expecting no doubt a much longer list of desiderata, but Cassebeer in fact still knew only the rudiments of his craft, and what he knew he had already re­ vealed. With a swab of cotton and a mild solvent he could take care of

much of the visible problem, but while he was about that slow and

painstaking task he would be learning more. He intended later that week to meet with a disciple of Max Pettenkofer, a chemist from the University of Munich who had developed several patented techniques for restoring surfaces of Old Master paintings, and one or two other Berlin cognescenti who possessed, he hoped, bits and pieces of the alchemical art. He vowed to make himself the equal of the Giorgione when the time came. He worried most about his Virgin's face. He could see, beneath her right eyelid and near the hairline, slight blisterings of paint; it would be necessary, he thought, to see beneath to determine whether that almond cream was overpainting or by the master's hand.

That would be the test-the Virgin's face.

"When will it be convenient for me to begin?" Cassebeer asked, returning the shawl to the picture's face and reluctantly turning back to Kastein.

"Tomorrow, I should think." .•

And where? At your gallery?"

••

No. Too exposed. Here, here would be best," Kastein replied rumi­

natively. "It's quiet, off the street. I'm paranoid aboutthe best, you know. These Cezannes and Kandinskys, my little treasures-not valu­

able by general standards, but my treasures. I don't like them visited.

And the Giorgione, our Giorgione, how much more reason for

protecting it from the merchant's gaze. No. No. Right here."

"Excellent," Cassebeer responded drily. It seemed to him quite appropriate.

"Upstairs in Madame Schwarm's dressing room. A lovely room and excellent north light. It will be readied for you tomorrow. Shall we say eleven in the morning?"

Cassebeer was momentarily shocked. It did not seem appropriate.

The invasion of odors and dust, he thought. A curious way to regard 94

such an extraordinary woman, entering her rooms, setting up tables and

easels, leaving open bottles and jars, filthy cleaning swabs, as if putting the surgery next to the nursery. But, he temporized, the unguents of his

trade would be more than offset by the perfumes of Madame Schwann.

And perhaps she would, he allowed himself to think

...

perhaps

Madame Schwarm would one day watch him at his art.

5 The following morning, Cassebeer presented himself once more at the home of Lazare Kastein. The butler passed him to the young man, and

the young man, his flannels flapping against his ankles, preceded him up the stairs, drifting from one side of the spacious staircase to the other as if, Cassebeer thought, to attract his attention. When they arrived at

the second floor, he turned to the right and at the end of the corridor

opened the doors of a sitting room beyond which, through cascades of drapery, he could see the sun-drenched dressing room.

The little suite contained no bedroom, and Cassebeer surmised,

embarrassed by his imagination, that the beautiful woman was obliged to walk down that somber corridor to the master bedroom which he

assumed to be in the other wing of the house. The little sitting room was

furnished in shades of green, with walls the deep green of emeralds and

furniture the azure of the Mediterranean, while the dressing room

unpredictably severe. Cassebeer had expected light and air, sky blues and rose. The room, however, was dominated by gray, mat gray becoming silver; the chaise longue alone was covered in another color, a textured mauve silk. The only dazzlement of color was a grotesque portrait of the beautiful woman by one of those Munich artists so much in vogue since the war-her face panels of green, her cheeks outlined in strong black lirles, her hat a layering of colors, and the background a floral pattern of crudely painted blue and red anemones. The room un­ doubtedly belonged to Lily Schwann for it breathed of her; its aspect was one of majestic formality: the carpet a rich tapestry, the dressing table a cabinet of mirrors before which rested a silver tray holding a half-dozen opalescent vials and a gold-handled brush from which several strands of hair glistened in the morning light.

There, amid the refinements of her dressing room, stood the music stand, and upon it the beshawled Virgin of Giorgione.

The young man motioned Hans into the room. He had not yet spoken. was

9S

••

Herr Cassebeer," he began, returning to refinement, "this house wel­

comes you. If you should wish me,

ring twice." He motioned to the bro­ caded sash which hung near the dressing table. "My name is Rolf, Rolf Diamant. I should be pleased to assist you." As he said the last, he exaggerated, as though momentarily distracted from his succulence.

His eye had caught something. With an irritated groan, he went behind the chaise and withdrew a long white stocking, crumpled it, and put it into his pocket. "Madame Schwann is sometimes scandalous," he smirked. "Good day to you, Herr Cassebeer."

The remainder of that first day and the day which followed, Hans Cassebeer applied himself to a very close examination of the picture. He had prepared an exact tracing of the work, dividing its surface into quadrants an inch square; within each square, in a minuscule hand, he detailed, in signs and symbols of his own devising, his observations on the condition of the painting. A magnificatory loop which he held to his right eye and passed with snail-like slowness over the picture's surface gradually revealed to him its texture and touch. With practice, he felt certain, he would be able to mime the master's hand.

Cassebeer's method of self-education, scarcely intelligible to the

layman, was hardly conventional even for professional restorers. But then Cassebeer was not a professional restorer. He was not a neat gentleman with gartered sleeves and trimmed mustache conducting his craft like a bank clerk. He was Hans Cassebeer, swollen with the spoils of destiny.

By the third day, the work of inspection and annotation was done and he arranged to have the painting photographed to document its exact condition before he began his work. He did sectional photographs which he enlarged, and then constructed a composite photograph which trans­ formed the intimate votive painting to the scale of a mantel portrait. He was angered by this necessity, for it seemed to him a vandalization of the painting, but he had no choice. That was the procedure, the procedure of a new science and it was called for in all the manuals he had con­ sulted. Of course the enlarged photographs were grainy and coarse, but

they endowed the early sixteenth-century with a sepia cast which enabled Hans to discriminate little abrasions virtually invisible to the naked eye. He chafed at science, as witches ought, but he took advantage of it nonetheless.

96

The second week, having passed Sunday in a solitary walk through

the public park near his home, wrapped in the warmth of late spring, he

ready to begin the work of hands. The swabbing began with the lower right patch he had first uncovered in Kastein's presence: beneath the grime of centuries emerged a loamy richness, into which one could was

almost put one's finger and know for certain that one would find there

the good slithering worms of the earth. He had been working in a neatly

described rectangle, perhaps two inches in length by an inch and a

quarter-so tiny, so very tiny. Utterly concentrated, his eyes narrowed upon the patch of umbrous flooring. Only the tip of the Virgin's toe, shrouded by drapery, extended into the rectangle of his labors.

It was past four in the afternoon. He had worked nearly five hours without an interruption. He stood up from the painting, threw back his arms to stretch-and heard a low

laugh from the dressing room. The

younger Hans Cassebeer would have jumped, alarmed. In his childhood he had arranged reality in such a way as to prevent surprise; one

imagines, for that reason as much as for any, he had passed his youth safely but without a significant measure of joy. Joy is so often at the heart of danger (or is it risk?). In any case Cassebeer had avoided danger by taking no chances, but consequently had left himself unprepared for loud noises, unreasonable cries and shouts, even unanticipated laughter. When these occurred-daily, one would think-his face would whiten, his skin stiffen with fright, his palms itch and perspire, and he would retreat abashed to his room in the Cassebeer household where familiar things, all inanimate and in place, would receive and restore him. But at this moment, young Cassebeer was unafraid­

indeed, delighted by the low rumble of laughter. Here he was, a man in his early twenties, tall, with hair cut like a monk's, falling in bangs over his forehead, with intelligent gray eyes, a remarkably strong nose (more like that of an Italian condottiere than the son of a middle-class

Prussian), and a warm, full mouth ("sensuous," his married sister had called it) which had embraced no flesh but his own. He was a virgin like the Virgin, but unlike her he had no reason to remain one, although he

had not devised that sector of reality with anything resembling the care

with which he had prepared himself against loud noises and cries.

Hans Cassebeer did not turn to face the laughter or its origin. He con­ tinued to inspect the work of the day, but his hands had dropped to his 97

sides and his fingers splayed as he rubbed his pant leg. A feeling of elated prescience suffused him, as though the rose-purple of dawn was at last penetrating night blackness and turning time from resentment to

blushing day. The laughter continued, pleasant, mocking, controlled.

"Forgive me. Cassebeer," she said at last, laughter licking the syllables of her apology.

"How long have you been watching me?" he asked, not turning.

"Today?" she replied.

"You have been here before?"

"Several times, last week and yesterday."

"That's not at all fair, Madame," Cassebeer chided, not yetturning,

although his head had moved in her direction. He felt strangely masterful. She had watched him unrevealed, but he had done splen­ didly. His workmanship and technique were superb, of that he had no doubt; but then she would not have estimated his workmanship, only the conduct of the worker. And in that, too, he had excelled. He was well turned out, his suit was stylish, his tie bright, his shoes polished. Such externals scarcely interested Cassebeer, but he donned them easily and without fuss. He did not own many clothes, but what he owned he had

bought carefully, with the same thoughtful self-possession with which he did everything--neither excessive nor abject. And his conduct during

the previous days had been exemplary. He neither pouted nor scowled.

He did not chafe or swear. He worked quietly, calmly, efficiently. Of all

this he was certain.

"Fair fair. Fairness has nothing to do with it. Moreover, young man, I am not given to fairness. Fairness has no place in my scheme of ,

things." She had lit a cigarette. He heard a series of rapid taps and then smelled the smoke. He turned and passed through the doorwell which

separated the dressing room from the sitting room. For the first time, Cassebeer permitted himself to look at Lily Schwann. He took her extended hand, kissed it, and sat down in the armchair that fronted a low table separating him from the mauve chaise on which she reclined.

For several moments, neither Cassebeer nor Madame Schwann

spoke. Cassebeer fidgeted, crossing and uncrossing his legs, locating a spot on his jacket front and pecking at it with his index finger, glancing from picture to picture in the room-in effect, avoiding the obvious fact that he had joined this extraordinary woman, the mistress of his 98

employer, in her own sitting room, and without so much as an invitation to do so. "I'm afraid I've been precipitous, Madame," Cassebeer said at last and stood up.

"Not at all. Do sit down. Since you have sat down already, why not

remain seated? It's all quite harmless."

Cassebeer blushed. "Yes, harmless, isn't it?" He confirmed her comment and then, brightening, asked, "Do you enjoy pictures,

Madame?"

"Yes, in a way I enjoy pictures. Not all pictures. Pictures of me, first of all. That Kirchner in the dressing room. I adore it. It is very much my

spirit. Imperious, outrageous, ugly, and beautiful. Don't you find me both ugly and beautiful?"

"You, Madame, ugly? No, Madame, you are exceptionally beautiful.

"

"But you don't know me at all, Cassebeer. I am superficially beau­ tiful. It all works. You see," and suddenly she wriggled her arm across her breast and it shivered toward him, her hand coming to rest at the

edge of the table. If she extended her finger, a red nail could touch his knee. She laughed again, throwing back her head. Her hair, parted in the middle, flew back and then settled around her small ears, curling beneath her chin. "Oh, Cassebeer. It all works, but it works by itself. It wriggles and swivels and turns and moves like a mechanical device. I sing marvelously. I charm. I taunt. I delight. But I should tell you, my friend, that my face is quite green, quite purple, quite gray as the Kirchner says it is. In fact, I am very beautiful, but I have a quite repul­ sive soul."

"Madame, I fmd all this a bit self-indulgent. If this is the way you charm in late afternoons, you will find me uncompromising. I am, after

all, only a simple restorer and, I should remind you, the employee of your friend Herr Kastein." The last was unnecessary, but Cassebeer was

interested in learning her response.

"Yes, I'm afraid you're right. Am I simply bored? Isuppose that's the case. Bored and feckless. The truth is I dislike

pictures, Kastein wearies

me, and you, young man, are, as you say, only a simple restorer." She

snuffed her cigarette, rose up from the chaise, and left the room, her

long dress floating behind her.

It was some moments before the perfume settled in the room.

99

Cassebeer replaced the coverlet over the Virgin and departed for the

day.

6 The following morning when Cassebeer arrived, he discovered Lazare

Kastein seated quietly in the boudoir, sipping coffee. It was the first time that Kastein had visited him since he had been engaged. He took it as a matter of course and extended his hand to

greet his employer, but it

was waved aside and Cassebeer was motioned to a chair

facing Kastein.

"Draw your chair closer, young man," Kastein ordered. "Closer still.

I want your knees to touch mine. I want to feel your breath as I talk to

you."

Cassebeer found the instruction strange, but did as he was asked,

drawing his chair so close that he felt Kastein's puffy kneecap against his shinbone. Kastein looked at him for a moment, passing his hazel eyes over Cassebeer's face, arching his bushy black brows in confusion as though seeking out some mark to which he might address himself.

"Now let me be direct and outspoken with you, young man. I am sure you know nothing of this. Yes, indeed, I am sure of it. Your face is too open, too unconcealed for any kind of treachery. Forgive me for using that vulgar word, that contemptible word, but I deal in treachery, you see." He began to wander, his voice was dry and rasping, and drops of spittle collected at his lips. "Yes, treachery, a whole life of treachery, mine. But that's the case. We become used to it. We, yes, we. No, not what you think. We-the universal we of my race-are used to

treachery. And myself most particularly." His voice was parched and strained. He reached for his coffee, swilled it, and rinsed his mouth, almost gargling the brownish mixture to relieve his tenseness. "Yes. Do you think, my young friend, that being an educated Jew from Riga and studying in the land of Czar Nicholas III was, in fact, a pleasure? Not at

all. I knew all the great collectors, Shuikov for instance. I even helped him procure one or two pictures, but would you believe, notwithstanding all his infl uence, I was ordered out of the country. Ordered out. mind you, because I refused to return money to the Grand Duke, the Czar's nephew, when he grew tired of a Rembrandt drawing I had purchased

for him at great expense. One morning I was awakened and told I had two hours to pack and leave the country. Whatever could fill two valises 100

was all I was allowed to take. I left all my

personal belongings, pictures

of my parents, memorabilia-and I filled my two valises with drawings and canvases cut from their frames. That little treachery cost me a fortune. Paris next. I was there until the war began and then I fled. The

French thought I was a German. What did they know of Kastein? I kept

saying Riga and they kept saying Germany. Off to Switzerland, and the contents of my gallery were sold at public auction like the good Kahn­ weiler. Another stupid treachery. Yes, my friend, Jews don't travel.

They wander, they flee, but they don't travel. So now I'm in Berlin. I've been here since 1917, and I like this country and I like this city and I love that woman. Yes. Now you see. It comes around to that, doesn't it? My love of Lily Schwann. She visits you now and then, doesn't she? She's fantastic, marvelous, but she is capable of enormous treachery. Yes, treachery." The words gathered force and the spittle edged through the gaps in his teeth, collecting in little dots about his full lips. "Ah, what's the use? You understand, Cassebeer. You must be merciful. You really must be."

"My God, Herr Kastein," Cassebeer said, stunned by his pitiable revelations. "How can you imagine such a thing, such monstrousness?

No, my good sir, not me. You may be certain I shall initiate nothing. And you do Madame Schwann an injustice. She has visited me once that I

know of, once, and I am certain, after that visit and this conversation,

that she will not visit me again-not without you, most assuredly not without you."

The conversation subsided and Kastein returned to his gloomy intro­

spection, passing his hand over his forehead, and looking about the bright room with such dark eyes that it seemed wherever he turned his head there was a momentary darkness. Not once, however, had his eyes come to rest on the music stand and the shrouded

Virgin.

After a quarter hour of silence Cassebeer stood up and went into the sunlit dressing room and removed the covering from the Giorgione,

hoping to attract Kastein's attention. When he turned back, his face molded into a smile, Kastein was gone. Cassebeer rang for Rolf

Diamant to remove the coffee implements. When the young man arrived he began immediately to rearrange the furniture, then withdrew

from under the chaise on which Kastein had been seated, a small oblong

lacquer box.

101

"Did Herr Kastein show you these?"

Cassebeer had not noticed the box. "No. He must have forgotten."

"Perhaps he did not intend to show you. They're quite extraordinary.

Contemporary dueling pistols with remarkable pedigrees."

7 Cassebeer had been working on the Giorgione for more than a month.

The cleaning was virtually completed, although he knew that there was at least another month, perhaps two months, of the most exacting labor:

the lifting and replacement of the blistered area and the retouching of the corners constituted the principal and most delicate of operations.

He had become accustomed to working slowly, deliberating before con­

testing a new area, reflecting after it was completed, noting the quality of the dirt removed, examining its possible origin, assessing the response of various pigments to the univocal assault of time. In other words, Cassebeer was not simply restoring his Giorgione but acquiring experience and information that would serve him in the years to come.

The hour with Lily Schwann was nearly forgotten, forsworn for the benefit of fantasy, and after more than ten days had passed without her return, even fantasy evaporated, replaced by the insistent reality of the Virgin and her Babe. Kastein's panicked plea, however, was more diffi­ cult to forget.

It was a murky afternoon in July, more than seven weeks after Cassebeer had begun his work, that Lily Schwann reappeared. He sus­ pected her presence, for when he arrived in her dressing room that morning he observed that a rose had been placed in a bud vase on the vanity table. It was not the apparition of the rose-an unspectacular bud and not inconsistent with the devotional quality of her boudoir, but Cassebeer had seen no flower there before, not a single rose, not even a lily, which would have been Kastein's obvious votive offering to his mistress. No. He immediately recognized the invention of Lily Schwann herself. You see, the week before, in the course of cleaning the canvas of Giorgione, Cassebeer had uncovered a remarkable concealment. On the pediment to the left of the Virgin's draperied feet, there upon the cold interior floor, his cleaning had revealed the presence of a single rose blossom, conventional symbol of the Virgin, her sacrificial innocence, animadversion to the destiny of her child. "Madame Schwarm,' he 102

thought immediately. It was she who had offered the rose to the Virgin.

He smelled the rose and began his labors. Later in the afternoon, Rolf paid him a visit and brought him, as had become his habit, a glass of wine. Hans thanked him cordially, although he was disappointed that it was he who had knocked and entered.

"Who," Cassebeer asked, continuing to work, "favors roses?" It was

oblique question, but one he felt confident the intently observant

an

Rolf Diamant would be able to answer.

"No one," he replied, blushing, "no one you would recognize."

"What does that mean ? You are sometimes so very obscure."

"Well, not intentionally, Herr Cassebeer, not intentionally. What I Kastein, he despises flowers. He says they use up human air. And Madame Schwann, her mean is that I don't know for certain. Not Herr

tastes run to everything. I don't know for certain. I, I honor roses."

"Could it have been you?" Cassebeer turned smiling.

"It could have been," Rolf replied slowly, "but then it wasn't. Excuse me, I have to go." Rolf stood up, estimated Cassebeer's smiling face,

and noted the mockery which had accented his question. He began to

dislike Cassebeer. He wasn't worth it, he thought, and departed.

An hour passed. The light of the late summer day, flattened and

shimmering in the heat, had tired Cassebeer, and he flung himself down Lily Schwarm's settee. He drank off the glass of purplish claret in a single gulp, flushed, and closed his eyes. He heard no laughter. A hand passed over his head and a finger stroked the down of his hair passing to the rim line of his shirt. He shuddered with pleasure, the sharpened nail scratching at his neck. The perfume enlivened the air and his face turned upward, her lips passing down to his, touching them gently, touching them again, kissing first his lips, then an eyelid, passing down the river of his eyebrows, returning to his lips. Young Cassebeer lifted his arms and grasped her shoulders, drawing her around to him, drawing her down to him. She came to her knees before him, and he held her head, kissing her hair, and she introduced him to voracious lips. She fell back, her body falling at the foot of the music stand which held the painting and he, unknowing, found by the instinct of the race the precious passages of her body where, with tongue and hand guided by her knowing shivers, he returned her to satiety.

It was late, almost evening, beyond his hour of departure when they

on

103

recovered and Hans kissed Lily a final kiss, stood up from the floor, and

made his way down the rear passage of the house, beyond the closed door of the kitchen, out into the early evening. As he passed into the street he saw an old lady crying cut flowers from a cart. He would have

wished to buy a rose to take home to his room, but he noted that the heat had curled and withered them and petals were falling from too many buds. He remembered then that he had not asked, in all that anguish of

love, whether it was Lily Schwarm who had brought the rose to the

Virgin.

8

The Virgin of Giorgione received only desultory attention from Casse­ beer during the days that followed the beginning of his romance with

Lily Schwann. It was exceedingly difficult to work with sustained atten­ tion for no sooner had he completed his preparations, laying out his swabbings, examining the terrain already traversed, preparing the first moves of the day, than Lily might appear and, if he succeeded in re­ turning to his work before late afternoon when ordinarily he would be finished for the day, he would have to begin again, to recommence as though it were morning rather than dusk. But on other days, when she did not favor mornings for their trysting, it would be no easier, for whether the hour was early afternoon or three 0' clock or teatime, the effect would be the same-work would be broken off, patching and blotchings of the small picture, islands of luminous color surrounded by the murky seas of centuries would have to wait, lacking causeways to peninsulas already cleared. And their lovemaking had progressed from passionate embraces upon lounge and carpet to easy disrobing and mutual assents. They talked little of anything but their pleasure, Cassebeer soliciting her satisfaction and Lily assuring him of his splendid virility-feeling his arms, pinching his breasts, sucking particular nodes of flesh until they rose in little bumps, exploring his body as though it were the terra incognita of ancient travelers, except that unlike those intrepid explorers, she had no sense of danger. She did not even seem to fear Kastein.

Cassebeer would ask if she had locked the door and she would shake her head that she had not. Once she replied, "It wouldn't matter," 104

which Cassebeer took to mean that she had no concern whether Kastein knew or not. Cassebeer was delighted at her indifference, interpreting it as an affirmation of her satisfaction with him. Yet nonetheless he

aspired to a life calling and could not take the risk of being discovered and denounced before he finished his work. At least, he calculated, if

Kastein discovered their romance after the Giorgione was completed, he could make off with both his mistress and his achievement. Cassebeer therefore half-locked the door, turning the lock until it caught in the

jamb without falling fully into its appointed hole, but turning it suf­ ficiently so that it would have to be banged if someone tried to enter. Lily always watched his efforts to arrange this protective ruse with amuse­ ment, waiting behind him with her arms open to embrace him when he finished and turned to meet her.

So it continued for more than ten days, and work progressed betimes.

The Giorgione was cleaned. Two months had elapsed since he had first come to Kastein's residence. He had learned

enormously about the two

most important things in the world, love and work. In both he was con­

tent and fulfilled. He intended the following day to invite Kastein to

inspect the Giorgione and to deliberate with him whether he should press further-add paint to an abraded area, perhaps a half centimeter overall, which would be hardly noticeable to any but a scrupulously attentive eye, and touch up one scuffed edge nearly lost in the distant landscape which looked in upon the seated Virgin in the upper right­ hand corner-or declare the work fully restored and ready for delivery and exhibition. (It should be noted that Count von Preissendorf hoped to unveil his Giorgione in September, at an exhibition of his collection in the provincial museum of Posen near which his family maintained their ancestral country home.)

9

At eleven 0' clock the following morning Hans Cassebeer entered the boudoir where he proposed to invite Kastein to an inspection. He hoped that Lily Schwann would be there, that she had not dressed quickly

enough and would be awaiting him, lazily drawing a stocking over an outstretched leg, giving him permission to hug her thighs and fasten the snap. Or perhaps, hearing him approach (and he made a point of lOS

whistling a tune as he reached the top of the landing and turned to the right in the direction of his atelier), she would emerge from the bath­ room adjacent to the boudoir and advance toward him, peignoir sheer and loose. He entered the boudoir and for the first time turned the lock

completely behind him. But Lily Schwarm was not there awaiting him and, though the boudoir shone with sunlight, the Virgin was no longer honored by a rose. Only the painted rose at her feet remained. He frowned-petulantly you might think, but really not so, for Cassebeer had persuaded himself that he loved Lily Schwann as much as he imagined she loved him and was quite simply annoyed that reality had confounded fantasy. Since it was his first love, authentic in its way, it seemed destined-by indulgence of sixteen hours of imagination since they had last made love--to endure forever and therefore to be con­ sidered true and trustworthy love.

All this took only a moment. No sooner had he removed his suit jacket and put on the alpaca coat in which he habitually worked than he heard a shouting in the hall. He could hear Lily's piercing laughter and Kastein's infuriated shrieks and foot stampings. Suddenly there was a banging at the door of the sitting room and he saw the handle turned back and forth with rapid, agitated motions. He threw the lock and Lily entered.

The door remained open behind her, but she ignored it. She walked about the room with an exaggerated arrogance, her back arched, her shoulders pushed forward with outrageous indifference. But her lips

quivered and an edge of swollen rosy flesh clung to the tooth that had bitten it. Lily did not turn to acknowledge Cassebeer. He was there, she was certain, but she had no intention of yielding to him and his out­ stretched arms. She came to rest before her Kirchner portrait and con­ templated it. She drew a cigarette from a beaded purse and Cassebeer hastened to light it. She did not acknowledge the gesture, but continued to face the portrait. Then with sudden, startling contempt, she ap­ proached her image and, lungs filled with smoke, she kissed the lips of the picture. The smoke rose up, enveloping both her own and the picture's face.

"It's disgusting. I loathe it," she said turning away from the picture on the wall. "His rage. Disgusting. He's in another rage. Another.

Always the same. My God." Lily Schwann did not address her exasper106

ation to Cassebeer but to the room, to the eaves of the room, to the vault of the ceiling. Her words were there, sullen and hanging in the air.

"Can I do anything, my love, anything at all?" Cassebeer ventured. "

'Love' is it? Let me tell you, Hans, severallovings do not make a love.

I wish you'd understand that, but then why should you? Kastein

understands it no better than you. Ach, you men are such contemptible idiots and, worse yet, indulgent romantics."

Cassebeer was appalled. It was clear that she had told Kastein. Why?

cruel, cruel to both of them, senseless and cruel.

"You told him?" he asked, his voice trembling with anger.

"Yes, what? Yes, of course, I told him. Why not? He always suspects me, suspects me constantly. I don't sleep around, as the street expres­ sion has it. But I have admirers, like you, Cassebeer. One lover, that's quite enough. One protector, friend, councilor, that's also quite enough. And Kastein is both, but he's dreadfully jealous. He thinks himself unworthy. He isn't, you know." Her voice thinned and she looked toward the window glinting with sunlight. "He really isn't, but he thinks he is because he's ugly and an art dealer and a Jew, and all those together aggravate him and, in the end, I am blamed." She came at that

It was senseless and

moment toward Cassebeer and rested an arm upon his shoulder on

which, for an instant, she laid her head, but then, rethinking the gesture, raised her head again and sat down heavily on the sitting- room chaise. "I'm exhausted. Sit down with me, Cassebeer?" she asked, her voice weary but imploring.

Hans Cassebeer began to pace in front of her, clasping and un­

clasping his hands. He could recognize today that he was foolish, those ancient, time-worn gestures of confusion, the wringings and c1aspings and scowlings of confused men suddenly confronted with the disarray of their amorous empires. But at that instant, for he was young and only recently become a lover, he wanted only to cover the nakedness of his confusion with the armature of a question, imagining naively that he could conceal his unpreparedness for the answer, even the right answer.

"What do you think love is, Lily Schwann? What is it? What do you think of when you seduce someone? Why did you need to have me, to make me love you? Why, tell me?" He advanced toward her and, upon an impulse, slapped her face. She withdrew from the blow, but her face stung and she lifted her hands to protect it, thinking further blows 107

would follow. At last she cried. Cassebeer was grateful for her tears. He

fell onto the chaise beside her and took her hand, stroking it.

"Hans, my friend. I deserve your anger, but it's all so foolish. You

loving me. Why? All because I made love to you? Making love is just that, making the acts of intimacy. It's not love. Pleasure and perversity, that's all. You're very handsome, dear Hans, but I don't love you.

Kastein, whom I love, is most certainly not handsome and for that reason cannot for a moment believe I love him. It's all ridiculous. I've

tried to prove it to him in so many ways, but he doesn't seem to under­

stand, ever.

"Several years ago a young Count called upon me at the theater and demanded that I accompany him to dinner. I did, since he seemed both

determined and, as events proved, a bit unbalanced. But he was nothing

compared with Kastein. All he wanted from me was the loan of a shoe, which seemed harmless enough compensation for an expensive dinner.

Some months later the shoe was returned, soiled, but with an engraved note of thanks. It appears the Count made use of his misbehavior by having his appreciation set in type. But Kastein found the shoebox and made such a scene. He actually threw the shoe out into the garden, where his butler found it a week later. He abused me unmercifully, claiming that this kind of thing happened all the time. Actually the Count had been unique. Later it was a French businessman with larger schemes for me and bouquets of flowers seeded with diamond bracelets.

I kept the flowers but returned the jewels. And again Kastein was enraged."

"But you made love to them, to the Count and the businessman," Cassebeer interjected, his anger renewed.

"Of course not. The Count was impotent, obviously, and the busi­ nessman was simply enormously rich and had decided the time had come for him to

put an end to his misogyny. Who wanted such non­

sense? No, I didn't make love to them. But Kastein made so much of those episodes, coming as they did one tumbling upon the other, each a for astounding scenes and denunciations, that I decided to show

ground

him. And so I began letting admirers become lovers, like you, Hans.

There have been more than ten in the past year. Ardent young doctors,

writers, millionaires. Each time that I leave them I return to Kastein and make deep love to him, deep love, shuddering love. I did that last night, 108

and the moment we were done and lying back in the cool of the evening, he demanded to know with whom I had been proving my love for him. I

told him. You can't imagine his rage. He flung me out of bed and beat me with a belt. Not

hard, but hard enough to make the point and then he

disappeared. This morning he returned and you heard the racket. I think something has gone wrong with all of this. It's a sour ritual now, and it has begun to hurt, hurt him, hurt others, hurt me."

It was difficult for Cassebeer to respond to Lily Schwann's speech.

Not only was he inexperienced in such matters, never before having

had to cope with a mistress, but he realized that he was completely baffled by her apparent sangfroid in the narration of her disagreeable behavior. For a moment he continued to sit beside her, a dumb, half­

knowing smile upon his face, his hand continuing to stroke hers, but his intelligence, strained and agitated, was hunting for a recourse he could not find. What to do? What to say? He had no experience to recall, no literature to consult. And so a stream of "wells," "perhapses," "might nots," issued from him without fluency. As nothing followed each opening sally, however, he joined her at last in silence.

Lily Schwann was beyond the reach of Cassebeer' s counsel, and his counsel, moreover, was nonexistent. What was left to him and to her was in fact the

only communication in which they had achieved any semblance of articulate feeling. They had little alternative than to make love. Another stupidity, he came to realize later, many years later. Not alone a stupidity, but an arrogance which some men habitually contrive to assume in the presence of more worldly women. Frightened by the

authority of sovereign women, they assume that the only tactful and meaningful and appropriate language is that of passion.

Hans Cassebeer began, therefore, to shift his weight, to raise his hand from hers to encircle her back, to draw her to him, to seize her shoulders and turn her, to put kisses upon her tired eyes, to let his small tongue as­ say the curve of her lips. Lily Schwann acquiesced, but that was all. She allowed his caresses, but did not respond and the longer she remained

passive, the more ardent and single-minded Cassebeer became. Making love was a restorative, a means of renewal, and a respite from a conver­ sation to which he had nothing to contribute. The sheer emptiness and

vacuity of his gestures, lost to him, were not wasted upon Lily Schwann.

When he undid her gown, clumsily using one hand to unbutton while the 109

other continued the work of caress, her exhausted indifference turned to tears and at the end-at the moment when she sat before

him, her breasts revealed, her gown bunching at her thighs-her sobs became low growls of laughter, laughter choking with tears, tears

repudiating laughter, laughter winning over tears, tears matting upon her cheeks, laughter rising into screams, gasps for air, and laughter returning like a waterfall gusted by wind. Cassebeer understood that Lily had become hysterical and as he raised his hand to slap her again, thinking to jar her back to him, he became aware that another was present in the room, hunched in the chair just to his rear, and at that moment had raised a hand which held a small revolver.

"Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop." The voice was absolutely clear, each order distinct and apart. Cassebeer dropped his arm and Lily Schwann fell

forward, her laughter succeeded by low, muffled sobs. Lazare Kastein's voice was very quiet and he spoke as he stood up and moved toward

them. "I have seen enough. The last treachery. The very last." He

pointed the revolver at Lily's exhausted body and was about to squeeze the trigger, but stopped, looked for an instant at Cassebeer, and turned the revolver to his temple and fired. His head fell to one side and his

body shuddered and unwound into what one hopes was a restful death.

10 In the weeks that followed, the scandal made headlines in the afternoon

papers, the morning papers being more concerned with the graver details of politics and economic unrest. Hans Cassebeer had fled the

house, pushing Rolf Diamant down the massive escalier as he ran up toward the pistol shot. There was an inquest, the episode became public, and after a period of disgrace, Cassebeer became something of a

celebrity. Lily Schwann left Germany almost immediately for the Ticino, where she had friends. And the Giorgione? That had a more de­ cisive aftermath.

The Virgin of Giorgione was exhibited, as planned, by Count von

Preissendorf at the provincial museum in Posen that autumn. Cassebeer

fortunately did not attend its revemissage. Several scholars, a Signor AIdo Pignatelli from the Academia in Venice, himself the author of a monograph on the Bergamo "Virgin," and a German scholar from 110

Munich, Dr. Rayner Urteil, were present and scrutinized the work with enormous care. Several days later they gave an interview to the Posen Wochenblatterwhich was reprinted in all the major art periodicals of the country. They made it clear that the work could not possibly have been by Giorgione himself, that however much it was a work of the time,

indeed the work of a Venetian master, and even the work of a master familiar with the visionary clarity and warmth of the great Giorgione, it

unquestionably a rehash of other works, a veritable Renaissance pastiche. The most singular and striking point in their argument was the fact that Giorgione would never have stooped to such an obvious sentimentality as the emplacement of a rose, however subtly delineated, at the feet of the Virgin. No Virgin of Giorgione, they concluded, would have been honored by such a cliche device. was

Cordials David Kranes

It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she felt her first

contraction that Lynn even thought of herself as being pregnant. She

anatomically thin and had managed to conceal the fact for well over seven months, with a regimen of boiled turnips and cold consomme­ and the reminder was badly timed to say the least. She had wanted to sleep with David Marker from the moment she and Jack had spent a Saturday with the Markers sailfishing three months ago out at Wild­ wood, but there'd been interferences at just about every point. She had called him; he had called her; they had tried one afternoon at her apart­ ment only to find her son Adam home from Hotchkiss as a surprise. Fall in New York is a difficult time to have an affair: everything starting up, schedules overcrowded again; and so this evening was to have been an

was

island for both of them.

"Something the matter?" David asked her.

She smiled. "No." "You winced."

"J ust anxious, I guess."

"As am I." 113

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She rubbed the knuckles of his hand, climbing each ridge, kneading the loose skin in the depressions with her forefinger and thumb.

"Do you want to leave now?" he asked ..

.

Let's finish our drinks," she said, her eyes partly on her watch,

wondering when the next contraction would come. It came seven minutes later. She drained her glass: "All through," she said.

David smiled, breathed in his Drambuie and drained it. "Let's go," he said.

He helped her on with her coat. "Where are we

...

?"

"A friend lent me his studio."

"Where?"

"Rowayton."

"That's an hour."

"Fifty minutes. And it's a nice Indian summer. We'll drive with the windows down. Sea smell's an aphrodisiac."

"I don't need an aphrodisiac." Her voice was surprisingly soft and quiet.

David nodded to the maitre de, and pushed the door open; she went out. "It's a great place-this place-this studio."

Lynn breathed the late September West 52nd Street smells, and felt another contraction coming on.

When they cloverleafed onto the Merritt Parkway, the tugs were

coming regularly, just under five minutes. Both the front windows were down. David had the heater on, her coat off. She had her face against his neck, her jaw pressed there. She'd worn no bra-she didn't really need to-and he was moving the tips of his right middle fingers over the nipple, under her burgundy knit.

You're perspiring," he said, trying to make it sound playful.

"Yes." She bit at him. "It's the heater. The blower's going right up my dress." She knew, in fact, it was probably lactating.

"Rowayton?" There was a hum in her voice.

"There are fourteen- foot ceilings," David traced her neck. "And a fireplace.

"Had you planned on using the fireplace?" "

"

"For a fire, sure; not for us."

114

"I don't know if I can wait." Lynn felt her body tightening again,

watched the speedometer climb from 70 to 85.

"You'll love it," David said to her; "it's on the shore. You can hear the ocean. Waves. It's a great rhythm. Great keeping time to. Natural.

Nothing rushed." He let his hand slide slowly down to her leg. She picked it up, kissed it. She looked at her watch: three minutes and twenty seconds; she picked up and kissed his hand when she felt the next contraction again; three minutes and fifteen.

"How long until we get there?" she asked him.

"Twenty-twenty- five minutes." He played with her nipple again.

She held her breath. "You're really remarkable," he told her. "I've been clawing half New York's concrete for three months."

"Me too," she said. "I've been having the most amazing fantasies."

"I'm not very good at waiting," David told her, then smiled.

"Nor am I." She thought about it; it was true. "I waitfor very few things."

"Waiting fantasies are strange." He began to slide his hand down to her abdomen. "They make you feel almost adolescent." She picked his hand up again, kissed it, checked her watch. "Your heart's jumping."

"There's a motel in Mamaroneck," she said.

"One quarter hour, max," he told her. The pains were coming every two minutes plus.

When they pulled in beside the studio and cut their lights, Lynn's spasms were only a minute, or slightly more, apart. Like a schoolboy, David started to undress her in the car; she put two hands against his

chest: "Let's go inside.

"

He smiled; "O.K.," then kissed her eyes, let himself out, and walked around to her door. She could smell the sea, as he'd predicted, and it

smelled as though her own body had become huge, grown unlit and

infinite and moved outside to become anatomy in the night around her.

She became her own child briefly-undelivered though dependent and scared. She thought of when she was fourteen, parking out near Coney

Island with a boy named Arnold, the "Tennessee Waltz" on the car radio, how her whole mouth had trembled, how her thigh muscles had gone slack. She heard the door button click, felt the sea wind against her hair, smelled the blown redolence of herself.

115

Lynn didn't like being aggressive. She had always hated that role, it ruined everything; but she pulled David inside and when he wanted to get a fire going, she said no.

"Why?" "Please.

"

"Lynn, that's the whole

" ...

"Afterwardl" "I may want to sleep."

"Please!"

"O.K." She pulled him to the bed.

She had continually fantasized David's undressing her, three months lived it in her mind: its being gentle, slow; kisses, where he placed them,

breast, belly, hip; when they came. And so against her better judgment she let him, let it work out, let the mind come true. True: she stood there, in the dark, arching, moving, turning slightly for him on the balls of her heels. And David carried it off: it was worth the concealment, worth the

pain. The hands played, the kisses came on time, in form. She felt the zipper on her dress move down, slipped her arms out, felt the dress fall around her hips. She felt her water break. "David," she said, and pulled him in.

She dug at him, made his shoulder bleed, bit his face. It helped to get the pain out. He was trembling, "Jesus! Jesus-God! Jesus, Lynn," he said. "God, come on! Off our feet! Off our feet! Talk about adoles­ cents! God!" "Then get undressed," she told him.

"You!"

"David

" ...

"Do it. You-" His jacket was already off. His neck was moving on its base; his

breath, heavy, wet. "Christ, you're incredible! You're incredible!" he said.

She couldn't help it. They were somewhere between twenty and thirty seconds apart now, and the pain and pressure was too much. She

grabbed the collar of his shirt and tore, ripped it down, spread it, snap­ ping all the buttons in a line. They landed, light as crickets, on the rug.

"Fantastic!" David was moaning. "Oh, fantastic! Wow!" She yanked 116

his belt. "Oh, God!" She felt it uncinch. She broke the button above the

fly and heard the zipper whine. The pants fell past his knees.

"O.K." she managed, her voice strained and tight, "You do the rest."

"No. Please." He was rocking. "You. The shoes!"

"David

" ...

"O.K. I'm sorry." He stepped out of things. "I'm sorry." He let other

things drop. She saw his shape sit on the bed's edge, pull his shoes off.

She didn't know how she was going to make it as she removed her panties and came close.

He pulled the bedspread down. She found a wastebasket and slid it beside the bed. She moved against him, kept his hands on her back, pressing her whole anatomy hard, violently down, against, trying to create hard enough pressure to displace some of the pain. She screamed.

She dug in. She fought against him with her fists and knees. He kept bellowing sounds to match hers, saying things like: God-he thought his fantasies were pretty advanced, but-jesus-he realized now that

they were-Christ-naive. But as they tore and fought against each other, Lynn felt herself giving way and knew that what she'd hoped for was impossible. She could not last. She could not hold out.

She slid down his body slowly, marking it with her teeth, clearing herself as where she could. When the baby came, it came easily and she was able crudely to slice the cord, get everything in the wastebasket and cover it with the bedspread without really losing much of the rhythm of the foreplay. She submitted to David pulling at her, at her shoulders, slid back up along him, joining, both of them, three minutes later,

coming almost together under the bloodsoak of sheets.

David lay with his head off the far edge of the bed, making sounds.

Lynn played one hand over his ribs, blew breath gently against his sweat.

She could smell herself-herself, the ocean and her own birth, but could not keep them apart. She thought she heard a steamer, way out in Long

Island Sound. Shortly afterward, when David showered, she took the

basket out to the small pier of the studio front and emptied it into the

Standing there briefly, she tasted herself again, her own fetality, felt the darkness-warm, salty, moist, in membranes layered out and sea.

out around her. The moon, real and untelevised above, seemed a strange

opening in space, a place she might ultimately move to, go. She ached, but could not feel her body. It was an abstract ache, one in air.

117

Inside, they came together one more time: much quicker, less violent, more

studied, more synchronized. David did not shower. Instead, he

dressed himself hurriedly and lit a long cigar.

"Did I hurt you?" he asked. "I'm always afraid

..

;"

"No," Lynn reassured him from the bathroom. She stopped herself with toilet paper, pulled on her panties, and dropped her dress over her head. "No." Somehow it was true.

"Hey-you start?"

"What?"

"Your period start?" " ...

Yes."

In the car, on the way back to Manhattan, they talked enthusiastically

about St. Croix.

Her husband, Jack, was sitting on the long couch going through briefs in his blue bathrobe when she came in. There was a small snifter of

creme de cacao on the coffee table to his right. They said hello. She kissed him on his forehead and hung up her coat.

"Where you been?"

"Theater.

"

"What'd you see?"

"Long Day's Journey."

"How was it?"

"Fantastic." She straightened her hair.

"Great play." Jack wrote a sentence in the margin of his brief.

"There's some triple sec there, if you want."

"Thanks."

"Picked it up on the way home."

She poured a cordial glass half full. The smell of orange reminded her somehow of Christmas, kumquats from Florida fruit packages she had

bitten into in lost distant Decembers as a child. She crossed the room.

She stood in front of their window wall, looking out. The lights beyond,

below, all the bunched thousands of them, looked like perforations. She stared at the reflected milk stains on her dress, her reflection seeming to

spread out across the perforations to surround her until, searching the distance, she was gone.

"Did you find it?"

118

"Hmmm?"

"Find the triple sec."

"Yes. Fine. Thanks."

"See the letter from Ad?" "No. What's he say?"

"They beat Taft 21 to 20. He pulled a ligament in his knee. He's been having whirlpools. Nothing serious. They took X rays at the Sharon Hospital. He seeing Cynthia Kaufmann this weekend. Listen=-do you want to?"

"Hmmm?"

"You at all horny?"

She pressed the cordial glass against her lips. The fruity taste rose up,

viscous, wet; it made orange seeds of her eyes. "Maybe later," she said.

"Can't hear you."

She took the glass away, wet her lips. "Maybe later."

"Sure, O.K." Her eyes watered. She experienced the only moment akin to incest she had ever felt. She thought of her son, Adam, in the whirlpool. Her knee

hurt.

The man who swam through jellyfish, through men-of-war Robert Onopa

Kimo Akeo owned a cream-colored Cessna from which he spotted fish for his sons. In the clear Hawaiian air, he flew in an elegant, extended

zigzag pattern over waters he had set nets in when young: those of the Aui Channel from the westerly shore of Molokai to the easterly shore of Oahu; from Nekker Shoals in the north, south to the Penguin Banks. In the moving waters of the channel--seas blue-green and brilliant whose vast bulk was furrowed by the wind and heaved by swells-his fifty­ year-old eyes could distinguish schools of mullet swimming in shim­ mering circles just beneath the surface, or aku bonita, whose fins breaking water turned it foamy white in circles a hundred yards wide.

Seeing such fish, he would radio the position and direction of the school to his sons in family sampans below. Nets were set for mullet­ close-meshed, surface float nets, twenty boat widths wide-and though a hold loaded with mullet might be taken to market, the Akeos caught mullet for aku bait and chum. Aku bonita was the prize. Mullet in the bait wells, Kimo swooped his Cessna and directed his sons to foaming circles of white, cruised by wheeling gulls, where the large fish fed toward Nekker Shoals. Thrown washbuckets of mullet, the bonita fell

into a feeding frenzy, broke the water, gorged two-inch unbaited hooks whose only enticement was that they shone. With big fishing under way, 121

TriQuarterly

Kimo Akeo, who had swung fish back into the hold for thirty years

himself, would circle once in a wide graceful arc, last glimpse money

being made, and settle to cruising either island's coast.

From the air, the coastlines were patterns of coral, reefs outlined, rip currents and tidal pulls streaking the water-whose color changed from

sky blue to violet, from ice blue to white, as the currents carried it over live reefs, past meandering sand spits miles wide, past points, through

the surf break, and finally to the sea-green deeps where the aku swam.

Some days, off Oahu, he could see two-hundred-pound ulua lolling in

the shallow sub-reef, the sun glittering off their silvery backs; off

Molokai, vast stretches of empty sand peppered with the shifting shadows of crabs, vast flocks of birds, like dust in the sun off the roadless westerly coast; or near the sea change between the islands in

winter, schools of twenty or more blue whales, massive and graceful as swells, sounding as they rounded toward the leeward coast of Oahu,

running toward open sea.

"There's a plane down there. A small airplane. You can see it," Har­

riet Kunen said, trying both to get her husband's attention and to keep her eyes fixed on what she saw from the oblong window of the huge air­

craft. "Cy, you have to look. There are whales, in front of it. You can see

them, you have to look."

Cy Kunen reluctantly stuffed his magazine into the seat pocket be­ fore his knees and undid the seat belt he had fastened when they had begun their final descent; gawking annoyed him. They were down to three thousand feet now, minutes away from landing in Honolulu, ap­ ," he muttered finally, proaching over the Aui Channel. "By Christ craned to the window. "Christ, that plane is low."

"Like it's landing," said Harriet. "Those splashes are whales, aren't they, Cy?" "No, I Already the light plane and the fish it followed were ...

"

...

passing from the middle of the window aft. "Did you see that stream shoot up? I'll betthose are whales. Christ."

"That plane is in the water, Cy." "It must be a seaplane."

"Cy, you're crushing my dress. That plane landed in the water."

122

"I can't see, Harriet. In the water? Can you land a seaplane in that

kind of water? Harriet, move, you're

" ...

Already too far aft for Cy to see clearly, the light plane appeared to Harriet to stop forward motion, wallow, pitch, then yaw. It seemed to lose definition and blend with the sea-green water heaved by swells.

"Maybe you should tell the stewardess, Cy." "Harriet, don't get hysterical." Cy Kunen settled back in his seat, refastened his safety belt, and made an indecisive motion toward his magazine. "ey."

"Harriet, we're landing." Through her window the Aui Channel slipped aft, and Harriet could see the point at Mokapuu, Koko Head, and the high-rises of Honolulu stretching into view. The huge plane yawed to port and along its wings flaps separated from smooth alum­ inum surfaces with a high-pitched sound of rushing wind. "You can tell the stewardess what you saw when we land. Just don't get hysterical, for Christ's sake. Those

thing."

...

whales down there, it could have been

...

any­

Cy Kunen stretched around and saw the other passengers in the

half-full aircraft for the most part gazing out the windows on the other

side ofthe plane, where Diamond Head reared. "Look," he said, "if you want to look at something, there's Diamond Head." Now he reached for

his magazine.

Three miles off the southeastern shore of Oahu, Kimo Akeo settled his Cessna into the Aui Channel, stung with disbelief at the abruptness of the last two hundred feet of his descent. Low over the channel,

looping a playful school of blues sounding and rolling in the sea, a flashing panel light told him his back-up magneto had gone bad, and then, before he had time to think about it, his working magneto cut out.

He had time only to feather his propeller as the Cessna soundlessly eased toward the swells. With the engine cut he could hear the shift of the trades and the slosh of the sea; and it was all he could do to bring her nose around and settle squarely, bang open his door, scramble out on the wing. For a long moment he felt the Cessna wallow in the water, then a swell brought her tail up as the cowl dipped down. With one chagrined glance he took in the control panel, the nonoperating radio, and his new 123

windbreaker on the second seat; then Kimo slipped into the soft bulk of the water, dunked his head, and swam slowly away. Ten yards off,

treading water, he watched his Cessna disappear.

He was left with the hiss of the wind and the ticking of the sea. When the swells raised him, he could see blue-green mountains, diamond flashes of windshields on the Mokapuu coast road, the lighthouse, the white spray of surf crashing outside Haunama Bay. Two, perhaps three miles off. Despite the vastness of the water, the pull of the current, and the relentless rising and falling of the swells, he was not afraid. For thirty years he had spent as many as twelve hours a day in the water, setting nets-though this was not a part of the channel he had fished.

Before too long he could see from the rapid shift of a line he had been watching between the lighthouse and the ridge behind it that he was in a current taking him south with a speed unknown on the Molokai side.

This would be the slip off Mokapuu. He would have to start swimming, but if he did swim, say, straight for Oahu-it occurred to him-he would be carried past Oahu by noon, and to the open sea. So there was reason to be afraid, he understood, because his only plausible landfall lay behind him. He stripped off his trousers and T shirt, turned in the water and looked for Molokai's westerly shore. He could see it only as a bluish mist rising on the water-twenty-eight miles away. Windshields flashing at his back, the current pulling him south, he began to ride the ticking soft bulk of the ocean, stroking in a wide arc that he hoped would take him close enough to Molokai for lights to swim by when behind him the sun had set.

Cy Kunen did this: spuming Waikiki as the merchandised wet dream of perverse, asphyxiated Angelenos (he was thirty-five, from New

Jersey), he took his wife in a rented Vega past cane fields and pineapple­ planted slopes to the sugar town of Pupukea, where-he had read-the big waves were. Those he saw: walls of water, house high, just off the road.

Cy said, "Now this is Hawaii."

Harriet said, "Cy, this is beautiful."

Cy beamed as if it was him she was speaking of.

They left their car on Kam Highway and walked across the sand, a thirty-yard stretch, to where the surf boomed in at the shorebreak. Fifty 124

yards out, vast masses of ice-blue water rose twenty, twenty-five feet, moved forward-they seemed slow, their movement excruciating and ponderous, they were so large-till at the inside reef the swells broke, crashing into their own bulk, sending foam hissing onto the sand to where their feet were. Cy rolled up his trousers. Harriet took off her shoes ..

.

It' swarm, Cy. We should have brought our suits."

For a few minutes they watched. Then Cy chased a receding wave, ran

back from the rush of hissing foam. He did so again, then turned to

smile at Harriet higher up on the beach. She saw the final and largest wave of the set hiss foam at her husband

knee-high.

Cy Kunen's knees buckled, and he went down on all fours, sliding backward with the pull of the rip. Harriet, open-mouthed, watched her husband slipping back across the sand. She began to scream when the rush from the following wave broke over him. She saw him pushed back up the sand-but as he tried to rise, the undertow of the same wave pulled him down again. Half-rolling toward the shore break, he was

engulfed by the next wave, and then he slid up the sand on his back.

Harriet ran to him, stepping high; lost her footing as the sand was sucked away in the rip; and fell, her dress in her face, rolling in the water. Two huge waves later the largest of the second set pushed and rolled them both high on the beach.

Eyes stinging, throat gagging, Harriet cried. Sand was in her under­ wear, her hair, her mouth, her nostrils. Staggering to retrieve his shoes, Cy Kunen dropped to his knees and vomited on the sand.

Behind them the shorebreak hissed and the sea made a ticking sound.

A lone surfer, who had begun running across the beach when he had seen Cy fall, held Harriet as she cried.

Brown-black hair, face made up, a slightly heavy but attractive body,

sun-pink skin, white bikini: Harriet Kunen sat in a padded canvas chaise on the lanai of the Hotel Halekalani. She was trying both to watch the setting of the sun and to comprehend the headline of the Star­

Bulletin folded in her lap: UAL-FAA TAPES SUBPOENA QUASHED?

A slight breeze moved coconut palms, date

palms, and across the beach the sea rippled at the sand with sun-glazed laziness. A fat orange sun 125

hung over the ocean, and Harriet watched it, wondering, well, UAL­ ?,SUBPOENA QUASHED ?,UAL SUBPOENA TAPES FAA QUASHED ?, mightn't she go blind looking directly at the sun? But it didn't seem to hurt her eyes in the slightest. Could she feel anything? She turned the paper in her lap, started to read an article in a bottom corner of the page-then sat up and read from the beginning out loud:

FAA

PLANE DOWN IN CHANNEL

Honolulu, Feb. 3. James Akeo of Piho, Molokai, was reported missing as a light plane which he was piloting apparently crashed in the Molokai channel this morning. Shore fish­ and tourists at Mokapuu, Oahu, said they saw a small aircraft down in the channel apparently with engine trouble at 9 a.m,

ermen

Akeo, S4, a spotter for Limo Fisheries, had filed a Molokai-Molokai flight plan. He was last reported in radio contact forty-five minutes before the crash. A U.S. Coast Guard

spokesman said that rescue efforts would concentrate off the southern Oahu coast.

Cy grunted. At first he had paid no attention to his wife's reading. He had been staring at a huge-bosomed girl sauntering up the beach,

watching her breasts rise and fall, thinking, you must have a nice tush, t� but he caught the gist of the story soon enough. Embarrassed, he looked at his wife ..

.

I wasn't the only one," said Harriet, pinker than she had been.

Cy nodded, thought he should stand up. But his limbs hung without energy. He looked at the sun: it was huge and liquid, orange-yellow, suspended but sinking into an endless sea that stretched flat-glassy, sun-glazed. At the same time he recalled the distant sea-green water they had seen in the channel, and felt the rise and fall of the swells as he breathed. A heat within him matched the heat of the sun on his skin.

Dazed by the sun, the chemistry of his body confuted by the length of

the flight that had brought him to this island, he felt himself suspended where he sat. He looked down. He made circles with one dangling foot in the thin sand, which seemed everywhere to creep onto concrete.

The sun set at Kimo Akeo's back, unseen, as he stroked the rise and fall of soft swells in the calming sea. The wind at such times of day sub­

sides; the sea settles. The water is warm and comfortable: it would be a time to fish. But soon Kimo swims in darkness.

A cloudless sky looms above him. From time to time he rolls over, 126

rests on his back. Suspended in the water, he sees and considers the

positions of the stars-the Southern Cross on the horizon, Cassiopeia's Chair directly above him. As yet, he can see no lights which he can positively identify as Molokai. He is swimming, he thinks, toward Molokai's roadless westerly coast, where lights would not be apparent.

Behind him he can see distantly the domed glow of Honolulu, a light­ suffused, blue-black atmosphere. The moon will not rise until ten.

He makes himself a proposition: if he can swim until sunrise, he will live to fly another another plane. Floating on his back in the calm sea of early evening, he almost sleeps, dreams of watching the sea, of blue-green mountains, of sand beneath his feet.

By ten P. M. the moon does not appear, but the seas rise. First light, he calculates, will be at five. He begins swimming in earnest again, encouraged by the invisibility of the moon, for that makes him think that it is tucked now behind Molokai. Before an hour passes he is touched-touched and stung. One jellyfish, one man-of-war: two.

Touched and touched again. Men-of-war floating on the water, in a wind-driven school. How wide?

He parts the water with his hands, breaststroking, to keep the faintly

glowingjellyfish from his face. He is tempted to double up and float.

Jellyfish here? Perhaps he is as far south as Penguin Banks; if that is so, the current has carried him further than he has swum. He does double up, slips off his jockey shorts, rips them in his hands. Stuffs rolls of cloth up in his nostrils, swims again, stroking as powerfully as he can,

his eyes closed. He cannot tell if he is still in jellyfish, for the stinging

stays with him, swathing his body like electricity. Only when he must, he breathes through clenched teeth, half-rolling to his side. He dares not open his eyes.

Cy Kunen sits slumped in a chaise on the balcony adjoining the room he has tried to sleep in. In a clear sky, the moon is distinct, its craters discernible. Stars shine. He had slept, he thinks, three or four hours before he found himself awake, before he slipped from the room to the lanai. Behind him, Harriet sleeps soundlessly. Before him, on a moonlit, deserted beach, the sea laps at the sand rhythmically. On the sea, neither boat lights nor buoy lights shine. Perhaps he sleeps again, un­

knowing. But he is awake to see in the east the blackness modulate and 127

become a thin gray stripe. The grayness spreads slowly in the eastern

sky, is washed with blue at the horizon. The sea assumes shape; directly east he can discern the shorebreak at the foot of Diamond Head; now he can see the crater

looming, outlined. He can faintly hear birds, and at

first light, behind Diamond Head, he sees a ghostly rainbow, its shape

diffuse, its colors slight. Before he can hear it, he sees illuminated in the southern sky a large helicopter canted forward, driving west. Against

background of birds he hears the sound it makes: flat flat flat flat flat flat. Its sound fades as mynah birds distantly scream. The beach a

becomes the color of sand.

He pa.sses indoors, where all sounds cease. Harriet lies on her side;

then, as he touches the bed, turns on her back. The covers lie strewn at the foot of the bed. For a long moment he watches her, then kneels

down, kisses her stomach-soft, warm, rising and falling beneath her

nylon nightdress. She sighs, her eyes barely open. Quietly, as if it is her breathing, he hears her say, "Cy." Her knees rise, fall. In minutes she is naked. Cy Kunen rests on the lower half of the bed as behind him light streaks the sky. The air seems to him salt-rich, humid. Her vagina tastes of the sea.

In the channel Kimo Akeo swims, sunburned and skin-seared by men-of-war. As he swims, he is lifted and lowered with the rhythm of swells sown in the South China Sea and grown huge off the westerly winter surf line of Molokai Island. But he does not see that the island is

there; to his eyes swells approximate islands approximate swells. Lately this is what he sees from a trough: water around him, sea-green, trans­

parent, bright with sunlight and suspending microscopic worlds of air.

Other sightings include seabirds, flotsam, and at sunrise a fln slicing water, flashing gray or violet (which, he could not say-shark or which?). The sun, when it is higher, maps on his back areas of

dolphin: slight, severe, and somnambulent pain. He strokes slowly, evenly, each arm just falling, pulling when he can.

He trusts to some unchecked sense of direction. No doubt the sun. For

time he daydreams of flying and considers himself as gently pitched and yawed by the wind. Below him silver fish sail in the current, contract a

dorsal flesh, turn together in military ballet, descend further still to 128

regions of black coral, cowries, and anemones heeled by some breeze.

Kimo perceives weather: a hiss has risen on a ticking sea, and the swells are coming alive.

He is raised as in an updraft. His eyes register across the sun-glazed ocean a blue-green shore, mists rising in the valleys, sea-spray. The swell rolls from beneath him, lifts higher as it rolls and crests into a trans­ parent sheet of water topped by spray, obliterating the distant shore.

Kimo considers that he hears the roar along the outside reef and feels it in the water. Even alongside him a mountainous winter swell breaks for an instant, settles, travels to another cloud of white. Shark or dolphin, swell or bonita, choose one, choose none, choose two. Seabirds. Kimo makes for the weather. Sun high, the seabirds wheel, making for the inside reef, the opihi-rich small surf, the crab-sweet shore of Molokai.

Letter from Mao to Malraux Frederic Tuten

China, 1967

My dear Malraux,

Perhaps you will recall our too brief meeting in Canton, spring 1927, when we exchanged remarks about R. W. Emerson and Oscar Wilde in a sunny courtyard behind the hospital Bonne Volonte, Much has happened to keep us occupied since, and I hope that time has been kind to you and that you have advanced in the direction of your dreams.

I have been rereading your novel, La Condition Humaine, these past weeks and wish to tell you how pertinent the experience has been. I re­

cently spent an afternoon considering the goals and nature of our revo­ lution when suddenly I thought about Kyo, the character I think closest to your heart, his aspirations and his destiny. Kyo was a type I knew quite well in the twenties-there were many passionate young comrades like him among us. The type, unfortunately, has virtually disappeared among the youth of today. Those who were born to the revolution are already a different breed, no less virtuous, no less capable 131

TriQuarterly

of revolutionary heroism and ardour, but wholly without an immediate sense of

revolutionary mission and transcendence. Their sense of sacri­

fice is locked, waiting for some great event to trigger the release. What can we

expect of them, dear Malraux? Can a youth of eighteen be as

zealous in organizing a comm une or in spurring factory production as we were in

struggling against our enemies, as we were on the Long

March?

Not only for the young, but for ourselves-we Longer Marchersdo I think these things. After the revolution, what? We do not want to be charred stars in an illuminated sky. We would burn, continue burning; we would test this life and that,

inventing new ones if necessary, in order

to keep our firmament bright.

It's raining, Malraux; long waves of it sweep the empty streets,

washing away the past. But it is the past we always half love; not my nor your past, although that too is included, but the history of us all in our least besmirched moments. Civilization, its material and spiritual presence, occasionally emanates from us in our yearning for tran­ scendence; the individual is nothing butfor his expression of transcen­ dence. (I catch myself in the rationale of the dying.) I believed myself capable of sparing you these salvational homilies, but the grim rain and the fatigue of writing and thinking bring me to the gates of self­ pity, a lovely park of rotting flowers.

To change this subject for a moment, have you been eating well? My stomach is rotting. Now that I can finally afford good food the system is giving way, the guts gone gummy and sick of functioning-who can blame them after all the crap those tubes had to digest during that bestial trek of 1934? What shall I do should they put me in a ditch where no one can find me? Alone, Malraux, all alone. Sinking in loneliness and pain, the same feeling I knew in my youth before the beautiful view of struggle filled me. The memory of that loneliness haunts me as it can no man born after the great victory, the revolution, the time commenc­ ing the end of human isolation.

Aging, easily fatigued, self-pitying (do you recognize yourself in this sad inventory, my dear friend ?), I think more and more of the past and the future. (I read that you spend your afternoons in lovely restaurants, with flowers and expensive wines at your linened table. Yes, I'm sure 132

this is so.) Malraux, I dare speak to you across a chasm, hoping that in our instance, for at least one moment, a thread of sympathy may be drawn. I address you, then, as a man who has lived, a man whose spirit

allows him to see beyond the gross masks of nationality, race, class interest. On this occasion, let me speak, as I would to none of my

comrades, my troubled mind. Do read me with patience and charity.

When you have lived your life fully, life itself is habit. One wearies of

habits protracted. The same face, the same suffering, the same plea­

limits; when you do one thing, you can't do another-this is the cell of space and time and self. There is no shame, then, when the carcass and the mind have wearied, to consider the ways to ecstasy and sures. Life is

final will, the last urge of this dull self that only pisses and shits and thinks memories. And so I, like some dreamy, lonesome youth who

regards the approaching storm clouds with a quickening joy, sum­ moning up in himself all the fancy of tempests and thunder, imagining himself a ship's captain caught in the swirl and brine, fixed at the tossing helm shouting down commands to his fearful crew-perhaps like that youth I too conjure bossing the apocalypse, letting release the flood to swell the fearful shore, threatening the mainland with its annihilating tide, the slaughter of all the man-made world, the purification. And if God is not yet ready to do it, who shall? For surely we require cleansing. Justice, Malraux. Justice sweeping all under its abstract and disinterested blade. How may this be accomplished?

At times I think there is no hope "for as little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just the good they seek. If it comes at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want." There is not much time to rescue the world from its disgusting stink, to attempt to repave the world with lilacs and magnolias-all the buried past breathes up its sighs and infections to us here on the world's floor: it would require vast armies of hope to stanch the past's invasions.

I would, therefore, take myself to some enchanted land where from among the untilled slopes an ancient calm rises, wafting along avenues of pomegranates and lemon trees to drift down rosette, gentle cliffs to

the honey-coloured beach and soft dolphin-speckled sea. Perhaps I would grow young there. Perhaps, for one hour, I would be loved. Yes, 133

Malraux, her hair lilac scented, her limbs long, the flesh firm, a girl of your race. I perhaps wish for too much in these last days of cooling blood

and assaults of memory and desire.

Christ! There must be something to shake up this passionate

monotony. On the right hand, all fares well; we're raising up needed dams and power stations, we're developing every centimeter of arable land (in l..olo province we've even gone the luxury of planting orchards of plum and mulberry trees); on the left side, I feel in the doldrums, this

ship dragging weedy seas, barnacles of habit and pride fastened to the rudder. Everyone wants it easy; no one wishes to work in factories or farms. Administrators, yes. Academic posts, industrial management,

doctors, poets, engineers, party functionaries, army officers, film directors, the whole lot of clean hands, yes. Even the older comrades talk of privileges, cars, extra food coupons, going to the opera, the ballet.

They think I should ship them off to diplomatic posts in Paris or Rome.

Tired of home cooking, they dream of your exotic cuisine-mussels and cafe-au-lait for breakfast. The young are like their fathers. They talk.

They are hot for theory. They strut like dandies in the main streets. They secretly despise workers and peasants. Did we fight for this?

I know, my dear wise Malraux, I do know what you would say to my

impatience with human nature. I hear your voice, admonishing, prophetic: Mao, "everything human is abused; and it would seem that the only period of tolerable condition is the transitory state, when the new force is gathering to a head, and before the storm has time to break.

In the meantime, the earth revolves; men are born, live their time and

die; communities are formed and are dissolved; dynasties appear and

disappear; good contends with evil, and evil still has its day; the whole, however, advancing slowly but unerringly toward that great consum­ mation, which was designed from the beginning, and which is as certain to arrive in the end, as the sun that sets at night and rises in the morning.

The supreme folly of the hour is to imagine that perfection will come before its stated time."

Yes, the long view. A means to fend off suffering, but I seem always to take the quickest route to misery. All I view before my nose offends me, a

revulsion, a stomach sickness. Humans! Who can count on them? This

give his girl a squeeze, that one adores waxing his car, another craves mushroom omelets on Tuesdays and Fridays, another is one wants to

134

mad to have his nipples caressed by young boys, another detests humans and resides in an enclosed garden, hugs lilac bushes before taking

breakfast. Why must I always view the world as a long parade of the sick and maimed, as a procession of balding tops, burst eardrums, rotting

teeth, sagging and can cered breasts, fallen arches, fungused toes, And the men who speak to the air, telling stories of goitered necks? of old hurts and insults, telling the air their need for hope, past doings, telling the air redundant tragedies. Eyes of women sailing out of youth ...

into the rot -land of hysteria-not even socialism can halt time.

Malraux, I'm at the age I am, but I have the heart of a child. I believe I have hidden it well to the world, but not to myself. Even in those moments when I appeared in my mind something of a grown hero, I would know that it was all deception. I look sometimes at my comrades,

grown men as I, hear them make speeches, rational, solemn, wise even; I look at them knowing what they have endured all these years of struggle,

knowing they have children, have lost wives and lovers, knowing that they have been brave and have faced life day by day without turning coat and surrendering to despair, to that lassitude which brings you to press a pistol to your temple. I regard them closely-at times I may appear rude, so distracted I am-and often think: this man is playing, has been playing all these years at being grown-up, and he has managed the trick gracefully, with honour. But I know, too, that when he is in his room alone, when he stares up at the ceiling from his narrow bed, the child is in him again. The frightened and hurt child, the child fearful of life and of death, wishing always his mother, her teat, her heat, her soft words and simple touch. And so I look at men and see only my own despair, for it does not reassure me that all men are the same, that we all cower in loneliness and in the cold of our dreadful detach­ ment. I know this will all change, must change in generations to come,

when men and women have conquered solitude and will not think of

themselves as children, when the world will warm the world without a

thought.

But as of now I do not take to men as much as to their works, for that is their best marrow, bequeathed to us in refined

intimacy, shorn of the

squalid and the unnecessary. I think again of Keats, in the narrow room, dying, his throat engorged, his mouth babbling foamy blood, his friend and physician Severn beside him watching with personal and historic 135

eye the poet's end. What refinement or grace in that scene? Dying is not

synthetic act, it offers us nothing but a corpse, a breathing away to dust. I wish Keats's words beside me, not his bloody lips. And for this reason I'm always alone now with the tracts and texts of time: I am a good vegetable and will grow anywhere, so long as men have left me the nurturing soil of their thoughts.

Perhaps this is merely the sentiment of a tired man. I have done enough, I often tell myself; let others make their way as they see fit; you cannot control the future from beyond the grave. "Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require.

It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its govern­ ment shall be organized, or how administered."

Trust in the amplitude of time and events, live patiently, without anxiety, in that amplitude; we are driven mad by imagined, not real, wants. We stoke the furnace of our infelicity and fan the glowing coals until we are quite consumed. There is no happiness without simplicity and no simplicity without trust in the plenitude of life. The truly adventurous soul seeks divine unity, not wanton action. An inner voice asks me, Do your thoughts conform to your highest purpose, so that each day is lived purely in the altitude of soaring Andean eagles? Remember that each day is a gift of life that may be withdrawn the next. And have you, then, yet penetrated the mysteries of leaves, of fish, of your brother animals? Have you turned your eyes to your soul plasm and seen the spirit animate the cells and molecules and atoms of your infinite self?

My darling, I say to myself, pools and rivulets and streams and lakes and vast stretches of waters, seas and oceans, these images of our pro­ foundest selves invite and encourage our divinity, propose our corres­ pondence to nature, to trees and pastures, to roads and gossip, to flowers and coffins, to the last particle of matter. What we all long have assumed is true: we are nowhere repulsed by life; we are the gardens of the universe rising, we are the plantations of the soul, we are the divine plasm of the ascending world's body.

The individual body forms the whole of the communal self, and we are in suspension in the universal solution, fragments of the whole space a

136

coursing and flowing, going and returning, drifting and shooting in slow and quick time. Plum-shaped world, it is you I invoke, infinite universe, it is you I enclose and am enclosed in.

Oh! Obscure night studded with sharp thrusts of pointed light

through the trees and wet branches of the parks and little treed squares. ! This is Oh liquid nights of cities, strung bridges, streets, the world ineffable This for the isn't it? the transcendental crunch, hug longing and merge, this sympathy with symbols and their essences, this silent thrill of identity, Christ! Would that I were in the arms of my love and the rest of that noxious cackle. Malraux, show me a man of feeling and I will show you a ruined scarecrow, his button-eyes pecked away by the ...

sparrows.

I rebel, make mutiny with this transcendental voice; this urge for cosmic marriage is a bourgeois sickness, a remnant of the Old East

which I have not exorcised. See the truth with material eyes. See that the world stinks from the lack of order. Office, priority, place, all in shambles. Each man covets his better's possessions and position. All live in a riot of envy and malice. So it always has been, in both East and West. In order to create order we must first bring man ...

...

the masses

to his original communal innocence. We must destroy man's pride,

the collective pride.

Let's talk straight, I urge myself. How simple to shed the common view. For some years after we installed the revolution we were filled with

hopes, projects, and directives. In a short while "I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of

what it might or ought to be. It was impossible, situated as we were, not to believe that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or

fast becoming so; that the crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis,

and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble. No

sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint."

Let's face it, then: in this world there is a hierarchy of talent and beauty. To one degree or another this will be as true under socialism as it 137

has been true under capitalism or feudalism. The ugly, the crippled, the deficient will always envy and disdain those more attractive, more

graceful, more intelligent. Humans are made this way. There shall al­ ways be an elite. Let the others live, let them sort out their vulgar destiny under comfortable skies. Do not allow them to be injured; let them raise their families and their shelters.

Our new world is made for the advancement of a special breed, the

Kyo of your novel, for instance.

In 19- I knew a young man my age, a comrade. I suppose I loved him in the way young people are mad for those they wish to resemble. In an age unconcerned with living among beautiful objects, rooms, paintings, people, in a time when few seek to perfect their manner, when personal

style-the wit, cadence, and carriage of one's dress and speech and thought=-counts for little, when men do not contemplate making their lives works of art, he was an anachronism. Charm but not unction,

politeness but not sycophancy. Discourse and speech ranging from plain style to eloquence as the situation demanded (he was free from circumlocutions and rhetorical embellishments, but chose his words

precisely, without ever appearing stilted). His presence alone shamed loud mouths and braggarts. Delicate but never prissy, his was a grace without frippery or mannerism. He was ironical by nature, which is to say he understood ambiguity in human motives and behavior and, not being filled with dreams about human purity or nobility, he viewed dis­ passionately the hero and the coward. Like Sagittarius in the astro­ logical symbology of the Western world, his feet were firmly on the ground while he shot his arrows to the stars.

-

To those who had the least, he gave the most. But to those who had

much to give and gave it, he responded in measure. He would have been the ideal Renaissance courtier, not the degraded sort, those studied

fops, all cologne and costume, but one who knew, in his instinctive soul, the world must be made tolerable through daily acts of grace. "Our revolution must breed nightingales," he would say.

He was trained in medicine, specializing in tropical diseases, but his

education was wide and he read English and French. I think he

attempted poetry. In spite of his Western inclinations and modest wealth (his family owned several luxury resorts much frequented by the French and English), our comrades respected him because nothing of 138

his interests or station obtruded on the concerns of the movement. On

vacations from the university he worked with the peasants in the rice fields or labored in the factories in Canton. For organizing workers in a

paper mill he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured. Fortunately, his parents were able to obtain his release by bribing seven officials. When,

finally, he returned to us, he was so altered in appearance, so gaunt and wasted, that we first took him for an unemployed coolie. "Mao," he said to me, "while in my prison cell I often had a strange vision--even while being beaten I had this vision. I saw a wide river, walled on either bank by huge leafy trees. I heard voices in a soft language. They told me to wait by this wide river until I no longer need wait."

That was all he ever related of his prison experience. And that was the last time I saw or spoke to him again. When last heard from, he was in Brazil, on the bank of some Amazon settlement, working in a laundry.

(We Chinese have long done the world's dirty wash.)

That he would have been the crown of our revolution, that he would have given it a direction more refined and visionary had he been in my

place now, he surely was aware. His imagination carried him so far ahead of what was in store for him that he felt he had already lived fully the anticipated experience and, having lived it, he desired a new life­ as I myself do now.

How, after all, can I bear this one-shot life, knowing that people smell, that there is dust on beautiful objects? I who wanted exquisite toys and passions, singing birds on golden boughs. With few excep­ tions, most old men should have died young. There is little left for me to do now

except to give this globe one last good shake. I will follow

destiny, not consciousness. Let me live by impulse and whim. All else is bondage.

The rain beats harder than before, the trees are gorged with heaven's downpour, their boughs heavy and swollen, ready to fall to the rivers of earth. Factories and pagodas sweep away, bobbing and sinking in foamy gurgles, wild screams of animals and men are silenced in this an­ nihilating wet; the world before me drowns. I'm in ecstasy, for "it needs a wild steersman when we voyage through chaos!" And I'm the man to steer through time, through the brink of the universe and beyond to god's strange heart. Oh, my dear Malraux, my brothers, I weep for us all.

139

The Red Menace Michael Anania

It was Gerald, who was himself called Red Fox, who first called Russell the Red Menace.

"Don't nobody fuck with Russell, he's the Red Menace."

"Damn right, and if you fuckers don't watch out I'm gonna

overthrow this whole country by force of arms."

Impressive flex of his long, brown arms-that brown which is romantically called bronze, mythically called red, the penny-brown of the Sioux. "Then, I'm gonna scalp your black ass."

"You ain't gonna scalp shit. The cavalry'll ride all over you, just like always."

"Man, what you think the cavalry's gonna be doin at your house?"

"Waitin on his mama."

"On your mama, that line gonna be so long, come all the way round the corner and down the street."

"We ain't got no worries about the cavalry this time, man, cause we

got the atomic bomb."

"Shee-it, "

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"That's right-stole it last week."

"You ain't stole nothin."

"You remember that test last week, the one they canceled on account a the weather?"

"Yeah."

"Well, there weren't no weather. We stole it

...

right off that fuckin

tower."

"Bull

...

shit. Ain't nobody can steal an atomic bomb. They got

guards all over that desert.

"

"Sure they do, but we got Apaches and an Apache can sneak up on

anybody and steal anything."

"Man, I ain't never heard such shit in all my life. What they do with it?"

"First, they Apaches caught them slouch-ass soldiers off guard and cut their fuckin throats, then they took that bomb right off that damn tower and carried it off."

"Where to?"

"To their secret camp, dumb-ass. Don't you know that whole desert is in Apache country? Man, they know every inch of it, and ain't nobody but another Apache can follow their trail, either."

"What if the Army's got scouts?" "

Yeah, Kit Carson."

"Would you get serious? Kit Carson died a hundred years ago; there ain't no more scouts. All them fuckers know how to do now is drive

jeeps."

"Yeah, well how many Apaches know how to use an atomic bomb?

Just a bunch a dumb-ass Indians sellin blankets and moccasins."

"We ain't got no trouble workin the bomb. We're the Red Menace, man, we got all them Russian spies workin for us, and they sure as hell

know how to work a bomb."

I t all made sense. Out in the desert the Apaches bareback riding their

spotted ponies, and on a travois skidding through the sand, an atomic bomb, Indian women behind them brushing the trail clean with branches, two Russians in oversized overcoats--even in the roasting New Mexico sun-riding on a buckboard beside them. They enter the

box canyon; an Indian on a high, painted desert cliff waves them in with 142

a carbine. There was another sense to it as well. one that came later.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured in the Senate, patriotic

Omahans gathered petitions to support him against his colleagues.

They collected them in a log cabin-the same log cabin which was used each summer to sell rodeo tickets. Perhaps the Red Menace in some corner of the collective

patriotic unconscious was Red Indian after all,

and the "enemy within" that oldest of American enemies.

Russell was an Omaha Indian, great-grandson of Logan Fontenelle, last chief of the Omaha; his name was given to the housing project where we all lived presumably because had given up all his people's

lands without a fight, saying, perhaps, "Better Red than dead." Logan

Fontenelle-fellowtraveler, dupe, highly trained paid subversive, card -carrying member of the Yankee conspiracy, what they called in

school a dignified statesman, a credit to his race, or a man caught with

impossible alternatives among a domestic people. Russell's family lived on the flood-slake of the Missouri out past the dikes long before upriver dams tamed the river and wintered in the tenements above Bum's Park

downtown, usually in the crumbling flats over Canfield's Army Store, where we all bought war surplus canteens, throwing knives, and ruck­ sacks for occasional pioneer excursions into the woods of Fontenelle Forest or Mandan Park on bluffs just south of the city. When we were in

grade school, Russell had a palomino horse he once rode in a

Halloween parade. He wore shiny cowboy shirts, boots with carved tops, and a Stetson. For a long time Indians dressed like cowboys-because

they too were westerners? or because that was for so long the next rung up in America, a vantage point for some aspiration? Grade school had a place for Russell, niched out of the comfortable place it gave to Indians in general. There were enough nice little Indian stories, show-and-tell, cub scouts-an obvious, if temporary, value attached to his past, and

there was that awe-inspiring horse, the tribal bonnet and beadwork

shirt he once wore. He left the school at strange intervals as the borders of the school district played Monopoly with the mud-bar where he lived or as the board of education settled

ponderously the matter of his family's permanent residence among the other city Indians who lived in the Army surplus store's tenement. By junior high school, Russell had grown tall and thin and had one of those Indian faces early painters 143

loved-high cheek bones, long, straight nose, strong chin, deep cheeks -the romantic Indian profile of civic statues and the buffalo nickel. He was not especially athletic, was a clumsy baseball player, but Gerald was right, he was very strong and an unbeatable street-fighter. His voice had that swallowing thickness which Siouan gives to English, slightly operatic in the way it stays in the throat, ironic, and menacing. He had become the school's silent antagonist, stayed home regularly, slept in class. Even when he was awake, he slouched down so deep into his chair that his head would rest on the back and his chest would curve under the

writing arm. I don't remember his ever being in trouble; he just stayed silent. He quit school as soon as he could, and I saw him only occasionally around town driving a black Pontiac, which in pre-GTO, l..eMans, Bonneville days still had an Indian hood ornament jutting out into the traffic. a face that could have been modeled on Russell's. He worked on construction jobs in the summer; in winter he changed tires at the Yellow Cab garage. The last time I saw him I was stopped at a

traffic light next to an Omaha construction site. He was slaked over with

powdered concrete, carrying the puddler's hoe, close enough for me to call out his name. We talked briefly through the window, determined that we were both fine, both getting by, both married. I was working that summer in a steel mill and was wearing work clothes and a fatigue hat.

"You still in school?"

"J ust graduated. I'm working for the summer, then going to school

again."

"That's a good thing. Blain went to airline school in Denver. The only airline job he can get is loading suitcases. That your car?'

"Yeah." It was my first foreign car. He clearly disapproved.

"What is it?"

"Borgward," I said as the light changed and I drove away.

I was embarrassed by my car, the first gesture of that infidelity I still practice against my simplest crush on the automobile, a feeble snobbery which raises the stakes of that affection and so makes it more accept­

able. Russell had known that, and had known also that I was in school,

despite my clothes and the flakes of steel a bending machine had sprayed me with all day. He knew me, knew the parameters of my life as well as I knew his. We had known each other back to the beginnings of both our memories; the alphabet had seated us together through much 144

of grade school and junior high. If we had talked longer, he would have chided me for owning such a silly little car, but would have tolerated the smart -ass gesture of it in the same way he had tolerated all my years of

arm-waving eagerness in school. He had always known the stakes of the games I played and the stakes of his own. The ironies of his situation were my business: the concrete he puddled for Peter Kewitt and Company was being pasted over his land, after all, flooring offices up over the city that still carries his people's name in exchange for a Pontiac every few years, pocket money through the cold winter, and visits to the reservation at Macy with nostalgic ritual moments and blue corn mush.

When he dressed up he would have still worn hand-carved boots and

pants with a western cut, a shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, and a jacket with a chevroned, ranch owner's seam across the back-the clothes of the fantastic figure America had daydreamed into myth as his ancestral friend-enemy. I dressed in Ivy League mixed with Beat in those days-tweed jackets and Oxford cloth shirts-<iisguised as

something I would also never be, adon or ajunior fellow, studying a slightly shambled appearance that might indicate boredom with gener­ ations of wealth and comfort, the signs of a distracted attention about worldly things that went with a love of poetry and art. The only fad in national disguises I have ever fully resisted is the one indulged by the vagrants of the middle class which puts on work shirts and boots; that's too close to the truth of the class America gave to Russell's people and

mine.

The skim of irony I give to Russell is easy enough; I shouldered my own, still do. Russell is not a cowboy. I doubt that it was ever a serious

pretense; instead, it's the costume that was left behind when the dust settled in the dream theater of the West. Breech-cloths and leggins did not survive into the modern world. Although they signal in many ways

his disinheritance, figure forth again and again the battle his people

lost, they are tied, as well, to the place where we fantasize the struggle to have occurred. The only fight my college and graduate school gear had to do with was one I fought with myself that had no circled wagons or

great battles, and whose scufflings required French philosophy and the modern European novel in place of any of the traditional warrior's

skills.

145

Some of the steel I had helped bend that day would be delivered in time to the construction site Russell was working, and would be wired into place to reinforce the concrete he puddled, and so, in some strange way, the building would be a collaboration between us, a last joint venture neither of us would ever have any use for-though even that

apparent thematic finality has to be modified, since my brother-in-law would later work in that building as a draftsman. Finally, the bargain, however unspoken, was unevenly struck. My brother-in-law is a con­

venient signal for the general political fact that, once completed, the

building would devolve to my people and not Russell's. Among that concrete and steel, my sister's husband still supports his family by drawing out the plans for further developments, more ambitious projects. Perhaps Russell still supports his by pouring their lattices of steel full of concrete. It is a symbiosis in which Russell always gets the losing share. Within the design of success America fed us all, my brother-in-law's slightly greater share is thought a victory, and the immense holdings of the construction company that owns it all are called "the way it is."

Against such knowledge one holds out whatever dreams imagination and nightmare make possible. That atomic bomb, not much bigger than a suitcase, I'm sure might still rest in a high cave at the end of a box canyon out in the desert, holding within its sleek titanium and steel hull the secret reserve of energy each of us needs, if only in supposition, some access t<r-an assertion that gathers, if only in its style or its garmentry, a brief collective

momentum, so that for a few moments the fears of a

whole country rest with you. This is what Russell held that day, not

merely the bomb but the bomb's plausibility balanced among those other fancied plausibilities that the movies, comics, the entire popular flotsam of American culture dealing with the West had made for us.

What he understood, intuitively, was what all the rhetoricians of

apocalypse have always understood-that the signal points of our real fears are lying all about us and that turning them to any purpose is a

poetic act of cultural alignments, a fine tuning, conducted through language, of what is already in scrambled view. Finally, the bomb is no more real than the stereotypical movie Apache, the painted desert no more tangible than the hulking Russian agent. There is no measured 146

ontology to the stuff of this culture; there are only levels of energy. In one way or another everything in America is an icon; nothing is merely an object until it is thrown away, literally heaped outthere with the garbage at the town dump or just slipped from our attention, waiting to be recovered as either bric-a-brac or nostalgia. In their own turn, Russell and his people have been recovered. The Indian has been re­ generated to our view; at a fresh level of haute culture he is loved all over again. Russell's classic profile is not yet back on the hood of his Pontiac, but his beadwork swings across the chests of thousands of the with it, and his language is being ramshackled by hundreds of poets. The territory of his clothes-his tether to the dissolving West-is now fully invaded. He is a charm America once again needs-fringed jackets, slouched western hats, beads, Zuni silver, and-in museums-spirit wheels and ghost shirts. Against what present fear? Is it that we now want that same tie to connect us to a transaction with a land now

thoroughly lost to all of us, or are we merely at play again, disguised against our knowledge of what we otherwise are, eager accomplices of the machine which has grown to the edges of the garden ? You see them each day on campus, imitation Indians in fringed leather and turquoise, carrying suitcase-sized radios; you can watch them in tribal sway to the ear-dissolving din of rock amplifiers. They love the explosions of sound among the synapses of transistors and diodes, not the earth-lines within the turquoise, the land among the sky. The Indian is a familiar to a new

passage among microcircuits and cybernetics, just as he was the familiar of the long ride of manifest destiny. In his passage across the

continent, the white man drove the Indian out but kept Indian names for numerous towns and cities, killed his buffalo, then hung his profile on icehouses, coal companies, locomotives, and nickels, the Indian's tail.

John, a mixed Otto, Ponca, and Pawnee, who lived in the apartment next to mine for several years, developed a more lasting attraction to the

bomb than Russell. In junior high and the first year of high school, he was determined to become a nuclear physicist. He read everything he could on atomic power and the bomb, very early passing his own ability to comprehend what he was reading. His talk was impressive, though­

full of technical language. He incanted the names and numbers of 147

radioactive materials, described cyclotrons, and hallowed critical mass

though it were a precise mixture of Christ's return to earth and an orgasm. What John lacked in all this was Russell's poetic perceptive­ ness. Russell stole the bomb; John presumed that he could acquire it.

His real fancy was to build one. In his most unrestrained moments he wished himself the ability to make one immediately, but day to day he was willing to defer that fantasy to years of reading and study. He as

wanted to grow up to build an atomic bomb. In the meantime he satis­ fied himself, as so many other of my friends did, with carbon, saltpeter, and sulfur tamped into smoky, black-powder bombs or the white glow of stolen magnesium strips billowing out their chalky smoke above the sidewalk. John and others like him-my second cousin who in search of the atom burned down his parents' garage and, finally, in high school blew off his best friend's arm at the shoulder-were the true believers, who applied the Christian premise, "Faith without works is dead," to

that dream of destructive supremacy. Across the country many of them

did, in fact, die, consumed with their own mini-atolls, jerry-made altars of Gilbert Chemistry Set remnants and workbench junk set up in basements and garages.

John took the culture at its word and so determined to work at books and school and putter about with his chemicals at night. It lasted, this

attention to science, about two and a half years; then he grew interested in fighting-not boxing but street-fighting--studyingwith all the enthusiasm he had given to the atom: what Russell seemed to have

naturally. School had been made more frustrating by his motivation.

The aspiration was too high for the results available to him. He wasn't ever especially good in class, but even if he had been, I doubt that it would have helped. He wanted a mushroom cloud and all that went with it. General Science offered, at best, stained litmus paper and a pat on the back. Given such a meager reward, he opted for a good right and the sidewalk terror that went with it.

The bomb was to sheer power what "a cool million" was to wealth, and in one sense every fanciful aspiration to power had as its new

Ultimacy that cloud in the desert we all desperately loved and feared.

Personal strength and a few dollars were both understandable; their 148

acquisition was mundane, idiosyncratically possible or impossible. Ob­ viously, it was easier for any of us to be a bad-ass, though, than for any of us to be economically even solvent. We did not speak of solvency; as a result we spoke of wealth-a million bucks-and television provided Mr. Anthony of The Millionaire to give it all some credibility. Science, all that dangerous black -powder tinkering, was the credibility the bomb's figure of overwhelming power required. There was for the bomb, as there was for money, a regular, societal route to be taken­ years of school, late nights of study, self-denial in the college laboratory while others drank beer and felt-up girls-but I think John and the rest of the self-styled physicists knew what the compromises of that route were. After all that sacrifice, you could probably not be your own sane version of the mad scientist, whose power was all his own. After years of wear, you would be someone else's scientist, building someone else's

bomb. That was the clear message of the Oppenheimer case; at such levels in the balance of power, the scientist was not allowed his mad­ ness, whatever it was; the bomb was not his to press or restrain. In our

world, Dr. Frankenstein, however benevolent, worked under someone else's authority. Oppenheimer was the victim of the Red Menace, whose terror his weapons presumably gave us the strength to repel. For a short

while, John, the punch-out artist, had a power that was all his own.

Russell had never been tricked by science or school and had both-the

reputation of a bad-ass and, out there in the desert with Russians tricked into playing firewater salesmen and gunrunners, had, at least in our imaginings, an atomic bomb as well.

The scientist has always been an equivocal figure in America, perhaps in Western culture generally. Einstein's name came to stand for genius

-"He's real brainy, a regular Einstein" -and that explosion of white

hair, the bulb nose, and large head were parts of the American iconog­

raphy. He represented one of the self-stranding risks of sustained serious thought, a comic figure who wore sweatshirts and tennis shoes everywhere and was visually related to movie comedians, particularly Harpo Marx. I was often reminded in those days that though Einstein could "figure out all that stuff," he couldn't change a tire or fix a broken toaster. "What do you want to be? Some kind of egghead, a long-hair?" Disastrous qualities that were acquired like the hair which 149

masturbation would eventually grow on your palm. Another admonition could serve both situations: "You keep that stuff up, kid, and you'll go

crazy."

Madness was obviously the scientist's risk. Frankenstein lurks some­ where in every scientist=-Frankenstein and that more introspective

cousin, Dr. Jekyll, who releases from himself those monstrous qualities Dr. Frankenstein infuses into a cemetery collection of bodily parts. Ein­

stein's comic style and the separation he achieved from the actual

workings of the things his thought made possible left him more dotty than mad. Oppenheimer was the real Frankenstein of the fifties, who created a monster he could not control, then tried to recall it with a series of humanistic arguments. "Oh, my God, what have I done?" he said

with the movies' mad scientists, looking back at the demiurge of labor­

atory creation. Better to be an engineer-the career that counselors recommended most in those days-an occupation just a generation or so removed from the self-reliant, tinkering inventors who had made this

country great: Edison, Bell, the Wright brothers. Inventors and

engineers met real needs and offered implements-an airplane or a better mouse trap. They were, according to the texts about them in school libraries, dreamers, the practical conjurers of the industrial utopia to come. My father had wanted to be an inventor and had once tried to patent a lock to keep tires from being stolen off parked cars. My uncle, aiming more toward pure science (or ancient religion), suggested that I help him invent a thunderbolt that could be shot from an airplane.

Engineers held a safe middle ground; they were middlemen in the struggle between science and industry. Career counselors assigned an employment security to engineering that was reminiscent of the securities my family always ascribed to civil service. Scientists, the cold war suggested, were best kept and kept carefully. In melodramas there was always a struggle over our scientists and theirs, a sort of Milton Bradley game, played in part with a deck of cards captured from the Germans which was always stacked with America's pre-war Jewish refugees. Their role in spy thrillers was much the same as the role of beautiful women in earlier melodramas. They were courted, wooed, and cautiously kept; occasionally stolen, they were pressed into drugged 150

submission by their captors and forced to reveal their secret formulas, the forever irretrievable hymen the gallant hero had to rush to save.

This figure, the scientist-as-ingenue, was significant in modifying that strength the bomb seemed to give pure science. What, after all, was

the value of a supreme power if you were not able to translate that power into your dealings with other people, either on the street or in some

communist Zenda far away? The figure of the scientist as the passive character in a contention of heroic and demonic forces stole much of his

charm-and was, I think, another version of the passivity of the scientist in this society as dramatized by the Oppenheimer case. Still, the

scientist had to be regenerated; the society had grown too dependent on him to cast him out indefinitely, and that regeneration was the work of

science-fiction movies. There it was the young, aggressive scientist, isolated by his tenacious disagreement with the less imaginative members of the convened panel of experts, who invariably saved the world through a combination of laboratory work and physical exertion.

In such films the military men were the fools, versions of the dumb cops

of thirties' and forties' detective stories, who blustered their tanks into

firing lines againstflying saucers or blobs. This scientist-hero, often played in B movies by Richard Carlson (TV's Herbert Philbrick, ironically), offered science back a lost adolescent authority. His combi­ nation of daring, brilliance, and training were as crucial to his moment in history as the western hero's combination of daring, strength, and skill with a gun were to his. The metaphysics of motion pictures had always vested the just man with superior skill, and science-fiction vested the just scientist with superior science.

Eventually, the world would require for its salvation a breed of tough, handsome, athletic nuclear physicists, as quick with a theorem as the cowboy was with his gun. With a few more movies and the right oppor­ tunities, John could have given the world its first bad-ass scientist and so balanced those two different powers. Adolescent common sense and the movies both seemed to require a moment of personal physical strength and daring, however complex and technical its setting might become.

That is, I guess, too baroque a fancy to survive in the movies or youthful

imagination. Movie heroes would specialize, just as John did, in strength 151

and daring, years later casting up totally specialized secret agents to

us--specialized and, in the cynical mode of the sixties, profes­ sionalized. In the climactic scene in Goldfinger, James Bond stammers over the intricacies of an atomic bomb in Fort Knox as its digital clock ticks off the seconds till oblivion. Having fought his way through a host of villains, including an invincible Oriental, he only has to disarm the whirring mechanism of the bomb. He begins to reach in, then pulls save

back. At the last second on the clock in the bomb, a hand reaches in from behind him and pulls the appropriate switch. Bond was good at

overgadgeted weapons and that tricky Aston-Martin they gave him; science had, in its more crucial manifestations, gone too far. Knight errantship, however well paid, had found one of its limits.

Like any number of renegade chieftains, Russell had an unerring

("Don't make the mistake of underestimating Santana, son. He may be a filthy savage, but he's a brilliant tactician, the best I've ever met in the field.' ') He understood the exact point at which the schools no longer found him charming, and, implicitly at that point, he sense of tactics.

understood that the culture as a whole no longer found him charming.

He had surpassed his role as Little Beaver and outgrown the Indian

parts in school plays about Thanksgiving. With a lot of other kids­ white, black, and red-John presumed that there was magic in achieve­ ment, first scientific, then pugilistic. Russell had never given up the essential secrets of himself as an Indian. Tough as he was, his real

strength was in mystery. Remembering that mystery and assessing so early his deep antagonism to the society were crucial to that bomb­ stealing vision of his. All the problems of science and technology dissolved into the magic of difference-difference and the unities of antagonism. We have come back to the Indian now for his secrets and his blessings. If he is smart, he will give us neither.

152

A balance of nature Daniel Halpern

If you have to worry about what's going to happen next year, then it's a pretty sad life.

-Paul Bowles

There was a bus driver from the Msalla district in Tangier who drove his bus from the Grand Socco to the Old Mountain and back again all

day long-from six in the morning to eight at night. Larbi took the job after marrying Khaddouj, a girl from the Rif who came to Tangier a year before her marriage. Each night after Larbi parked his bus in the station, he walked to the end of Rue de Fez. There, in a small cafe, he had tea with friends before returning home.

At noon it was the habit of a certain pastry shop to serve Larbi a large

glass of cold milk, which he drank quickly, then moved on with his bus­ load of impatient passengers.

There was a young Berber girl who sat regularly outside the shop selling oranges. She watched this transaction with interest. Soon Larbi began watching her as he drank his milk. Whenever he saw her in other parts of the city, he waved and smiled.

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One night, on his way through the narrow alleys that led to the small

cafe, he heard a hissing sound from the shadows of a small courtyard. He could see no one. He approached the sound and found the Berber girl,

standing in a doorway. When she lowered her freshly pressed haik from her face, he was surprised by her beauty. She motioned toward the door and he followed her into a small room, lighted by two carbide lamps. He thought of his wife, knowing she wouldn't expect him for another two hours. He relaxed, preparing his sebsi for a smoke of kif.

The girl said her name was Latifa. She was born in Tata and came to Tangier as a young child with her parents, who were now both dead. She lived alone and made what money she could by selling fruit and begging in the medina. Larbi looked at her bright face and let thoughts of her fill his head, where the kif was now releasing its magic. Then he began to talk of his job as a bus driver, of the things he saw each day. Latifa looked over from the tea she was making. He continued to talk.

By the time he had finished four or five pipes of kif and a few cups of tea, he felt excited by the closeness of Latifa. He stopped talking and put his arm gently around her shoulder.

Walking down the street, Larbi whistled. When he came to the cafe where his friends were playing ronda and drinking tea, the kifsmoke spilling into the cool night, he crossed the street and hurried home. His wife had prepared dinner, which he ate quickly. Then he dropped off into a heavy sleep. Khaddouj washed the cups and plates, and curled up next to her husband.

The next morning Larbi snapped awake, dressed, drank his tea, and kissed his wife. He was impatient for noon to arrive. When he finally

pulled up to the pastry shop, Latifa was not there. He drank his milk quickly and moved away down the Rue de Caid, puzzled and dis­ appointed.

After work he wandered around the bus station a while, then went to the dark courtyard.

By the time Larbi reached home that night, he was tired. When his wife offered him dinner, he refused and went to bed. She lay down with him and tried to get his attention with small affections, but he was

asleep.

The next day at noon, by the pastry shop, Latifa was on her haunches

selling oranges as Larbi pulled the bus to a stop. He drank his milk 154

slowly. The passengers had to bang on the windows to get him moving again.

That night Larbi dragged up the steps of his house to greet his wife, who was waiting with a special meal. Without even looking at the food, he undressed and collapsed into bed. Khaddouj, wild with anger, thought, What could make him so tired? Sitting in a bus and two hours in a cafe? She threw the food out the window and left the house. She went to her sister's and explained how Larbi had suddenly lost his

youthful vigor. The sister disliked Larbi. She said, I know what's wrong, and it isn't age or a sudden loss of energy. It is another woman!

Khaddouj went back sadly to her house.

In the morning she no longer felt melancholy. She decided to go to a sahala who lived nearby and ask for some herbs to make her unfaithful husband lose all his manly powers. The old witch searched through her sack of tsoukel and found something which she said would make Larbi useful to no one. It was to be given in small doses if he was to lose his strength for a day or two, and in one big dose if he was to be rendered impotent for an entire year.

That night Larbi again returned home exhausted. He ate his meal and went to bed.

In the morning Khaddouj prepared tea for her husband, adding a

little of the herb, as the witch had instructed. He drank his tea and went off to work, a light rain falling from the early sky.

When he returned in the evening, he looked worried and puzzled.

Khaddouj smiled and prepared her husband's meal. They fell asleep after exchanging a few pleasantries.

The next day Larbi drank his tea, still troubled, and went off to work.

On the fourth morning Khaddouj decided that she wouldn't give Larbi any more of the magic. She thought, Three unsuccessful attempts will turn away even the most determined lover. He's learned his lesson.

That same morning Latifa went to seek the help of an old Arab woman she knew who lived in the mellah. The woman found a vial of

clear liquid and told Latifa that two drops would be enough for two good

nights, and if she used the entire vial, there would be enough strength in the magic to keep two men lively for a year.

156

At noon that day Larbi was surprised when Latifa brought him his milk. She smiled at his troubled face, and waved as he wheeled the bus around the corner toward the Grand Socco.

Khaddouj was in her kitchen, preparing a meal to celebrate the return of her husband. She sang a song she had learned as a child in the Rif.

Walking out of the bus station that night, Larbi felt a stirring in his loins. He stopped at a flower shop and bought two large bouquets of red roses, one of which he hid behind the wall of the little courtyard where Latifa lived. She came to the door and before she could say a word, he thrust the flowers into her arms, kissed her on the forehead, and sat down to enjoy his kif. She prepared the tea while he smoked happily.

Before their tea had cooled, he moved toward her and blew out the candle.

When it was time for him to leave, he kissed her softly and shut the door. Then, picking up the remaining bouquet of red roses from behind

the wall of the courtyard, he walked home. His wife opened the door and he pushed the flowers into her hand. He took her in his arms and left the meal on the table. His wife did not mind.

Interview with Paul Bowles Daniel Halpern

Daniel Halpern: Why did you first come to Morocco?

Paul Bowles: Gertrude Stein suggested it. She had been here three

separate summers, staying at the old Villa de France, and she thought I'd like it. She was right. I loved it. And I still love it. Less, naturally. One loves everything less at my age; also it's a little less lovable than it was

forty years ago.

Halpern: What is it that keeps you in Tangier?

Bowles: It's changed less than the rest of the world, and continues to seem less a

part of this particular era than most cities. It's a pocket outside the mainstream. You feel that, very definitely, when you come in. After you've been over to Europe, for instance, for a few days or a few

weeks, and you come back here, you immediately feel you've left the stream, that nothing is going to happen here.

Halpern: You were eighteen when you first left America. What lured you to Europe?

Bowles: Everyone wanted to come to Europe in those days. It was the

intellectual and artistic center. Paris specifically seemed to be the 159

TriQuarterly

center, not just Europe. After all, it was the end of the twenties and just

about everybody was in Paris.

Halpern: Did you know many writers and composers in Paris?

Bowles: Practically no writers. I met a lot but I didn't know them. Com­

posers? Naturally, Virgil Thomson, and Henri Sauguet and Francis Poulenc

....

Not very many, no.

Halpern: Did you see much of Gertrude Stein while you were there?

Bowles: Idid see a lot of her in 1931. She had read some of the poems I had published, and she didn't like them. I went around in 1931, and I

remember she mentioned Bravig Imbs, a poet at that time who wrote for various magazines, and she said, "Yes, Bravig Imbs is a very bad poet, but you're not a poet at all." She also had things to say about my music. I

played her my music in 1931 and she said, "It's interesting." And then I went back in 1932 to her country house in Bilignin and played some newer music for

her, and she said, "Ah, last year your music wasn't

attenuated enough, and this year it's too attenuated." That's all she had to say. Except that she told me to come to Tangier. She was liking me at

the time, which meant that I could trust her recommendation. The next year, when she was not liking me at all, she suggested I go to Mexico, adding after a pause, "You'd last about two days."

Halpern: Was she in favor of your giving up music and devoting more time to your writing?

Bowles: I suspect she thought I had no ability to write. I remember we were

sitting in the garden at Bilignin and she said, "I told you last week

what was the matter with your poetry. What have you done with it since

then, with those particular poems? Have you rewritten them?" And I said, "No, of course not; they've already been published that way. How could I rewrite them?" And she said, "You see! I told you you were not a

poet. A real poet would have gone up and worked on them and then brought them down and showed them to me a week later, and you've done nothing whatever."

Halpern: What was it about writing that made you put composing aside?

160

Bowles: I'm not sure. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I couldn't make a living as a composer without remaining all the time in New York. I was very much fed up with being in New York.

Halpern: When did you begin to write?

Bowles: At four. I have a whole collection of stories about animals that I wrote then.

Halpern: But it was as a poet that you first published, in transition?

Bowles: I had written a lot of poetry (I was in high school) and had been

buying transition regularly since it started publishing. It seemed to me that I could write for them as well as anyone else, so I sent them things and they accepted them. I was sixteen when I wrote the poem they first accepted, seventeen when they published it. I went on for several years as a so-called

poet.

Halpern: What ended your short career as a poet?

Bowles: I think Gertrude Stein had a lot to do with it. She convinced me that I ought not to be writing poetry, since I wasn't a poet at all, as Ijust

said. And I believed her thoroughly, and I still believe her. She was quite

right. I would have stopped anyway, probably.

Halpern: Were there any important early literary influences?

Bowles: Well, I suppose everything influences you. I remember my mother used to read me Edgar Allan Poe's short stories before I went to

sleep at night. After I got into bed she would read me Tales ofMystery andlmagination. It wasn't very good for sleeping-they gave me night­ mares. Maybe that's what she wanted, who knows? Certainly what you read during your teens influences you enormously. During my early teens I was very fond of Arthur Machen and Walter de la Mare. The

school of mystical whimsy. And then I found Thomas Mann, and fell into the Magic Mountain when I was sixteen, and that was certainly a

big influence. Probably that was the book that influenced me more than any other before I went to Europe.

Halpern: Before you actually begin writing a novel or story, what takes place in your mind? Do you outline the plot, say, in visual terms?

161

Bowles: Every work suggests its own method. Each novel's been done

differently, under different circumstances and using different methods. I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street. I decided just which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was

omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after that let it take its own course. You remember there's a little Kafka quote at the beginning of the third section: "From a certain point onward

there is no longer any turning back; that is the point that must be reached ." This seemed important to me, and when I got to that point,

beyond which there was no turning back, I decided to use a surrealist technique=-simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that.

Halpern: What about your second novel, Let It Come Down?

Bowles: That was altogether different. I began to write that on a

freighter as I went past Tangier one night. I was on my way from Ant­ werp to Colombo, in Ceylon, and we went past Tangier and I felt very nostalgic-I could see faint lights in the fog and I knew tha twas Tangier. I wanted very much to stop in and see it, but not being able to, since the boat went right on past, I created my own Tangier. I started by imagining that I was standing on the cliff looking out at the place where I was on the ship. I transported myself from the ship straight over to the cliffs and began there. That was the first part I wrote. I worked back­ ward and forward, as it were, from that original scene.

Halpern: Where Dyar and Hadija stand on the top of a cliff and see freighters going by.

Bowles: That's right. Then on the ship, before I got to Colombo, I

worked it out-the sequence of events, the patterns of motivations, the

juxtapositions. Again I decided to use exactly the same writing tech­ nique I had used with The Sheltering Sky. To get it up to a place from which it could roll of its own momentum to a stationary point, and then let go and use the automatic process. It's quite clear where it happens.

It's on the boattrip.

162

Halpern: When you wrote the scene in which Dyar was high on majoun, the evening he had dinner with Daisy, were you yourself under the influence of kif?

Bowles: No. The whole book was written in cold blood, up to that point.

But for the last section of the book I went up to Xauen and stayed in the

hotel there for about six weeks, writing only at night after dinner. After I

had worked for half or three quarters of an hour, and it was going along, I would smoke. That made it possible for me to write four or five hours

rather than only two, which is all I can usually do. The kif gave me a much longer breath.

Halpern: Are you in the habit of using kifin order to write?

Bowles: No, I don't think that would be possible. When I was writing Up Above the World I smoked when I felt like it, and worked all day wan­

dering around in the forest with a pen and notebook in my hand.

Halpern: To what extent does the ingestion of kif playa role in your writing?

Bowles: I shouldn't think it has an effect on anyone's writing. Kif can

provide flashes of insight, but it acts as an obstacle to thinking. On the other hand, it enables one to write concentratedly for hours at a stretch without fatigue. You can see how it could be useful if you were writing something which relied for its strength on the free elaboration of fantasy. I used it only once that way, as I say-for the fourth section of Let It Come Down. But I think most writers would agree that kif is for

relaxation, not for work.

Halpern: Do you revise a great deal after you've finished the rough draft?

Bowles: No, the first draft is the final draft. I can't revise. Maybe I

should qualify that by saying I first write in longhand, and then the

day, or the next day, I type the longhand. There are always many changes between the longhand and the typed version, but that first typed sheet is part of the final sheet. There's no revision. same

Halpern: Many critics like to attribute a central theme to your writing: 163

that of the alienation of civilized man when he comes in contact with a

primitive society and its natural man.

Bowles: Yes, I've heard about that. It's a theory that makes the body of

writing seem more coherent, perhaps, when you put it all together.

And possibly they're right, but I'm not conscious of having such a theme, no. I'm not aware of writing about alienation. If my mind worked that way, I couldn't write. I don't have any explicit message; certainly I'm not suggesting changes. I'm merely trying to call people's attention to something they don't seem to be sufficiently aware of.

Halpern: Do you feel trapped or at a disadvantage by being a member of Western civilization?

Bowles: Trapped? No. That's like being trapped by having blond hair or blue eyes, light or dark skin

....

No, I don't feel trapped. It would be a

very different life to be part of another social group, perhaps, but I don't see any difference between the natural man and the civilized man, and

I'm not juxtaposing the two. The natural man always tries to be a civilized man, as you can see all over the world. I've never yearned to be a member of another ethnic group. That's carrying one's romanticism a

little too far. God knows I carry mine far enough as it is.

Halpern: Why is it that you have traveled so much? And to such remote places?

Bowles: I suppose the first reason is that I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind. I'm always happy leaving the United

States, and the farther away I go the happier I am, generally. Then there's another thing: I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to

the whole world, not to just one part of it.

Halpern: What is the motivation that prompts your characters to leave the safety of a predictable environment, a Western environment, for an unknown world that first places them in a state of aloneness and often ends by destroying them, as in the case of Port and Kit in The Sheltering Sky and Dyar inLet It Come Down?

Bowles: I've never thought about it. For one thing there is no "predic164

table environment." Security is a false concept. As for the motivation?

In the case of Port and Kit they wanted to travel, a simple, innocent

motivation. In the case of Nelson Dyar, he was fed up with his work in

America. Fed up with standing in a teller's cage. Desire for freedom, I suppose; desire for adventure. Why do people leave their native habitat and go wandering off over the face of the earth?

Halpern: Many of your characters seem to pursue a course of action that often leads them into rather precarious positions, pushed forward by an almost self-destructive curiosity, and a kind offatalism-for example, the night walks of Port, or the professor inA Distant Episode. Could you say something about this?

Bowles: I'm very aware of my own capacity for compulsive behavior. Besides. it's generally more rewarding to imagine the results of

compulsive than of reflective action. It has always seemed to me that my characters act naturally, given the circumstances; their behavior is foreseeable. Characters set in motion a mechanism of which they become a victim. But generally the mechanism turns out to have been operative at the very beginning. One realizes that Kit's and Port's having left America at all was a compulsive act. Their urge to travel was compulsive.

Halpern: Do you think that these characters have an "unconscious drive for self-destruction"?

Bowles: An unconscious drive for self-destruction?

...

Death and

destruction are stock ingredients of life. But it seems to me that the

motivation of characters in fiction like mine should be a secondary consideration. I think of characters as if they were props in the general scene of any

given work. The characters, the landscape, the climatic conditions, the human situation, the formal structure of the story or the novel, all these elements are one--the characters are made of the same material as the rest of the work. Since they are activated by the other

elements of the synthetic cosmos, their own motivations are relatively

unimportant.

Halpern: Why do you constantly write about such neurotic characters?

Bowles: Most of the Occidentals I know are neurotic. But that's to be 165

expected; that's what we're producing now. They're the norm. I don't think I could write about a character who struck me as eccentric, whose

behavior was too far from standard.

Halpern: Many people would consider the behavior of your characters far from standard.

Bowles: I realize that if you consider them objectively, they're neurotic and compulsive; but they're generally presented as integral parts of

situations, along with the landscape, and so it's not very fruitful to try to consider them in another light. My feeling is that what is called a truly normal person (if I understand your meaning) is not likely to be written

about, save as a symbol. The typical man of my fiction reacts to inner pressures the way the normal man ought to be reacting to the age we live in. Whatever is intolerable must produce violence.

Halpern: And these characters are your way of protesting.

Bowles: If you call it protest. If even a handful of people can believe in

the cosmos a writer describes, accept the workings of its natural laws (and this includes finding that the characters behave in a credible

manner), the cosmos is a valid one.

Halpern: Critics often label you an existential writer. Do you consider yourself an existentialist?

Bowles: No! Existentialism was never a literary doctrine in any case,

though it did trigger three good novels-one by Sartre (La Nausee) and two by Camus (L 'Etranger andLa Peste). But if one's going to sub­ even

scribe to the tenets of a formulated belief, I suppose atheistic exis­ tentialism is the most logical one to adopt. That is, it's likely to provide more

insight than another into what attitudes to take vis-it-vis today's

world.

Halpern: But you do share some of the basic tenets of existentialism, as defined by Sartre.

Bowles: He's interested in the welfare of humanity. As Port said, "What is humanity? Humanity is everybody but yourself."

Halpern: That sounds rather solipsistic.

166

Bowles: What else can you possibly know? Of course I'm interested in

myself, basically. In getting through my life. You've got to get through it all. You never know how many years you've got left. You keep going until it's over. And I'm the one who's got to suffer the consequences of

having lived my life.

Halpern: Is this why so many of your characters seem to be asocial?

Bowles: Are they? Or are they merely outside and perhaps wishing they were inside?

Halpern: Do you think of yourself as being asocial?

Bowles: I don't know. Probably very, yes. I'm sorry to be so stubborn and impossible with all this, but the point is I just don't know any of the answers, and I have no way of

finding them out. I'm not equipped to dig

them up, nor do I want to. The day I find out what I'm all about I'll stop

writing-I'll stop doing everything. Once you know what makes you tick, you don't tick any more. The whole thing stops.

Halpern: You are against Sartre's taking life so seriously. Yet when you say about your life that you are just trying to get through it the best you can, it sounds to me as if you took living very seriously.

Bowles: Oh, everyone one takes his own existence seriously, but that's as far as he should go. If you claim that life itself is serious, you're talking out of turn. You're encroaching on other people's lives. Each man's life

has the quality he gives it, but you can't say that life itself has any

qualities. If we suffer, it's because we haven't learned how not to. I have to remind myself of that.

Halpern: Then life is a painful experience for you?

Bowles: You have to keep going, and try at least to keep a pleasant face.

Halpern: Life seems to be inaccessible to many of your charcters. By their going beyond a certain point, past which they are pulled by an un­ conscious force, they place themselves in a position where return to the world of man is impossible. Why are they pushed beyond that point?

Bowles: It's a subject that interests me very much; but you've got to remember that these are all rationalizations devised after the fact. and 167

therefore purely suppositious. I don't know the answers to the

questions; all I can do is say, "Maybe," "It could be," or "It could be something else." Offhand I'd suggest that the answer has to do with the Romantic fantasy of reaching a region of self-negation and thereby regaining a state of innocence.

Halpern: Is it a kind of testing to find out what it's like beyond that point?

Bowles: It could be. One writes to find out certain

things for oneself.

Much of my writing is therapeutic. Otherwise I never would have

started, because I knew from the beginning that I had no specific desire to reform. Many of my short stories are simple emotional outbursts.

They came out all at once, like eggs, and I felt better afterward. In that sense much of my writing is an exhortation to destroy. "Why don't you all burn the world, smash it, get rid of everything in it that plagues you?"

It is a desire above all to bring about destruction, that's certain.

Halpern: So you don't want to change the world. You simply want to end it.

Bowles: Destroy and end are not the same word. You don't end a process

by destroying its products. What I wanted was to see everyone aware of being in the same kind of metaphysical impasse I was in. I wanted to know whether they suffered in the same way.

Halpern: And you don't think they do?

Bowles: I don't think many do. Perhaps the number is increasing. I hope so, if only for selfish reasons! Nobody likes to feel alone. I know because

I always think of myself as completely alone, and I imagine other people as a part of

something else.

Halpern: And you wantto join the crowd?

Bowles: It's a universal urge. I've always wanted to. From earliest child­ hood. Or to be more exact, from the first time I was presented to another

child, which was when I was five.

Ha/pern: And you were rejected?

Bowles: It was already too late. I wanted to join on my own terms. And now it doesn't matter.

168

Halpern: And so now you alienate your characters, the way you were alienated?

Bowles: I don't think the judge would allow that question. Life is much harder if one is alone. Shared suffering is easier to bear.

Halpern: Sartre says somewhere that a man's essential freedom is the capacity to say "No." This is something your characters are often in­ capable of. Do they achieve any kind of freedom?

Bowles: My characters don't attain any kind of freedom, as far as I'm aware.

Halpern: Is death any kind of freedom?

Bowles: Death? Another nonexistent, something to use as a threat to those who are afraid of it. There's nothing to say about death. The cage door's always open. Nobody has to stay in here. But people want free­ dom inside the cage. So what is freedom? You're bound by physical

laws, bound by your body, bound by your mind.

Halpern: What does freedom mean to you?

Bowles: I'd say it was not having to experience what you don't like.

Halpern: By the alienation that your characters go through in their various exotic settings, are they forced into considering the meaning of their lives, if there is meaning to life?

Bowles: I shouldn't think so. In any case, there's not one meaning to life.

There should be as many meanings as there are individuals-you assign

meaning to life. If you don't assign it, then clearly it has none whatever.

Halpern: InL 'Etranger, Meursault is put in jail, which is a way of being alienated, and at that point he considers "the meaning of life."

Bowles: Camus was a great moralist, which means, nowadays, to be pre­

occupied with social considerations. I'm not preoccupied in that way.

I'm not a moralist. After all, he was a serious communist; I was a very unserious one, a completely negative one.

Halpern: What was it about communism that appealed to you?

169

Bowles: Oh, I imagined it could destroy the establishment. When I realized it couldn't, I got out fast and decided to work on my own hook.

Halpern: Back to destroying the world

....

Bowles: Well, who doesn't wantto? I mean, look at it!

Halpern: It's one thing to dislike something you see and another to want to destroy it.

Bowles: Is it? I think the natural urge of every human being is to destroy what he dislikes. That doesn't mean he does it. You don't by any means

get to do wha t you want to do, but you've got to recognize the desire when you feel it.

Halpern: So you use your writing as a weapon.

Bowles: Right. Absolutely.

Halpern: And your music?

Bowles: Music is abstract. Besides, I was writing theater music. It was fun but it's a static occupation. I always have to feel I'm going

somewhere.

Halpern: Has your desire to destroy the world always been a conscious one?

Bowles: Yes. I was aware that I had a grudge, and that the only way I could satisfy my grudge was by writing words, attacking in words. The way to attack, of course, is to seem not to be attacking. Get people's confidence and then, surprise! Yank the rug out from under their feet.

If they come back for more, then I've succeeded.

Halpern: If they enjoy your work you have succeeded-in the sense that their minds have been infected.

Bowles: Infected is a loaded word, but all right. They have been infected

by the germ of doubt. Their basic assumptions may have been slightly shaken for a second, and that's important.

Halpern: And you don'tthink of your goals as being negative?

Bowles: To destroy often means to purify. I don't think of destruction as 170

necessarily undesirable. You said "infecting." All right. Perhaps those infected will have more technique than I for doing some definite destroying. In that sense I'm just a propagandist, but then all writers are propagandists for one thing or another. It's a perfectly honorable function to serve as a corrosive agent. And there certainly is nothing unusual about it; it's been part of the Romantic tradition for the past

century and a half. If a writer can incite anyone to question and

ultimately to reject the present structure of any facet of society, he's performed a function.

Halpern: And after that?

Bowles: It's not for him to say. Apres lui le deluge. That's all he can do.

If he's a propagandist for nihilism, that's his function too.

Halpern: To start the ball rolling?

Bowles: I want to help society go to pieces, make it easy.

Halpern: And writing about horror is your method.

Bowles: I don't write" about horror." But there's a sort of metaphysical malaise in the world today, as if people sense that things are going to be bad. They could be expected to respond to any fictional situation which evoked the same amalgam of repulsion and terror that they already

vaguely feel.

Halpern: Are you, as Leslie Fiedler suggests, a secret lover of the horror you create?

Bowles: Is there such a creature as a secret or even an avowed lover of

horror? I can't believe it. If you're talking about the evocation of horror on the

printed page, then that's something else. In certain sensitive people the awakening of the sensation of horror through reading can result in a temporary smearing of the lens of consciousness, as one might put it. Then all perception is distorted by it. It's a dislocation, and if it's of short duration it provides the reader with a partially pleasurable shiver. In that respect I confess to being jaded, and I regret it. A good jolt of vicarious horror can cause a certain amount of questioning of values afterward.

171

Halpern: Is that what you hope to accomplish through the horror you evoke?

Bowles: I don't use horror. If reading a passage of mine triggers the

suspension of belief in so-called objective reality for a moment, then I suppose it has the same effect on the reader as if I had consciously used horror as a device.

Halpern: I'd like to talk a little about your translating. Many critics are convinced that the stories from the Moghrebi are really yours.

Bowles: I know, butthey're not. That's critical blindness. If they were

mine, they'd be very different. They're translations. Each Moroccan writer has a different style in English because the cadence of each one's

speech is different in Moghrebi. I keep the tapes. Anyone who listens to them and understands the language can hear the differences.

Halpern: Has your writing been affected by the translations you've done?

Bowles: A little. I noticed that it had been when I wrote A Hundred

Camels in the Courtyard. I was trying to get to another way of thinking, noncausal.

...

Those were experiments. Arbitrary use of disparate

elements.

Halpern: You did some translating of Borges' work, didn't you?

Bowles: I did one short story, which I particularly liked, called Las Ruinas Circulares-back in 1944, I think it was. He was completely un­ known in the United States. His cousin, Victoria Ocampo, was in New York. She was the editor of Sur, in Buenos Aires, and was the woman

who eventually bought La Prensa and went to jail under Peron. She was

spectacular woman. One afternoon she tossed me a book, which she said was a new work by her cousin (it was one that she herself had published). It was called ElIardin de los Senderos Que se Bifurcan. A a very

marvelous book. Since then it has been translated as Ficciones. I had read some Borges four years before that, and already admired him. I

think that was the first translation into English of a short story by

Borges. I don't know whether View, the magazine it was published in, bothered to get permission from Buenos Aires or not, but I doubt it.

They seldom did.

172

Halpern: Did you have much difficulty in translating that story?

Bowles: Well, Borges writes in classical Castellano, and the ideas are

simply put; he's an easy man to translate. I should think the important thing would be to retain the particular poetic flavor of the prose in each story.

H.alpem: Do you feel there is any importance to the Moroccan trans­

lations you've done?

Bowles: I think they provide a certain amount of insight into the Moroc­

mentality and Moroccan customs, things that haven't been gone into very deeply in fiction. I haven't noticed many good novels about Morocco, so in that sense they're of use to anyone interested in the country. Literary importance? I have no idea.

can

Halpern: Why do you spend so much time on these translations instead of on your own writing?

Bowles: Because Jane, my wife, was ill, and to write a novel I need soli­ tude and great long stretches of empty time; I haven't really had that

since 1957. The summer of 1964, of course, I did go up on the mountain, Monte Viejo, you know, and write Up Above the World.

Halpern: Are you a great fan of Jane Bowles's work?

Bowles: I am indeed. I've read Two Serious Ladies ten times-I think I can

quote most of it. Also, it was going over the manuscript of Two

Serious Ladies that gave me the original impetus to consider the possi­

bility of writing a novel.

Halpern: You met Jane before she started writing Two Serious Ladies, didn't you?

Bowles: Oh, yes. She began writing Two Serious Ladies in 1938, in Paris, the year we were married. She wrote a few scenes that were later much

modified, but still they were the nucleus. And then she went on writing it in New York and finally in Mexico.

Halpern: Was it difficult living with another writer?

Bowles: That's hard to say, since I've lived only with Janie. She was the

only writer I've ever lived with, and also the only woman I've ever lived 173

with, so I don't know which difficulties come from her being a woman and which come from her being a writer. Naturally,

you always have

some difficulties with your

wife, but whether these had anything to do with the fact that she was a writer, I can't tell you.

Halpern: Was there ever any question of competition?

Bowles: Competition between us? Competition's a game. It takes more than one to play. We never played it.

Halpern: Among your own books do you have a favorite?

Bowles: Of published vol urnes I like The Delicate Prey the most.

Naturally that doesn't mean I'd write the stories the same way now.

Halpern: Do you have much contact with other writers?

Bowles: When other writers come through Tangier and look me up, I see

them, yes. And I knew a few before I settled here. One of the first was Bill Saroyan, who came to New York with the script of a play for which

he wanted me to write music. It was My Heart's in the Highlands. and the old Group Theatre produced it. About that time I met Auden. I

always held him in great respect: he was erudite, and he had an un­ paralleled ability to use the English language. An infallible, like Stravinsky. And of course I knew Isherwood and Spender. There was one spring when I used to have lunch with them every day at the Cafe des Westens in Berlin. Although I never felt that I knew them, because they were English, and enough older than I to be intimidating. It was only much later, long after he had gone to America, that I knew Isherwood better. And Tennessee Williams. Certainly I've seen a lot of him and in many different places: Acapulco, New York, Rome, Tangier, Paris, It used to be I who was the traveler, but nowadays Hollywood Tennessee moves around a good deal more than I do. This is probably because he doesn't refuse to take planes. Truman Capote was here for a whole summer, staying at the Farhar, and we ate our meals together every day during those months. Gore Vidal came, and Allen Ginsberg, and Angus Wilson, and Cyril Connolly. And of course Bill Burroughs lived here for years. Even Susan Sontag came, although she didn't stay very long. ....

Halpern: What about Djuna Barnes?

174

Bowles: Yes, Djuna came here to Tangier and took my house on the Marshan one year. She was writing a book she called Bow Down. Later she called it Nightwood. I used to see a lot of Carson McCullers when we

lived in Middagh Street, and then we used to go and visit her up in Nyack

-spend weekends up there. And of course Sartre, who came to America for a while. We'd have lunch together and then wander around the poorer sections of New York, which he wanted very much to see.

That was the year I got the rights to translate No Exit. Later he was an­

noyed with me in Paris, so I don't know him any more.

Halpern: Annoyed about what, if I may ask?

Bowles: He was annoyed because I was unable to keep the director of No Exit from changing the script. He considered that my province, which it

should have been, but the point was that I didn't have a percentage in the show and he didn't know how Broadway works. I was simply the

translator, so I had no rights whatever. He sent telegrams of protest from Paris before we opened, and I was obliged to send back replies that were dictated

by John Huston. His anger should have been directed

against John, not me.

Halpern: What about contemporary writers? Are there any you enjoy reading?

Bowles: Let's see, who's alive? Sartre is alive, but he did only one good novel. Graham Greene is alive. Who's alive in America? Whom do I follow with interest? Christopher Isherwood's a good novelist. They're

mostly dead. I used to read everything of Gide' s and Camus'.

Halpern: Let me have some opinions on the kind of writing that's being done in America today.

Bowles: There are various kinds of writing being done, of course. But I

suspect you mean the "popular school," as exemplified by Joseph

Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon-that sort of

thing? I don't enjoy it.

Halpern: Why not?

Bowles: It's simply that I find it very difficult to get into. The means it uses to awaken interest is of a sort that would be valid

only for the length of a short piece. It's too much to have to swim around in that purely 175

literary magma for the time it takes to read a whole book. It fails to hold my attention, that's all. It creates practically no momentum. My mind wanders, I become impatient, and therefore intolerant.

Halpern: Is it the content that bothers you or the style of the writing? Or both?

Bowles: Both. But it's the point of view more than anything. The

cynicism and wisecracking ultimately function as endorsements of the present civilization. The content is hard to make out because it's

generally symbolic or allegorical, and the style is generally hermetic. It's not a novelistic style at all; it's really a style that would be more useful in writing essays, I should think.

Halpern: Let me go back to the critics for a moment. Do you think they have missed the point of your writing?

Bowles: They have, certainly, on many occasions. I've often had the

impression they were more interested in my motive for writing a given work than they were in the work itself. In general, the British critics have been more perceptive; language is more important to them than it is to us. But I don't think that matters.

Halpern: One thing that particularly interests many who meet you is the great discrepancy between what you are like as a person and the kind of books you write.

Bowles: Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a clear

reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways. Even when

there's a definite connection between the work and the life, the pattern

they form may be in either parallel or contrary motion. If you want to call my state schizophrenic, that's all right with me. Say my personality has two facets. One is always turned in one direction, toward my own Mecca; that's my work. The other looks in a different direction and sees a different

landscape. I think that's a common state of affairs.

Halpern: In retrospect, would you say there has been something that has remained important to you over the years? Something which you have maintained in your writing?

176

Bowles: Continuing consciousness, infinite adaptability of human con­

sciousness to outside circumstances, the absurdity of it all, the

hopelessness of this whole business of living. I've written very little the past few years. Probably because emotionally everything grows less in­ tense as one grows older. The motivation is at a much lower degree, that's all.

Halpern: When you were first starting to write you were, emotionally, full of things to say. Now that that has faded somewhat, what spring­ board do you have?

Bowles: I can only find out after I've written, since I empty my mind

each time before I start. I only know what 1 intended to do once it's finished. Do you remember, inA Life Full ofHoles, the farmer comes and scolds the boy for falling asleep, and the boy says: "I didn't know 1 was

going to sleep until 1 woke up."

) .

'.i

Harrison's Row Alan Sillitoe

On the banks of the sinewy River Leen stood a group of cottages known as Harrison's Row. There must have been six to

eight of them, all in a

ruinous condition, but lived in nevertheless. They were built with the usual small red English house-brick, but now they were dark and

weather-stained, having been put up for stockingers during the Indus­ trial Revolution a hundred years before.

And yet Harrison's Row had a character all of its own, both because of its situation, and the people who lived there. Each house had a

bit of garden rising in front, and a strip of garden sloping away from the kitchen door at the back, down to the Leen. The front

gardens

had tended to merge into one piece of common ground, while those at the back had more or less retained their separateness.

From the slight rise on which the houses stood, the back doors and

windows looked across the stream onto the lush green fields, out toward the towers of Wollaton Hall in one direction, and the woods of

Aspley

Manor in the other.

After a warm summer without much rain the children were able to wade to the fields on the other side=-paddle almost. But after a 179

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three-day downpour when the air was still heavy with undropped water, and colored a menacing gunmetal blue, it was best not to go anywhere near the river, for one false slip and you'd get sucked in, and dragged by current the the powerful Trent some miles away. There was no along to telling where you'd end up. It seemed to flow into the River Amazon itself. During the persistent rain of one autumn, the water came up over the gardens and almost in at the back doors.

Harrison's Row was a cut-off place in that not many people knew about it unless they were familiar with the district. You went to it from St. Peter's Street, down Leen Place. Butit was delightful forthe kids who lived there because out of the back gardens they could go straight into the stream of the Leen. In summer an old tin hi p bath would come from one of the houses.

Using it for a boat, and stripped completely to their white skins, the children were happy and mobile while sun and weather lasted.

In other words, Harrison's Row was the last of Nottingham, where it met the countryside. Its houses were at the very edge of the city, in the

days when numerous housing estates hadn't been built beyond. They made a sort of bastion before the country began-innumerable streets of houses rising behind, and green fields glistening in front.

Yet the houses didn't immediately start behind, due to gardens and a piece of waste ground, which gave to Harrison's Row the feeling of isolation.

Across the little River Leen horses were sometimes to be seen in the

field, and in the fields beyond that, the noise of combine harvesters were heard at work in late summer. Children living there, and adults as well, had the advantage of both town and country.

A joke going around at that time was told about how young Ted

Griffin, who'd just started work, saw two policemen one day walking down Leen Place toward Harrison's Row. Convinced they had to arrest him for meter-breaking he ran through the house, went over the fence,

jumped into the Leen (fortunately not very swollen), waded across and into the field, and made his way to Robins Wood a mile or so beyond. A perfect escape route. He stayed away two days and crept back home at night, famished and soaked, only to find that the police had not come for him-yet-but to question BIonk next door, who was suspected of poaching ....

180

But this is about Jeff Bignal, a young unmarried man of twenty-three, who lived with his mother and worked at the nearby pit. He was short in

height, and plump, his white skin scarred back and front with livid blue patches where he had been knocked with coal at the pit face.

Often after his tea in summer when it was still warm and light he'd sit in his back garden playing the fiddle, and when he did everybody came out to listen. Or they opened the doors and windows so that the sound of his music drifted in, while the woman stayed at the sink or wash-copper, or the man at his odd jobs.

Even tall dark sallow-faced elderly Mrs. Deaffy stood by her back door as if she weren't stone deaf any more and could follow each note.

She smiled at seeing everyone occupied, fixed or entranced.

And Blonk, in the secret dimness of the back kitchen, went on

mending his poaching nets before setting out with Arthur Bede next door on that night's expedition to Gunthorpe by the banks of the Trent, where the green escarpment between there and Kneeton was riddled

with warrens.

Jeff sat on a chair oblivious to everybody, fed up with his day's work at

the pit and only wanting to lose himself in his own music. The kids

stopped splashing and shouting in the water, because if they didn't they might get hauled in and clouted. It had happened before, though Jeff had never known about it.

His face was long yet generally cheerful--contrary to what one would

expect-a smile settling on it whenever he met and passed anybody on the street, or on his way to the group of lavatories at the far end of the row. But his face was almost down and lost to the world as he sat on his

chair and brought forth the first sweet notes of a summer's evening.

It was said that his father had taught him to play like that. Others maintained it was an uncle who had showed him how. But nobody knew for sure because when someone asked him directly he said that if he had any gift at all it must have come from God above. It was known that on some

Sundays if the sun was out he went to the Methodist chapel up on

St. Peter's Street.

He could play anything from "Greensleeves" to "Mademoiselle from

Armentieres." He could do a beautiful heart-pulling version of Handel's "Largo," and throw in bits from the "Messiah" as well. He'd go from one piece to another with no rhyme or system, from ridicu181

lousness to sublimity with shocking abruptness, but as the hour or so went on it all appeared easy and natural, part of a long piece coming

from Jeff Bignal 's fiddle while the ball of the sun went down.

As as child I watched him play, and it seemed to me as 'if the songs lived in the hard collier's muscle at the top of his energetic arm, and that

they queued one by one to get out. Once free, they rushed along his flesh from which the shirt sleeve had been unrolled, and split into his fingertips, where they were played out with ease into the warm evening air.

The grass in the fields across the stream was livid and lush, almost

blue, and a piebald horse stood with bent head, eating oats out of a large old pram whose wheels had long since gone. The breeze wafted across

the places farther out, from Robins Wood and the Cherry Orchard, and even, on a day that was not so hot, from the tops of the Pennines in

Derbyshire.

Jeff played for himself, for the breeze against his arm, for the soft hiss of the flowing Leen at the end of the garden, for the horse in the field which took no notice of anything at all and which, having grown tired of its oats in the pram, bent its head over the actual grass and began to roam.

In the middle of the winter Jeffs fiddling was forgotten. He went into

the pit before it was light, and came up only after it had got dark once

Walking down Leen Place from St. Peter's Street he complained to Blonk that it was hard on a man not to see daylight for weeks at a

more.

time.

"That's why I wain't go down the bleddy pit," Blonk said vehemently,

though he had worked there from time to time, and would do again no doubt. "You'd do better to come out on a bit 0' poaching with me," he suggested.

It was virtually true that Jeff saw no daylight, because even on Sunday he stayed in bed most of the day, and if it happened to be dull there was little enough sky to be seen from his front bedroom window.

The upshot of his complaint was that he'd do anything to change such a situation. A man was less than an animal for putting up with it.

"I'd do anything," he repeated to his mother over his tea in the single downstairs room.

182

"But what, though?" she asked. "What can you do, Jeff?"

"Well, how dol know?" he said, almost snapping at her. "But I'll do

something.

"

He didn't do anything about it till the weather got better and life

turned a bit sweeter. Maybe this improvement finally got him going on

it, because it's hard to hel p yourself toward better things when you're too far down in the dumps.

On a fine blowy day with both sun and cloud in the sky Jeff went out in the morning, walking up Leen Place with his fiddle under his arm.

In the afternoon he came back without it.

"Where's your fiddle?" Mrs. Jones asked.

"Sold it," he said, a forced smile on his pale face.

"How much for?"

"Thirty bob."

"That ain't much."

"It's enough," he said.

So the fact that he'd sold his fiddle for thirty bob rattled up and down

the line of cottages till everybody knew of it.

They wondered why he'd done it, but had to wait for the answers, as usually does. They came out one by one, for there was nothing secre­ tive about Jeff Bignal. If he'd sold his music for a mess of pottage he saw no point in not letting them know.

All he'd had to do was make up his mind, and he'd done that lying on his side at the pit face six hours a day, while ripping coal out with his pick and shovel. Decisions made like that can't be undone, he knew.

He'd brooded on it all winter, till the fact of having settled it seemed to have altered the permanent expression on his face, and given it a new look which caused people to wonder whether he'd ever be able to play the fiddle again anyway-at least with his old spirit and dash.

With the thirty bob he paid the first week's rent on a butcher's shop on Denman Street. Maybe he had a bit more money knocking around, though it couldn't have been much, but with that and a slice of bluff he got enough credit from a wholesaler at the meat market downtown to stock his shop with mutton and lamb, and in a couple of days he was in trade. The people of Harrison's Row were amazed at how easy it was.

He parted his hair down the middle, like a serious man of business, but everyone agreed that it was better than being at Radford pit. They one

183

saw

that, like many a one before him, he'd got fed up with selling the

sweat of his brow.

He didn't exactly prosper, but he made a living. And he didn't have to

bother about not seeing daylight again for almost the whole of the winter.

Six months after opening the shop he got married-and held the

reception at the chapel on St. Peter's Street, which seemed to be a sort of halfway house between Harrison's Row on the banks of the Leen, and the butcher's shop farther up.

The people of Harrison's Row missed the sound of his fiddle on the following summer's evenings, though the children could splash and play with their tin bathtub undisturbed, floundering through the shallows, and scrambling up to the grass on the other bank.

184

The crystal world: notes on excerpts from Cesare Pavese's The job of living Richard Komer

The author of the remarkable diary which the reader is offered a taste of

here, Cesare Pavese, took his own life just before his forty-second birthday. He left the diary for those who would come after him, for the

unhappy few. Others have had a crack at translating the book before my own attempt, but it needed doing all over again. The publication of these first excerpts from my new version are to be construed, then, as a salute on the sad occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death to a most

afflicted, most gifted man: poet, translator, novelist, man of

letters, and a self-destroyer for most of the years of his too short life.

The diary proper begins at about the point where we enter it here, on a note of almost insurmountable despair. Both apolitical and antifascist

by temperament, Pavese had been denied a real occupation during the early thirties and was eventually sent away from his native Piedmont to political confinement in Calabria-from the tip to the heel of the Italian boot-for nearly a year. During his Calabrian exile his first book of poems, Workls Weariness (tousethetitleofthetranslation-in­ progress by William Arrowsmith), appeared, drawing a stone-silent reception from the critics, including Croce, on whom Pavese had 185

TriQuarterly

counted. Returning from confinement in April 1936, he learned that his fiancee had broken their engagement and found herself another man.

The second blow, capping the first, crushed Pavese's spirit. And he set out to analyze a mood that was at once murderous and fearful, to probe

and analyze that palpable despair in which we find him.

I leave it to the reader to make the essential discoveries, but certain

things ought to be said in advance. The title Pavese had left for the diary when it was found after his death, tidily bundled among his papers, was II mestiere di vivere: anything but a casual choice, for none of his titles was casual, and this was after all to be his posthumous letter to the world. I have rendered it TheJob ofLiving. Job, not Business, as in the A. E. Murch translation, which seems to me too crass for Pavese's

intention. And not Craft, the word Arrowsmith uses in the title, which,

though closer than Business, is too restricted. Living, for Pavese, was above all else ajob of work to be done, a task he set for himself, a vocation requiring the compliance of act and will. Significantly, I think, he looked on writing as still another job of work, another mestiere (here one may legitimately think of "craft"), but the primary job was living. And literature, as he would note in the journal toward the end of that nearly impassable year in which these selections close, "is a defense against the assaults of life."

Precious little of the second mestiere seeps into the pages at hand.

We wished instead to concentrate on the life, to screen it out from the

otherwise ineluctable intrusions of reading and writing-things all writers do, to be sure, and which Pavese did more ofthan most. But

there are glimmerings here and there that a first-rate talent is at work,

taking leave of his poem-making and teaching himself to make longer prose fictions. The entries of April 27, 1936, and June 18,1937, for example, are instances of apprenticeship in dialogue and narrative structure, while the entries of November 9, 1937, and March 26, 1938

(where he quotes from a poem called" Ancestors"), are instances of the farewell to poetry. In the meantime, partly of course out of eco­ nomic necessity, Pavese kept right on with his translating from English and American authors: his versions of Dos Passos' Big Money,

Stein's Toklas, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and a book he disliked intensely, 186

Steinbeck's OfMice and Men were all produced in the span of time ,

of the diary selections here in TriQuarterly. As for the critical judg­ ments that punctuate the whole of the diary, they are rare among these

selections. For an example, turn to the entry of February 17, 1938, an attack on Flaubert for his

moral stance of salvaging the artist and

pronouncing all else dross. The intelligence behind such a remark requires no comment from a translator, but a reader of the earlier version might be left wondering why Pavese had it in for poor Flaubert.

Why did Pavese wait twelve more years to commit suicide? The an­ swer of course is that these pages take us through a late-adolescent malady, diagnosed by Theodore Ziolkowski as the crisis of the thirty­ year-old. Its most obvious symptoms are dissatisfaction with one's artistic and sexual performances. The entries for September 27; 1937, and March 26, 1938, preceding and following (though the reader could not inferit on his own) "a half-hearted attempt at suicide with gas" in

January 1938, are medical-text examples:

" ...

a man who

soon would have been better off had he never been

ejaculates too

born"; "the illusion

of my talent has vanished." Either we get through such crises or we do

not, and in the meantime there is a job of work to be done.

Elsewhere in these same pages, in an entry we have excluded, and just

prior to the suicide attempt, Pavese himself speaks of having "transformed an awful collapse (1935-36) into a crisis of transition to maturity." Once he has achieved this transition, he will be able to live and continue to write for a time. The early pages of the diary that make up our selections are the record of his struggle to regain a purchase on life and on art. The two mestieri come closer at this point than they ever will again. Perhaps it is significant that in these years the diary annotations are the longest and that the period of Pavese's fullest phase as a novelist, 1945-50, are the sparsest in the diary. The job of living, in the section that directly concerns us, became itself a work in progress, whose end was no foregone conclusion, evidence of self­ destruction to the contrary notwithstanding.

The essential lesson Pavese draws from his own most bitter

experience in these years is precisely how to go on living with no hope that he will be able to change his destiny, with recognition in advance 187

that the blows life dealt him in defeat would be harder still to absorb in a later moment of

triumph. He constantly saw the skull beneath the

skin; he was and would remain the most disenchanted of writers, the most cut off from human company, even that of his closest friends.

Toward the end of 1937, he cautions anyone wishing not to be

disappointed in his love affairs to "create a crystal world in which the beloved will find pleasure." Once the crystal bursts and the other person, the lover, is allowed to penetrate the vacuum, all is lost. The diary for these years is literature in its own right, a defense against the

assaults of life. It is also a crystal globe which Pavese creates, only to watch it burst before his eyes. And there were to be twelve more such years still to live: the wonder and the glory of it are that he managed to live so long, and to go on writing.

Although the prevailing note is the initial one of despair, it would be a gross mistake to think of Pavese as a one-note author. He was no more lacking in wit than in reasons to kill himself, and at times the diary is

actually amusing. Here, if nowhere else, we find the antiphon to all that suffering. "A man who suffers they treat like a drunk. 'Up, let's go, that's enough, out, enough now, not that way, enough Had Hamlet left a diary it might well have resembled this one; nor would he have failed to include the gravedigging clowns for ballast. The skull '

"

....

beneath the skin is also risible.

1936

April 22 The truth is that nothing in the world has yet passed through my spirit,

projecting the essential, metacorporeal reality of its structure as on an X-ray film. I've not yet reached the gray and everlasting skeleton which lies beneath.

I have seen colors, sniffed odors, and cherished gestures, pleased

with a joy that selects and reorders. I have played as if with friends and found pleasure by myself.

I have ignored the word of deliberation. My words were only

sensations. My portraits were paintings, not dramas. I have set my mind on faces and have

pondered and contemplated them so much that I've

reproduced them in gratified transfiguration. I've simplified the world 189

to a trite gallery of gestures of strength or of

pleasure. There's the spectacle of life in these pages, not life. I must start all over again.

AprU24 You've got to have felt the rage for self-destruction. I am not

speaking of suicide: people like ourselves. fascinated with life, with the unforeseen, with the pleasure of "telling it all," cannot come to suicide except by imprudence. And then. suicide appears by now as one of those mythical heroics. of those fabulous affirmations of man's dignity before his destiny, which interest us the way sculpture does but leave us to ourselves.

The self-destroyer is a type at once more desperate and practical. The

self-destroyer makes the effort to discover within himself every flaw, every bit of meanness, and to encourage this bent toward annihilation, examining it, getting drunk on it. enjoying it. The self-destroyer is

absolutely more sure of himself than any conqueror of the past. He knows that the thread attaching him to the next day, to the possible, to the prodigious future, is a stronger cable-being a matter of the last jerk-than any sort offaith or integrity.

The self-destroyer is above all an actor and a master of himself. He loses no opportunity to experience and test himself. He is an optimist.

He hopes for everything from life, and is attuned to place in the hands of future events the most shrill or meaningful sounds.

The self-destroyer cannot bear solitude.

But he lives in a continual danger: that a rage for construction, for arrangement, a moral imperative may catch him unawares. Therefore he suffers without letup, and could also kill himself.

Note this well: in our time suicide is a way of disappearing. It is committed timidly, silently, by those who are overwhelmed. It is no longer enacted, it is undergone.

Who knows whether optimistic suicide will come back to the world again?

To express in the form of art, with a cathartic purpose, an inner trag­

edy, is possible only for the artist who, having lived through the tragedy, was already subtly stretching out his constructive threads, who in short was already engaged in a creative incubation. There does not exist a 190

storm suffered madly and followed by a liberation through the work of

art, all under pain of suicide. All the same, the artists who really killed

themselves for their tragic lots were usually bardic lightweights, amateurs of sensations, who never gave a hint in their entire repertory of

the deep cancer gnawing at their vitals. From which one learns that the

only way to escape the abyss is to stare at it and take its measure and plumb it and descend within it. ...

April 26 Then there's also the type who, the more he falls to the ground and

ought to think only about getting up again, the more he thinks about flying and gets excited about it. It is first of all the taste for contrasts and the habit of self-contemplation. No one who hasn't got the vice of looking at himself as if at someone else--someone very important­ can, in the course of grief or worry, find instead the excitement of pleasure or freedom.

A man who has lived for twelve years with an ideal-all the more so if

the ideal is un admitted-when his reawakening comes finds himself

inevitably compromised in his character and no longer finds refuge in the habit of that ideal. Now, among the many monstrous and the ugliest of things is the habit of an ideal. And if he improves in all else, he doesn't in this. He will be able to try to change the direction of the ideal, nothing else.

As luck has it, of all the spiritual habits-passions, deformations, complacency, serenity, etc.-the only one to outlast our youth is composure. It will return.

One must go slowly in communicating the psychological discoveries of powerful perversities to whoever is ignorant of being perverse; for the

first victim will be the truthful discoverer of such a state. The old story of the bull of Perillus.

Whoever reveals her potential self to a woman will be the first one she cuckolds.

It is mathematical. Just so, mathematical.

What better way for a woman who wants to fuck a man over than to take him to unfamiliar surroundings, dress him up ridiculously,

subject him to things in which he has no skill, and-as for herself-to 191

have in the meantime other things to do, maybe those very things which the man can't do? Not only is he diddled in the world's eyes, but-the

important thing for a woman, who is the most rational animal that exists--she is convinced that he ought to be diddled, and her clear conscience is preserved. Because with skill and experience we arrive at this incredible thing: to prearrange things and facts, the chains of causality, in such a way that whatever we want will happen without offending our principles of ethical behavior.

April 27 He tells it this way: ..

She told me, one day, how she would treat me. It was atthat anxious

time when nothing had happened but it was bound to happen. I made her speak of her past, in a frenzy to know as much as I could about her, and to make a place for it in the dreams I indulge in.

"She told of a simple young man who had annoyed her on a train. She had infatuated him. With words and gestures. (She had taken a trip

with me, too.) Then she had ended by giving him a false name. "

And the young man had written to ask her to marry him.

"

April 28 ...

But come now: has youth ever meant anything in my craft? And if

the seven years weren't lost, if they had ended well, that is, with my

composing of poems that would last, finding out how to work with satisfaction, gratefully paired off for life, married and merry in the public spectacle; if everything had gone that way, would I have something more? Would it have been worthwhile?Would I be sitting at this table with greater joy?

And if I were to answer that I should be happy to have attachments, to have duties, wouldn't I be saying something useless, since one always has some duties, provided he wants them?

And so, so it is only she that I really regret? The woman who fucked me over? But if all the rest is unchanged, what more does she represent than a trite emotional disappointment?

My happy young man, it isn't even permissible to sink into a grand 192

collapse. The collapse doesn't exist. We are as before. we have burned seven years. some nice things have happened. Let's start over, but without shouting, and keep in mind that there is no reason that in another seven years we won't be having the same conversation again.

And then again. and then again. But who told us that life was to be enjoyed? My boy. we still have our youthful illusions.

But if it's true that it happens this way to everybody, how come old men don't all have faces that are twisted, haunted by demons, cleft by butcheries? Why are they so calm instead?

The sole clear thing is why dead men rot. With all that poison in their bodies.

May 9 ...

After all, as I haven't found another reproach for voluptuousness

than the fact that it ruins anyone who carries on with it (by making him "suffer uselessly"), it would suffice to clarify whether self­

humiliation causes us to suffer uselessly or not. And in my case, how am I to escape the usual directive to

verify the legitimacy of my state by its creative fertility or sterility? For surely this directive is false, or insufficient at least-since not everyone's job is creative.

Useful or useless suffering will be determined in the context of an entire existence. And that the interested party should then be a creator as well has nothing to do with the conscience. It is a question here of needs that touch the very foundations, crossing occupations, classes, and nations.

But take away this, take away that, what remains to bind us to our

duties? It is therefore necessary not to exclude my state as a creator in order to get down to the cellar and look for the cornerstone, but simply to consider that, besides being a creator, I am a man as well, and

unemployed and apolitical and unfledged and other things which escape me. It's nice work to examine the effect of self-humiliation on all these states and find the largest common denominator. And not only in

the present, but in all of my past. Since-remember-sin isn't one action rather than another, but an entire existence badly contrived

193

....

September 13 Among the warning signs that my youth is over, the greatest is realizing that literature no longer really interests me. I mean that I no longer open books with that quickened and anxious hope of spiritual sustenance which despite all, I once felt. I read and want to read more and more, but I don't welcome enthusiastically now, as I once did, different sorts of experience; I don't blend them any more into a calm uproar that precedes poetry. The same thing happens to me in taking walks through Turin; I no longer experience the city as an emotional and symbolic spur to creation. Done it already, I feel myself responding every time ....

October 2

Finally something positive. That horror of the public din, that disgust with other people's mean gestures, that remorse for my hesitations and explicit embarrassments are proof of a sufficiency of mine, of a sense of behavior of mine, which are dignified. Even my search for objective poetry meant this.

Today, however, I am distressed from having always, up to now, ignored forms and manners, from not having made myself a style of comportment, but from having always acted rashly, trusting to my scornful taste, and in that way perpetrating countless romantic faux pas.

Why do women in general have better manners than men? Because they must bank everything on their formal effect, while men act or think. I must become more of a woman.

1937

January 28 Whatever the disaster, either we're mistaken and it isn't a disaster, or

else it arises from an insufficiency of ours for which we are responsible.

And just as it's our fault when we make mistakes, so whatever the

disaster we must not blame others than ourselves. And now take

comfort.

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June 18

1. Rabble-Priest-Speeches (afternoon)

2.Escaping-Street-Whistle (twilight) 3. Investigation-The priest at prayers 4. Woman and him-Well into the night

S. (Morning) Investiture-Return.

August 3 Sooner or later, if she's no fool, a woman meets a human wreck and tries to save him. Sometimes she is successful in this. But if she's no fool, a woman sooner or later finds a sound man and makes a wreck of him. In

this she is always successful.

September 27 The reason women have always been "bitter as death," the sinks of

vice, faithless, Delilahs, etc., is after all only this: the man always ejaculates-if not, he's a eunuch-with any woman at all, while they rarely achieve a pleasurable release, and not with all men and often not with the one they adore, just because they adore him. And

they achieve it, they dream of nothing else. Out of a frenzy for that release, and rightly so, they are ready to commit any sort of iniquity.

They are compelled to commit it. That is the basic tragedy of life, and a man who ejaculates too soon would have been better off had he never been born. It is a defect that makes killing oneself worthwhile.

once

September 30 The only women it's worth a man's while to marry are the ones he can't risk marrying.

But this is the worst part: the art of life consists in hiding from the dearest persons your own joy in being with them, or else they are lost.

November 6 The suicide's worst fault isn't killing himself, but thinking about it and not doing it. Nothing is more abject than the state of moral

disintegration to which the idea-the habitual idea-of suicide leads.

Responsibility, conscience, strength, everything floats adrift on that 195

dead sea, and sinks and comes to the surface again futilely, the play­

thing of every stimulus.

The true rate isn't the one who fails in the large things--who has ever succeeded in those?-but in the little ones. Not to

get so far as to set

up house, not to keep a friend, not to make a woman happy: not to earn a living like anyone at all. This is the saddest failure.

November 9

The repetition in the new poems doesn't occur for the music, but rather

for the construction. Observe how the key sentences in them are always in the present, and the others come close, even if they're in the past. I mean that it occurs to me in these poems to grasp a current reality, not narrative but evocative, in which something is happening in an image,

is happening now, insofar as the image is elaborated now by thought and seen as acting and sinking its roots into reality.

The repeated word or sentence is nothing else than the sinew of this

image, constructed from top to bottom like scaffolding, the pivot on which the imagination turns upon itself and supports itself exactly like

only in the present, in action, and then falls and becomes just another piece of metal. a gyroscope which exists

November 17

Every woman keenly desires a male friend, in whom to confide and fill the void of the hours when the third party is far away; she demands that this friend not disturb her love; she gets upset if he asks her something which may interfere with her love. But let the friend concentrate on

himself, and chastise his own glances and words for the sole purpose of no longer suffering from that desire, and suddenly the woman--every woman-puts out glances, talons, and words again so as to know and

suffering. And she does this without being aware of it.

And above all, remember that making poetry is like making love: we will never know if our own joy is shared. see that he's

It is unbelievable that the woman we adore should come to tell us that her days are empty and full of torment, but tha t about ourselves she

doesn't want to know.

The reward for having suffered so much is that later we die like dogs.

196

Great poets are rare, like great lovers. The yearnings. the furies, and

the dreams aren't enough; what's needed is something better: iron balls. Also called an Olympian gaze.

November 21

If it's true that you get accustomed to grief, how is it that with the

passing of the years you suffer more and more?

No, they aren't mad, these people who have a good time, pursuing pleasure, traveling. fucking, fighting-they aren't mad, at any rate, since we'd like to do that too.

If pounding away with the hammer is triumphant in all things, why not in this as well?

To think that that body also has a thinking, an awakening, a repose, a

languor, an everyday duration, and if I were that man, I should really have all this, in the next room or under her eyes. The day would end with her: this, this I have lost. And there is no human strength which can restore it to me. And all of this has been thrown lovelessly away. And it isn't a crime, it isn't a sin, it isn't even an impropriety: it is a small thing that is done; one that gives no remorse, like crushing a gnat.

Cheer up, there's amorallaw.

November 25 The moral law serves to keep us from doing evil, rather than spare

others from it. Charity alone can tell us how much evil we are doing by

acting according to our duty. This is seen not only in matters of love, but in all of life. But this would be a vast ideal: to ask of each person always, indefatigably, what offends him, bereaves him, tortures him, and to compensate, to embrace, to rekindle.

But "of each" means of everyone, and means "always," and we cannot. We cannot especially because at least one person wouldn't

have this compensation and this embrace, and that one person is ourself. Because one thing is certain: to see enjoyment, even through our own

work, doesn't suffice for our peace. An example: dissatisfied

women.

It seems a mixture of the sacred and the profane, but it isn't. Life

begins with the body.

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November 28 .

.

.

I know a dolt who refused to learn in his youth the rules of the

game. and took refuge in fantasies. Now the fantasies are evaporating, and the game is crushing him.

A problem: is woman the strong man's reward or the weak man's prop. just as they wish?

The irony of life: the woman gives herself as a reward for strength and a prop for weakness. And no one ever

gets what he deserves.

November 29

Won't the thought have to catch me offguard, on some morning of mist and sunlight. that whatever I've had has been a gift, a great gift? That from the nothingness of my forefathers, from that hostile nothingness, I have still emerged and grown up alone, with all of my basenesses and my glories and that, by dint of hard work and toughness, avoiding all sorts of risks, I have reached the present day, solid and robust?

And that I have met her only, another miracle of nothingness and of

chance? And that whatever I've enjoyed and suffered with her, hasn't it been only a gift, a great gift?

DecemberS The error of sentimentalists isn't believing that "tender feelings" exist, but laying a claim upon these feelings in the name of their own tender nature. Whereas only tough and resolute natures know how. and are

able, to create a circle of tender feelings for themselves. And the obvious

tragedy is that such natures take less pleasure in them. If you've got teeth

....

Let's get it clear, once and for all, that to be in love is a personal fact which has nothing to do with the loved on�not even if the latter loves in return. Symbolic words and deeds are exchanged back and forth even in the event that each one reads whatever he has within himself and

supposes by analogy that it is operating in the other person. But there is no reason, nor is there any need, for what the two have within

themselves to correspond. There is quite a need for an art of our own to enable us to accept and favorably interpret those symbols, and to arrange our own lives in a way that will satisfy them. We can do nothing 198

for the other except offer these symbols, deluding ourselves that the

correspondence is real. But some reserve is called for, at the back of one's head, some practical cunning: what is called for is to avail oneself of this offer (made out of the loved one's individual need) to gratify needs of one's own. If you've been cunning in setting up such cor­

respondence, you won't suffer tribulations; you'll cause everything to happen so that it suits your own advantage, and you'll create a crystal world in which the beloved will find pleasure. But you'll never forget that the crystal globe is a vacuum wherein no air can penetrate, and you'll beware of bursting it in the naive attempt to let the air in.

Abandons, raptures, children, devotions, trusts: they are individual symbols, from which the air-the mystical penetration of the other person-is always excluded. There is, in short, between these symbols and reality the same connection as between words and things. We have to be cunning enough to lend them meaning without mistaking them for the true substance. Which is the solitude of each of us, cold and immobile.

December 15 That life is a lifelong struggle one sees well in the sexual relations of men and women, where, despite all the repressive efforts of the chivalric

ideal, despite the social demands for conformism and steady

resignation, despite everything, it is sacrosanct that one refuse someone else if that someone doesn't give the pleasurable release that is called for.

And one understands the innate, rapacious solitude of everyone,

observing how the thought that another man is performing the act with a woman-any woman at all-proves a nightmare, the uneasy awareness of a disgraceful obscenity, the yearning to make him stop and, if it were possible, to destroy him. Can one really bear that another man-any man at all-should be doing the act of shame with another woman? No-o-o-o. Yet this is the central activity of life, without doubt.

There's the falsity of all our altruism. However saintly we may be, to know that another man is screwing disgusts and offends us.

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December 25

With love or with hate, but always with violence.

To be placed in confinement is nothing; coming back from there is

awful.

Your average man ought not to be rowdy in public places, but on his best behavior. We are neither one nor the other.

There's something sadder than aging, and that's remaining children.

If screwing were not the most important thing in life, Genesis

wouldn't start with it.

Naturally everyone tells you, "What does it matter? There isn't only this. Life is varied. A man has worth anyway." But nobody-not even the men-will give you a glance if you don't have that radiant potency.

And the women tell you, "What does it matter?" and so on, but marry

somebody else. And getting married means putting your life in order.

And you will never put yours in order. What this means is you've been a child for too long. Just that.

If your life went badly with her, who was all you dreamed about, with whom can it ever go well?

Do you remember your dreams of limpid houses of working people, your tree-lined avenues above a meadow, your city, cold under the

mountains, your red neon signs facing the square that opens toward the mountains, the Sundays spent wandering toward this square, over the cobblestones, and then your lacerating dream of Piedmontese­ international liaisons, of girls who live alone and work, of plebeian

elegance and serenity, and then all your poems of the first year-how they were wiped out forever on the ninth of April? Is nothing left of all of your youth in the movies and in Piazza Statuto?

Do you remember how in Brancaleone you thought about Piazza Statuto?

It had to happen just to you, to concentrate your whole life on one

spot, and then to find that you can have any sort of life except that one.

After all, today is the 25th. And she is in the mountains. Has there been a 25th when she didn't go? Really?

What is the importance of living with others, when to all that is of real

importance to every one of us, everyone else is indifferent?

To please men it is necessary to profess what each of these men hates and rejects in his hidden life.

200

Sincerely. I would sooner die myself than get this news about her.

Here I really wish I believed in God, so that I could pray to him. Let her not die. Let nothing happen to her. Let all that be a dream. Let her last one day more. Let me disappear instead.

One creature alone teaches more than a hundred.

1938

January 5 One's own nature doesn't change. You discovered that you were naive, that you made a show of your feelings so that they would be even more absolute (the inability to tell lies) and believing that you were changing ,

your behavior, you now make a show of your tragic convictions on the necessity of lying.

This is conclusive: you will be able to have everything from life except

that a woman should call you her man. And until now all your life had been based on this hope.

The art ofliving is the art of being able to believe in lies. The tremen­ dous thing is that, not knowing "what is truth," we still know what

lying is.

January 24 The sentimentalist (a twister ofvalues) also called "dreamer," begins ,

by believing that his unfitness for practical matters is a scant price to be paid for Pre-established Harmony, in compensation for the unutter­ able consolations and triumphs he will find in his dreams.

Then he discovers that even the world of dreams requires a training, a cunning, like any other. But it always happens that he becomes aware of this when he's no longer in time to overcome his ingrained naivete. And this is the real price that he must pay.

After all, I am looking for nothing else in life than to prove that she is aslutfrom her head to her toes. To whom? To life?

Learn from her: every time you read her some indisputable and

offensive thought, she smiles tolerantly and refuses to argue. Sly ones are that way.

Especially with themselves.

It would have to be astonishing if it were otherwise: we accumulate and accumulate-rages, humiliations, savageries, anguishes, laments, 201

frenzies-and finally we find ourselves a cancer, a nephritis, a diabetes, a sclerosis which annihilates us. And there we are .

.

.

.

....

This is the essence of every love:

you start out by contemplating,

in exaltation

you end by analyzing, out of curiosity

What does a person matter to me if she isn't willing to sacrifice all her life for me? That this is the unconfessed claim of each man, one sees

by the marriages each one makes (or would like to make). Might it be that getting married is asking anything else? It goes without saying, without saying, that we, too, are ready to do the same. Yes, but with a difference: if the other person changes her mind, naturally we change ours as well, while it isn't at all natural that if we change our mind (a little stepping out on Sundays), the other person has this right as well.

Am I right?

February 2 The women who are most insistent as to their suitors having capital are the ones who' 'have

contempt for money." Because in order to have

contempt for money you've got to have some, and quite a lot of it.

Do you want to know what a woman is thinking of when you ask her to marry you? Read MollFlanders.

February 3 Dearest. In spite of these months of horror, in spite of this stupid and

unconscious destruction of every bit of energy left a poor man who has

only been able to afflict others; in spite of the dissipation of every bit of goodness that we still might have enjoyed in our future lives together; in spite of all the evil she has done me---I feel compassion for her, in her sadness and uselessness. I love not only that body but her stern eyes, all her futile and difficult exertions, all her splendid past as a poor, lovely woman enamored of life. Poor little girl: let this be my leavetaking and my prayer.

February 9 The source of all violence between man and man, and for all that between man and woman, lies in this: that most rarely do we find 202

ourselves in agreement on the value of a fact, of a thought, of a state of

mind; what is a tragedy for one person is a game for another. And even if initially both are ready to take a situation seriously, it happens�ince there is always a mild difference in intensity-that the more serious one is led to exaggerate its seriousness, and the less serious one to transform

the tragic into a game, out ofthat love of eurythmy, of coherence, of absoluteness which is in everybody.

One who might be able to keep to himself could avoid this destiny,

exhausting his needs in the closed circle of his own person. But we are so made that even our innermost urges seek support in a social consensus.

And actually those who live the most solitary existences are led, when

they find a response in their neighbor, to throw themselves at him with more enthusiasm and exclusiveness, aiming to create a varied solitude of souls. This is why one can never give the advice enough, to whoever is convinced of the essential solitude of each person, that he spread himself into numberless, and therefore undemanding, social ties.

Solitude that is real, i.e. endured, brings with it the desire to kill.

February 17 The moral judgments in Madame Bovary ignore every principle except that ofthe artist who does violence to, and makes a posture of, every human gesture. Some people get elated at the picture of love

that Madame Bovary gives, understanding it as a healthy criticism of romantic rubbish made by a robust conscience, and they don't see that the robust conscience is nothing else than the clear gazing, the

vehement displaying of sad, human motives. How can we live,

according to Madame Bovary? In one way only: as artists, en­ sconced in our homes.

Be careful not to take Flaubert's criticisms of reality in earnest; they are made to conform with no other

principle than this: everything is

mud except the artist with that conscience of his.

February 20 Having to lose someone very dear, who wouldn't prefer that she die rather than simply go away and live again elsewhere? Can we bear that that person, who was our whole life, should stop being that for us and 203

start being that for others or for herself alone? I am supposing as well

that the separation should be such as to exclude any possibility of her

coming back and taking up with us again.

You aren't capable of damming up your own life, and you want to channel and describe the lives of others?

Of the things of the spirit (art, morality, dignity, knowledge) you have ruminated just enough to leave the taste of them in your mouth, then gone back to your bread and potatoes.

You always forget that you were born a slave. You always think you've been done wrong. But can a slave be done wrong?

The goodness that arises from being weary of suffering is a worse horror than the suffering.

February 21 Why be jealous? He doesn't see in her what I do-probably he sees nothing. That would be just like being jealous of a dog or of water in a swimming pool. Rather, the water is more all-pervading than any sort of lover.

Why has almost everyone suffered a disappointment in love? Because the love into which we hurled ourselves with enthusiasm has to be-

tray us-by the law that we obtain only what we ask for with indifference.

February 23 To obtain a tragic love, one must have cunning. But it is just those who are

incapable of cunning who are thirsty for a tragic love.

March 5 To avenge yourself for a wrong done you is to deprive yourself of the

comfort of crying out at the injustice.

Love interests the loved one in proportion to the things it brings with

it. As a result of which, whoever worries about loving sincerely and

wholly almost never has had time in life to accumulate the things (personality, wealth, strength, means, qualities, etc.) which would cause his love to be welcomed. Of love in itself no one is able to permit 204

himself any. And rightly so: what is love in itself other than the lust of an

ape?

MarchIO A man who suffers they treat like a drunk. "Up, let's go, that's enough,

out, enough now, not that way, enough

" ...

March 23 No one is ever wanting for a good reason to kill himself. That which

we've not been able to do with the virgin strength of our mid -twenties, how can we possibly do it with the stigmata of our thirties?

To get love out of pity, when love is born only of admiration, is an idea

quite worthy of pity.

That we will never succeed in placing ourselves in the world (a job,

something normal), is clear.

That we will never win a woman (or a man) is clear, as much for the

former weakness as for the one you know.

That we will never fall in love with one of those ideas for which one

welcomes dying is clear--see the experience we've had.

That we will never have the courage to kill ourself is clear--see how many times you've thought about it.

March 26

Of what use has this long love been?

To discover all of my stigmata, to test my mettle and judge myself.

I see now the reason for my isolation until 1934. I perceived

unconsciously that for me love would be this massacre.

Nothing has been salvaged. [ ] My conscience has been split: see the letter and the temptation to murder. My character has been bent: ....

see the

confinement. The illusion of my talent has vanished: see the

foolish book and my natural bent for translating. My solidity as an

ordinary man has failed: at thirty I have no profession.

I have reached the point of hoping for salvation from outside, and there is no greater darkening: I still think that with her I could live and 205

struggle. But she sizes up this illusion herself. She laughs in my face and that way spares this last painful experience as well.

We are full of vices, oftlcs and horrors, We, the men, thefathen •...

Exactly right. Only we haven it even been fathers Physically as well, now lam no longer the same. However, it has happened to many men that a love has destroyed them and killed them.

Am I perhaps more handsome, so that it ought not to happen to me?

The struggle now is no longer between surviving and deciding on the leap. It's between deciding on the leap all alone, as I have always lived, and taking a victim with me--so that the world will remember.

Every day, every day, from morning to evening, to think this way. No one believes it: it is natural. It is this, perhaps, that is my real quality (not talent, nor goodness, nor anything): to be possessed by a feeling that doesn't leave one cell of my body healthy.

It's really the ultimate pride: no one would have stood up for nine .

.

.

.

.

months under a torture like this. She, too, says it: someone else, anyone, would have killed her by this time.

May 24 It's beautiful when a young man-of eighteen or twenty-stops to

contemplate his tumult, and tries to grasp reality, and clenches his fists.

But it's less beautiful to do it atthirty, as if nothing had happened. And doesn't it chill you to think that you'll do it at forty, and later still?

June 7 .

.

.

The things which have happened to you until now ought to have

happened when you were about twenty. This is all of your abnormality, not talent or anything I know. In this disproportion between vital possibility and experience lies the cause of your apparent flourishing at roughly twenty-five, and of your decline at present. Innumerable things were lacking for you then, which you made up for by passionate devotion to singularity and to poetry. Now, you've got them too late for you still to know how to judge them on their concrete worth You have deformed everything. .

206

Naturally, however, if this disproportion has occurred, it didn't arise by chance, but from your initial deafness and the dispersion which twisted your values at about twenty and caused you to seek unusual

things in a way that was unusually wrong. Because he who seeks finds, and experiences move mainly from within, and we have the love affairs we choose to have .

.

.

.

Death is repose, but the thought of death is what troubles every

repose.

I am at least eight years behind my contemporaries. As a rule they are

already convinced at twenty-two of what still doesn't convince me at thirty.

It's ridiculous to suppose that one's vital relations with a person can ever

207

change.

o

W

The self-conscious moment: reflections on the aftermath of modernism Robert Alter

Our literature has been for a hundred years a dangerous game with its own death, in other words a way ofexperiencing, of living that death: our literature is like that Racinean heroine who dies upon learning who she is but lives by seeking her identity.

-Roland Barthes, "Literature and

Metalanguage" A book is more than a verbal structure or series

of verbal structures: it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it

imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory Literature is not exhaustible for the simple and sufficient reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

-J. L. Borges, "A Note on (Toward) Bernard ....

Shaw"

Over the past two decades, as the high tide of modernism ebbed and its masters died off, the baring of literary artifice has come to be more and more a basic

procedure-at times, almost an obsession--of serious

fiction in the West. The creators of self-conscious fiction in our time do not constitute a school or a movement, and the lines of influence among

them, or to them from their common predecessors, often tend to waver and blur when closely examined. Some of these writers have tried their

hand at shorterfictional forms, which, after the Borgesian model, one now calls "fictions" rather than "short

209

TriQuarterly

stories"; but most ofthem,

perhaps inevitably, have turned back to, or stayed with, the novel, attracted by its large and various capacity to convey a whole imagina­ tively constituted world. Scattered over three continents, they are an odd mixture of stubbornly private eccentrics, on the one hand, and promulgators of manifestoes, on the other; of powerfully evocative novelists or conductors of ingenious laboratory experiments in fiction; of exuberant comic artists and knowing guides to bleak dead ends of despair.

This mode of fiction is variously practiced by such diverse figures as Raymond Queneau, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Mauriac in France; John Fowles in England; Robert Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut in this country; 1. L Borges and Julio Cortazar in Latin America; and, of course, Vladimir Nabokov, perched on his height in Switzerland, working out of three literary cultures. The whole reflexive tendency in contemporary fiction has been reinforced by the prominence of self-conscious cinema since the early sixties in the work of directors like Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, and Godard. Film, because it is a collaborative artistic enterprise involving a com plicated

chain oftechnical procedures, almost invites attention to its constitutive processes; and there is a clear logic in the involvement in film-making of several of the French New Novelists, or in the repeated recourse to

cinematic composition by montage in a writer like Robert Coover. The close parallels between what is happening now in the two media suggest

that the self-consciousness of both may reflect a heightened new stage of modern culture's general commitment to knowing all that can be known about its own components and dynamics. Our culture, a kind of

Faust at the mirror of Narcissus, is more and more driven to uncover the roots of what it lives with most basically-language and its origins,

human sexuality, the workings of the psyche, the inherited structures of the mind, the underlying patterns of social organization, the sources of value and belief, and, of course, the nature of art.

If this is the moment of the self-conscious novel, that is decidedly a

mixed blessing, as the spectacular unevenness of innovative fiction

today would indicate. The growing insistence of self-awareness in our culture at large has been both a liberating and a paralyzing force, and 210

that is equally true of its recent developments in artistic expression. In

this regard, criticism must be especially wary. The kind of criticism that often has to be invoked in discussing a traditional realistic novel is in the indicative mode: yes, we know that a woman like Rosamund Viney would act in justthat way, with just such a gesture, toward her husband at a given moment in Middlemarch because it seems right, because it

corresponds to some subtle, gradually acquired sense of human nature in our extraliterary experience, and to this we can only point, signaling an act of recognition we hope others will share. Most self-conscious novels, on the other hand, lend themselves splendidly to analytic criticism because they operate by the constant redeployment of fiction's formal categories. Is the critic interested in the narrative manipulation of time, the arbitrariness of narrative beginnings, the writer's awareness of literary conventions, the maneuvering of language to produce multiple meanings, the expressive possibilities of punctuation, paragraphing, typography? It is all laid out for him across the printed pages of Tristram Shandy ,ready to be analytically described, with no apparent need for recourse to a touchstone of "rightness" outside this and other literary texts. For this reason an astute critic, impelled by his own professional concern with formal experiment, can easily make a piece of self-conscious fiction sound more profound, more finely resonant with implication, than it is in fact. None of Robbe-Grillet's novels really equals in fascination Roland Barthes' brilliant descriptions of them. Queneau's Exercices de style (1947) is an intriguing and at times immensely amusing book, but it is just what its title implies, a set of exercises; and to suggest, as George Steiner has done, that it constitutes a major landmark in twentieth-century literature, is to mislead readers in the interest of promoting literary "future shock."

The instance of Exercices de style is worth pausing over briefly

because it represents one ultimate limit of the whole self-conscious mode. Queneau begins his book by reporting a banal anecdote of a young man with a long neck and a missing button on his coat who is jostled in a crowded bus. He tells this anecdote ninety-nine times, constantly changing the narrative viewpoint, the style, the literary conventions; going as far as the use of mathematical notation and 211

anagrammatic scrambling of letters in one direction, and the resort to heavy dialect and badly anglicized French in the other; even rendering the incident in alexandrines, in free verse, as a sonnet, as a

playlet. All this is extremely ingenious, and, I would admit, more than ingenious, because as one reads the same simple episode over and over through all these acrobatic variations, one is forced to recognize both the stunning arbitrariness of any decision to tell a story in a particular way and the endless possibilities for creating fictional "facts" by telling a story differently.

The controlling perception, however, of Exercices is one that goes back to the generic beginnings of the novel; and to see how much more richly that insight can be extended into fictional space, one has only to think of Sterne. where a "Queneauesque" passage like the deliberately schematic "Tale of Two Lovers" is woven into a thick texture of amorous anecdotes that

critically juxtapose literary convention with a cogent fact of human experience. Precisely what is missing from Exercices de style is any sense-and playfulness need not exclude seriousness=-of human experience, which is largely kept out of the book in order to preserve the technical purity of the experiment. I don't mean to take Queneau to task for what he clearly did not intend; I mean only to emphasize that criticism need not make excessive claims for this kind of writing. Queneau, of course, has sense of the erotic as a

written full-scale novels of flaunted artifice. both before and after

Exercices de style, that do involve a more complex sense of experience.

One of the great temptations of the self-conscious novelist, however, is to content himself with technical experiment, trusting that in these

difficult times (but then the times are always difficult) the only honesty,

perhaps the only real profundity, lies in technical experiment. This is the chief limiting factor in most of Robbe-Grillet as well as in Coover's collection of fictions, Pricksongs & Descants. In both, one can admire the virtuosity with which narrative materials are ingeniously shuffled and reshuffled yet feel a certain aridness; for the partial magic ofthe novelist's art, however self-conscious, is considerably more than a set of card tricks.

The other. complementary fault of the self-conscious novel, also much in evidence among its contemporary practitioners, is to give free 212

rein to every impulse of invention or fictional contrivance without

distinguishing what may serve some artistic function in the novel and what is merely silly or self-indulgent. After all, if in an old-fashioned novel you have to describe a petulant, spoiled young woman like Rosamund Viney, you are obliged to make her as close a likeness as you can to observed examples of the type, and so some commonly perceived human reality provides a constant check on your inventiveness. If, on the other hand, you are writing a novel about a novelist who invents still another novelist who is the author of bizarrely farfetched books, there is scarcely any piece of fabrication, however foolish or improbable, that you couldn't put into your novel if you set your mind to it. The Irish writer Flann O'Brien, in one of the earliest postmodern novels of

flaunted artifice, At Swim- Two-Birds (1939), has devised just such a book. The second -remove novelist invented by the first -person

narrator-novelist gives birth to a full-grown man (that is, a new

character); but while this writer, fatigued with parturition, is asleep, his characters rebel against him, resenting the roles he has assigned them.

In the end, they subject him to the most hideous torture and maiming, recounted in detail page after page-by writing chapters of a novel

(within the novel-within-the-novel) in which he suffers these horrors.

This scheme of recessed narratives also involves an amalgam of different kinds of fiction, starting with domestic realism in the frame

story and running through the gunslinging western and the novel of erotic sensationalism to fairy tales and Irish myth. "

A satisfactory novel," the young writer who is the narrator tries to

explain to a friend at the outset, "should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. "1 At first

glance, this might seem a perfect capsule definition of the self­ conscious novel, but upon consideration the formulation makes it too easy for both the writer and the reader. If one thinks of the history

of the self-conscious novel from its early masters down to Gide, to the

parodistic or overtly contrived sections in Joyce and the Nabokov of Lolita and Pale Fire, "sham" becomes far too crude and demeaning as a synonym for artifice or imaginative contrivance. The artifice, more­ over, should not be flatly "self-evident" but cunningly revealed, a hide-and-seek presence in the novel, a stubbornly ambiguous 213

substratum of the whole fictional world. To imagine, then, the reader

regulating his credulity at will is to reverse the whole process of the self-conscious novel. in which it is the writer who tries to regulate the reader's credulity. challenging him to active participation in pondering the status of fictional things. forcing him as he reads on to examine again and again the validity of his ordinary discriminations between art and life and how they interact.

Flann O'Brien. however. following the formula he attributes to his own protagonist. in fact produces a hodgepodge of fictions in which nothing seems particularly credible and everything finally becomes tedious through the sheer proliferation of directionless narrative invention. At Swim- Two-Birds is a celebration offabulation in which novelistic self-consciousness has gone slack because fiction is

everywhere and there is no longer any quixotic tension between what is fictional and what is real. I am not aware that it has influenced later

books, but it has certainly proved to be a novel ahead of its time, for its faults of conception and execution provide a perfect paradigm for those of much contemporary fiction, especially in this country, where a new

literary ideology of fabulation has too often turned out to mean license, not liberty, for the novelist. In reading many of the voguish new writers, one is frequently tempted to invoke the words of the narrator at the end of John Barth's story "Title": "Oh God comma I abhor self­

consciousness.

"

Those inclined to argue that the novel today is in a grave state of decay

often draw evidence from the current popularity of self-conscious

fiction, which they tend to see as a dwarfed offspring of the modernist

giants, turned away from life, dedicated to the onanistic gratifications of the artist pleasured by his own art. It would of course be foolish to claim that we are now in anything like that extraordinary period of innovative literary creativity of the 1920s when modernism was in flower, but the opposite inference, that narrative literature has reached some terminal stage of sterility, is by no means necessary from the facts of contemporary writing. I have dwelt upon the two chieftemptations of the self-conscious novelist-arid exercise and indiscriminate in­

vention-precisely because they should be recognized as dangers, not taken as the inevitable results whenever a writer determines artfully to 214

expose the fictiveness of his fiction. In fact, the prominent flaunting of artifice has led to some of the most impressive successes in the

contemporary novel as well as to some of its most evident lapses, and the

by no means restricted to elder statesmen like Beckett and Nabokov. (In America, one might mention Barth, who in different books has been both an impressively original writer and an embar­ rassingly puerile one; or Coover, who has gone beyond manipulations of technique to a vividly imagined satire where fantasy and reality enrich one another.) The old question of the death of the novel, which seems as doggedly persistent as the novel itself, is in the air successes are

again, and I believe an understanding of the self-conscious tradition in the novel which stands behind many contemporary novelists may help set that hazy issue in clearer perspective.

One of the newly prominent American novelists, John Barth, has himself given a new twist to the death-of-the-novel argument in a widely read essay first published in 1967, "The Literature of Exhaustion."

Barth settles on Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov as his exemplary figures 2

to expose the condition of narrative literature now, and that condition as he describes it proves to be

thoroughly contradictory-apocalyptic

and elegiac, at the end of an ultimate cultural cul-de-sac yet somehow

reaching toward exciting new possibilities. The "exhaustion" of the title is defined as "the used upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain -

possibilities," and the work of Borges is taken to be the clearest model of this contemporary literature of exhaustion. The Argentine writer "suggests the view," according to Barth, "that intellectual and literary has pretty well exhausted the possibilities of novelty. His history are not only footnotes to imaginary texts, but postscripts ficciones to the real corpus of literature." The characterization of Borges' fiction ...

is memorable, and not without cogency, but Barth has worked himself into a comer by following Borges in this fashion, and he is con­

strained to use the last two paragraphs of his essay in a rapid maneuver to get out of the trap. For even if reality has come to resemble for the

writer the library of a Borgesian fable where all the books that can ever be written already exist, even if Borges' Pierre Menard is an emblem of

the modern writer's wry destiny, "creating" the Quixote by laborious­

ly reconstituting it word for word in a version identical verbatim with 215

Cervantes'-Barth himself nevertheless writes novels which he hopes have some novelty, and he is not willing to dismiss the literature of our age as a mere postscript to a completed corpus.

Now, two paragraphs are not much space to get out of such a

quandary, so Barth resorts to a kind of literary intervention of divine grace: confronted with a labyrinthine reality of exhausted possibilities, the writer of genius finally can rely on his genius to achieve the impossible, to create a new literature when there is nothing left to create. "It's the chosen remnant, the virtuoso, the Thesean hero, who .

.

.

with the aid of very special gifts.

maze to the

.

.

[can) go straight through the

accomplishment of his.work.

"

(The italics are Barth's.)

This strikes me as a peculiarly elitist and miraculist notion of literary

continuity and renewal. Good writing has of course always required gifted writers. Now, however, Barth seems to be saying, we have come to such a pass that it is virtually impossible to write anything at all.

Nevertheless a few geniuses, having recognized that difficult fact, will somehow manage to create.

Borges himself, as we shall see, is far from agreeing with this idea, but in any case the choice of Borges as the paradigmatic postmodernist is in one respect misleading, precisely because Borges the prose writer is

parables and paradoxes, not a novelist. That is, Borges of the ficciones is concerned with a series of metaphysical enigmas about identity, recurrence, and cyclicality, time, thought, and extension, and so it is a little dangerous to translate his haunting fables into allegories of the postmodern literary situation. Books, real and imaginary, and books about books, of course figure very prominently in Borges' fictions; but he is after all a remarkably bookish man, and the contents of a library are the aptest vehicle he could have chosen for writing about knowledge and its limits, the ambiguous relation between idea and existence, language and reality, and many of his other favorite philosophical puzzles. The fact that Borges is a fabulist, not a novelist, hardly suggests that the fable is all there remains for fiction to work with now. Were he a novelist, his prototypical protagonist would not be a meditative wraith wandering through the hexagonal mazes of the infinite Library of Babel, but a man or woman-one glimpses the possibility in his most recent stories-with a distinctive psychology an inventor of

216

living among other men and women, acting against a background of social values, personal and national history. Such a figure, it seems safe to assume, would have a rather different relationship to the written word, past and present, than does the inhabitant of the great Library or the assiduous Pierre Menard.

Borges, it should be noted, has argued trenchantly against the whole idea of exhausting artistic possibilities in a brief essay, "A Note on (Toward) Bernard Shaw'v=which, not surprisingly, is hardly at all about Shaw. He begins with a list of fanciful notions, from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, of combinational reservoirs that would encompass all books, systems of ideas, or art works. One of

these, "the staggering fantasy" spun out by the nineteenth-century

popularizer of science Kurd Lasswitz "of a universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols, in other words, all that is given to express in all languages, is nothing less than the scheme of Borges' "The Library of Babel."

But, he immediately goes on to say, such writers, by reducing art and philosophy to" a kind of play with combinations," forget that a book is not a flat, fixed entity composed of combined letters making an unchanging design in language. Every book exists through a col­ laborative effort with the imagination of each of its readers-the controlling idea of Pale Fire is not a trivial one-s-and so it changes with its readers, with their life experience and their accrued reading experience. Literary tradition, in other words, does not and cannot exist as a mass of determined data in the memory-bank of a computer.

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is." The more books that are written, the more compli­ cated with meaning are the books that exist before them, and the more possibilities there are for creating new works out of old books and new experience.

Nothing could demonstrate this more forcefully than the inherently "

allusive structure of the novel as a genre. Don Quixote becomes more than it initially was after its transmutation into the "Cervantick" Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, after The Red and the Black, Madame

Bovary, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and The Castle. Each successive creation-to follow the implicit logic of Borges' plausible notion about a 217

book's existence--does not foreclose future possibilities but rather opens up new vistas for creation out of the common literary tradition. A book is not an integer but a relationship, an axis of innumerable •.

relationships," which of course grow with the passage of historical time and literary history; and so "The Library of Babel" must be, after all, a metaphysician's nightmare, not a novelist's.

But let us return to the relation Barth proposes between Borges' own practice in his ficciones and the foreseeable possibilities of imaginative writing. Without begrudging Borges the general acclaim he has recently received, both in America and in France, I think one may resist the

implication of Barth and others that he represents the future of fiction.

Robert Coover, although he does not mention Borges by name, seems to have an idea of this sort in mind when he takes up where Barth's essay

leaves off in his Dedicatoria y Prologo a don Miguel de Cervantes

Saavedra, the bilingual preface to his "Seven Exemplary Fictions."

Unlike Barth, Coover applies the notion of exhaustion not to literary forms but to a general contemporary sense of reality and to the whole

legacy of cultural values today: "But don Miguel, the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you have experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again. Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another exhaustion.'

....

We, too, suffer from a 'literature of

"

A quiet version of apocalyptic thinking is very much in evidence here. We love to think we are on the threshold of a radically new era, but in fact the

continuity of much of contemporary fiction with

its literary antecedents is too substantive to be dismissed as mere

vestigial reflex. Contemporary novelists resemble Cervantes (as Coover recognizes further on) because of the underlying operations of their imaginative enterprise, not because our historical moment parallels his in marking the beginning of a new age. And the proposed contrast between Cervantes and the contemporaries seems overdrawn. The least innocent of writers, Cervantes ironically undercuts the innocence and optimism of his hero, and through the strategies he devises fordoing that he invents the novel. In any event, Coover goes on to argue from the

supposed draining away of optimism in our age the conversion of the novelist to fabulist: 218

We seem to have moved from an open-ended, anthropocentric, humanistic, naturalistic, even-to the extent that man may be thought of as mailing his own universe-optimistic

starting point, to one that is closed, cosmic, eternal, supernatural (in its soberest sense), and pessimistic. The return to Being has returned us to Design,lo microcosmic images of the macrocosm, to the creation of Beauty within the confines of cosmic or human necessity, to tbe use of the fabulous to probe beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances, beyond randomly perceived events, beyond mere history.

Some judgments it may be wise on principle to decline making at all, and I see no way of knowing at this point in history whether we are in fact witnessing the death of the humanistic world view. To base an

argument for a new form of fiction on such a sweepingly prophetic historical assertion must in the end compromise the persuasiveness of the literary argument. In any case, of Barth's three exemplars of the literature of exhaustion, only one, Borges, really corresponds to this

description of Coover's. In regard to Beckett, all that strictly applies is the pessimism and the sense of a closed universe, and it is Nabokov who once tartly observed that "cosmic" is but a slippery "s" away from "comic." Both Beckett and Nabokov are by intention, in their radically different ways, comic rather than cosmic writers; both are novelists rather than fabulists in their concern with the naturalistic textures of

experience, whatever various structures they make of them. Both resemble Cervantes in deriving Design not from an image of eternal Being but, on the contrary, from a sense of the contradictions between traditional literary practice and their immediate perception of human reality.

The most questionable of Coover's claims, however, is that the writer of fiction is now moving "beyond mere history." Borges the fabulist does just that, but unless the novel is really dead, the one thing it ultimately cannot dispense with is history. The pressing actuality of historical time, or of an individual lifetime, or of both is the stuff of all ,

good novels, including self-conscious ones, the perennial subject that the medium of the novel-a sequential narrative use of unmetrical

language extended at length in time=seems almost to require.

Cervantes initiates the genre by using parody and the translation of literary criticism into narrative invention to juxtapose a literary dream of a Golden Age with real historical time. On the plane of individual experience, Sterne in his ultimate self-conscious novel makes time so 219

much his subject that the printed text becomes a maze of intersecting,

mutually modifying times-the time of writing and the time of reading, the actual duration of an event, time as a literary construct, time as an

ambiguous artifact of memory or consciousness.

Perhaps the most reliable index to whether a piece of self-conscious fiction is closed off from life is whether it tends to diminish the actuality of personal and historical time. Queneau' s exercices are only exercises because time doesn't really exist in them; it is only a necessary hypothesis to move the skinny young man from the beginning of the anecdote to the end. Robbe-Grillet's cinematic use of the present

indicative, together with his constant shuffling of versions of each narrative incident in order to destroy all sense of causal seq uence and of

time, is a technical tour deforce precisely because it goes so strenuously

againstthe grain ofthe medium, which is, after all, prose fiction, not film. As a result the virtuosity of his achievement is inseparable from its marked limitations. The same could be said of the composition by montage in Coover's shorter fiction or, on a cruder level of technical skill and imagination, of Barthelme's satirical collages. It is

instructive, however, that Coover is now working on a novel involved with public events in the Eisenhower years, a book he describes as "an

historical romance." And, to judge by a published section, his reentry into history, cannily seen through the revealing distortions of fantasy, can

produce energetically engaging fiction.

In the case of Robbe-Grillet, the one really striking success among his

novels is the book in which his ubiquitous technique of suppressing

temporal progression has a powerful psychological justification.

Jealousy is a compelling novel because its imprisonment in a present indicative that circles back on itself again and again is the perfect narrative mode for a man whose consuming obsession has robbed him of anytime in which things can unfold. Thejealous husband, always the excluded observer peering at his wife and her supposed lover from oblique angles through a hatchwork of screens and obstacles, can only go over and over the same scanty data, reordering them and surrounding them with conjecture, describing them with a seemingly scientific objectivity that is actually quite maniacal. Consequently what 220

is often felt elsewhere in Robbe-Grillet as an anomalous mannerism is here firmly grounded in the novel's peculiar facts of character and

fictional situation.

Queneau's Exercices de style, as I intimated earlier, is a limited

experiment that explores the most extreme possibilities of an under­ lying practice of his novels while deliberately omitting what is ultimate­ ly most essential to them-the potent force of time, analogous to the time of real experience, that sweeps along the imaginary personages and events. Over against Exercices one might usefully set a novel like Le Chiendent (1933), Queneau's remarkable fictional farce in the self­

conscious mode. At the center of this grand display of verbal highjinks,

parodistic ploys, hilarious stylizations, and satiric illuminations, stands a death-that of Ernestine the serving-girl, which, for all its abruptness, improbability, and absurdity, has large reverberations in the novel. "When a tree burns," says Ernestine, dying on her wedding night, "nothin's left but smoke and ashes. No more tree. That's like me.

Nothin left but rot, while the li'l voice that talks in your head when

you're all alone, nothin's left of it. When mine stops, it ain't gonna talk again nowhere else."

The last section of Le Chiendent takes off on a zanily fantastic extrapolation from destructive modem history. At the very end, three of the protagonists, among the handful of survivors of a long bitter war between the French and the Etruscans (I), meet again and openly share the awareness that all their actions have been relentlessly tracked down and recorded by a book-the one we have been reading and are about to finish. Not pleased with all they have done, they wonder whether it might be possible to erase--raturer--or, rather, "literase"­ Iitteraturer=-eensui episodes. But no, the thing cannot be done: as one of them observes, even in these literary circumstances "time is time, the past is the past." Then, in a final paragraph, Queneau dissolves his joined characters into separate and unconnected entities, concluding with a single silhouette, not yet a realized character, one among thousands of possible alternatives-which was precisely the image of the novelist-artificer's arbitrary choice in the making of fictions that began the whole novel. And yet the arbitrary invention is one that has 5

221

been elaborated in order to reveal something about the real world. The whole farce is in fact a sustained metaphysical meditation on the

dizzying paradoxes of being and nonbeing, in life and in fiction; and that meditation culminates in these last two pages, where the characters

finally shuffled back into the shadowy pre-world of fictional beginnings but are not allowed the more-than-human luxury of reversing, altering, or erasing the particular experiences they have lived are

out in the time allotted to them.

It may seem a bit odd to insist on a connection with historical or

personal time in a kind of novel devised to mirror its own operations, but the contradiction, I think, disappears upon close consideration.

Language is of all art media the one most thoroughly and subtly steeped in memory, both public and private. It is not easy to use language for the length of a novel, out of a self-conscious awareness of its function as the medium of the fictional

artifice, without in some way con­

fronting the burden of a collective or individual past that language carries. Language through its layer upon layer of associations opens up

complex vistas of time, and these tend to reveal-ultimately for cultures, imminently for individuals-loss, decline, and extinction. The continuous acrobatic display of artifice in a self-conscious novel is an enlivening demonstration of human order against a background of chaos and darkness, and it is the tension between artifice and that which annihilates artifice that gives the finest self-conscious novels their urgency in the midst of play. Tristram Shandy's wild flight from death across the pages of Volume VII in Sterne's novel provides the clearest

paradigm for this general situation. In the two major novelists of our own century who magisterially combine the realist and self-conscious traditions of the novel, Joyce and Proust, it is again death and the decline of culture into ultimate incoherence that powerfully impel the writers to the supreme affirmation of art. The void looms beyond Bloom's Dublin and Marcel's Paris, as it does beyond Biely's St. Peters­ burg, Virginia Woolf's London, and the invented lost realms of Nabokov; and that is why art is indispensable.

Perhaps this may make every novel with self-conscious aspects sound like a version of Sartre's Nausea, but that is only because Sartre provides an emphatically defined, programmatic formulation of the 222

general pattern. What I would like to stress is that even a novel worlds away from any intimation of existentialist views may tap this tension between the coherence of the artifice and the death and disorder

implicit in real time outside the artifice. The tension is present even in Fielding, with his fine old eighteenth-century confidence in the possibilities of coherent order and his meticulous preservation of the purity of the comic world. An example may be helpful here. In Book V, Chapter XII, of Tom Jones, after a bloody brawl in which Tom has laid Blifillow only to be vigorously battered by the redoubtable Thwackum, the narrator, surveying the bruised combatants, takes off on one of his so-called essayistic excursuses: Here we cannot suppress a pious wish, that aU quarrels were to be decided by those weapons

only with which Nature, knowing what Is proper for us, hath suppUed us; and that cold Iron was to be used in digging no bowels but those of the earth. Then would war, the pastime of monarchs, be almost Inoffensi"ve, and battles between great armies might be fought at the particular desire of several ladies of quality; who, together with the Idngs themselves, might be actual spectators of the conflict. Then might the field be this moment well strewed with human carcasses, and tbe next, the dead men, or infinitely the greatest part of them, might get up, like Mr. Bayes's troops, and march off either atthe sound of a drum or fiddle, as should be previously agreed on.

The narrator spins out this fanciful hypothesis for another

paragraph, then brings himself up short: "But such reformations are rather to be wished than hoped for: I shall content myself, therefore, with this short hint, and return to my narrative." What is all this doing in the middle of Tom Jones? To dismiss it as mere casual banter or extraneous digression is to ignore the integrity of Fielding's art and of

his vision of life. The passage is a virtuoso aria set in the optative mode.

It turns from The History of Tom Jones to history proper, but with a

series of careful indications of a condition contrary to fact. It begins and ends with an explicit stress on "wish," and all the verbs are SUbjunctive or conditional. The

emphasis through anaphora on "then" ("Then .") points to an era that exists not now or soon but in the imagination alone. This condition is underlined by likening the weaponless battles to those of a popular Restorationfarce, The Rehearsal ("Mr. Bayes's troops"), and by proposing that war should be conducted like theatrical convention, by previously agreed-upon signals. would war.

223

.

."; "Then might the field be.

.

Within the comic frame of Tom Jones's fictional world, we know very well that no fate much worse than a bloodied nose will be allowed to

befall any of the personages who matter. Fielding, by proposing for the space of two paragraphs that this frame be extended into real historical time, is doing something more than make a suggestion for

"reformation," as he pretends, or a satirical comment on historical man's irrationality, as is evident. What the excursion into optative

history points up is that the whole comic world of the fiction is beautifully arranged, sanely humane in its essential playfulness-and ultimately unreal. The age-old im pulse of the storyteller bespeaks a basic human need to imagine out of history a fictional order of fulfillment, but when the narrative is a novel and not a fairy tale, one is also made aware of the terrible persistence of history as a murderous realm of chaos constantly challenging or violating the wholeness that art can imagine. By the time we arrive at the narrator's explicit signal for with this short hint, the end of the excursus, "I shall content myself. and return to my narrative," we see with renewed clarity all that stands .

.

outside the artful narrative, inimical to it.

I have chosen from many possible texts, old and new, an example

from Fielding in order to emphasize certain underlying continuities of concern between the novelists of our own age and the

early masters. A

clearer recognition of such continuities, which more often than one

would suspect manifest themselves even on the level offictional

technique, might make us less inclined to see ourselves at the decisive end of an era, our writers footnoting with fables a literary corpus that has used up all the possibilities of primary creation. Looking over the actual production ofliving novelists in both hemispheres, I find it hard to believe that it is inherently more difficult to write a good novel now than in earlier periods. The realist mode of fiction that attained such splendid achievements in the nineteenth century may by now largely have run its course <though that, too, might be a presumptuous conclusion), but the self-conscious novelistic dialectic between art and

reality initiated by Cervantes seems abundantly alive with new possibilities of expression, perhaps even more than ever before as the self-consciousness of our whole culture becomes progressively more pronounced. To write a good self-conscious novel today one does not 224

have to be a unique "Thesean hero" finding a way out of some

impossible labyrinth, but simply an intelligent writer with a serious sense both of the integrity of his craft and of the inevitably problematic relationship between fiction and life.

A case in point is Claude Mauriac's The Marquise Went Out at Five (1961), one of the most interesting novels to come out of the fervor of fictional experiment in France during the past fifteen or so years.

Mauriac's book might be especially instructive as a concluding example because in both its design and its execution it ties up many of the major themes we have been considering, and because Mauriac, a gifted writer but surely no Borgesian wonder-worker defying the limits of nature, achieves what he does, not through impossible genius, but simply by an imaginative and keenly critical management of the self­ conscious mode.

The Marquise Went Out is the third of four interlocking novels aptly

called Le Dialogue interieur, The title of the novel is taken from Breton's "First Surrealist Manifesto," the relevant passage appearing as the

epigraph. Breton quotes Valery on the imbecilic beginnings of

most novels. Valery would never permit himself, he once told Breton, to write a sentence like, "The Marquise went out at five." We then turn the page of Mauriac's novel and of course find it begins, "La

Marquise sortit a cinq heures. The Marquise went out at five." At first, in the kaleidoscope shifting of interior monologues-perhaps a hundred different characters become posts of observation-with no

indication of transitions, the reader has difficulty orienting himself; but gradually a fictional novelist, Bertrand Carnejoux, emerges

distinctly as the principal point of reference. As Carnejoux stands at his window looking down over the Carrefour de Bucis, where all the events of the novel take place, one begins to suspect that all the interior lives exposed in the book are finally what he, the writer as distanced observer, projects onto the figures he sees. He is the fictional writer acting out his author's own literary impulse, in a contemporary version of the old quixotic pattern, by making a novel out of the world he inhabits: ...

Express the double brilliance, orangeish red bright yeUow, of the bouquets, no, they're

potted plants. Add to these two patches of bright color the movement transporting them, not 225

fast butjolttng, and the black mll8ll of that old lady carrylDa hernasturtluml-they are

nasturtiums, I think. I'm no different as an author from aU the authon wbo ever exlated since men fint began to write. VIlDg otber clevlcllI, but analogoUl on •• MaklDg use jUlt as fallacloUlly, as arbitrarily, of tbe world I clalm-qulte lnIanely-to poI .. I. At best I've tried to explaln andjUltify the Increaslna presence, consldered rldiculoul by some people, of

writer-heroes In tbe work. of wrlten

' .••.

The sense of the writer's predicament as a perennial, not peculiarly

modern, difficulty is notable: all serious novelists must confront the arbitrariness, the necessary falsification, of the worlds they invent

through words. In his critical writings, Mauriac has coined the term alitterature to describe this intrinsic problematic of literature. All literary creation worthy of the name, now and in previous ages, is seen as a reaction against the inevitable falsity of antecedent literature, a restless devising of strategies to escape being "just" literature. I think the idea is more historically accurate than the notion of a contemporary literature of exhaustion, and The Marquise Went Out at Five is a persuasive demonstration of its efficacy as a rationale for the continual renewal of literature.

By the conclusion of the novel, Carnejoux, the novelist as self-observing observer, imperceptibly gives way to the author of The Marquise Went Out at Five. The evoked world of fiction, revealed as fiction, shrivels up, and, as atthe end of many of Nabokov's novels, the fabricator of the fiction himself stands in its place. Mauriac now describes precisely what he has given us: "A novelist animated by a novelist whom I (myself a novelist) have put into a novel in which,

however, nothing was invented, a labyrinth of mirrors capturing some oflife's sensations, feelings and thoughts" (p. 310). Cervantes' emblematic image ofthe mirror-it is of course also Nabokov's favorite--is complicated in Borgesian fashion by a labyrinth not because the old quixotic probing of reality through fiction has changed in nature, but only because our sense of the complexity of the enterprise has been many times multiplied by both historical and literary

experience. (One might observe that as early as 1913 Andrey Biely was using the image of the labyrinth of mirrors in his St. Petersburg .)

Mauriac, it should be noted, does not in the end make the facile gesture of some contemporary novelists who simply shrug off their own fictions as, after all, mere fictions: he avows the artifice but affirms it as a 226

mirroring "life's sensations, feelings and thoughts," fiction seen as perhaps the only way to get at a whole range of real human experience.

After a paragraph of reflections on the Parisian square that has been means of

the scene of the novel, Mauriac goes on to summarize and make even

explicit this baring of artifice as the basic procedure of his book: "Thus the novel has in its penultimate pages gradually faded away, and disappeared, without masks or make-believe, giving way to the novelist who, if he has put himself directly into his book, has at the end purified it of its last traces of fiction by granting it a truth in which literal exactitude was preferred to literature" (p. 311). The literal exactitude is of course necessarily a pretense, still another novelistic gesture (as Cervantes first shrewdly saw in his play with supposed documents), literature passing itself off as alitterature in order not to seem "literature" in the pejorative sense. In any case, the edifice of fiction that engaged our thoughts and emotions for a good many hours has more

been swept away, and the novel can concl ude in the very next sentence

by setting on its head that beginning borrowed from Valery by way of ." Much earlier, we Breton: "The Marquise did not go out at five. learned that the Marquise of the initial sentence was no marquise at all, and now the predicate as well as the subject is tom from its apparent exactitude and cast into the shadowy realm of fabrications.

All this might be mere cleverness if the novel did not have the impelling sense it does of the urgency, the philosophical seriousness, of its enterprise. What drives Bertrand Carnejoux, and behind him Claude Mauriac, is an acute perception of two concentric abysses beneath the artifice ofthe novel-history and death. The Marquise Went Out, set .

between five and six on one warm afternoon in a few thousand square feet of the Carrefour de Bucis, attempts to exhaust the human

experience intersecting that carefully delimited time and place. But as Carnejoux and his inventor realize, such an undertaking is "doomed to failure" because "the unity of actualtime. [is] surrounded, absorbed the infinite penetrated, by pullulation of innumerable past moments" (p. 270). Though Mauriac explicitly compares the achronological method of composition here through a long series of .

.

...

separate "takes" with the methods of a film-maker, the effect is 227

precisely the opposite of cinematic composition in Robbe-Grillet because Mauriac accepts and works with the essentially time-soaked nature oflanguage as a medium of art.

Each of the interior monologues gives us glimpses of a deep tunnel into a private past, while Carnejoux, overviewing the scene, weaves into the texture of the novel substantial quotations from actual historical documents of life in the Carrefour de Bucis from the middle of the

thirteenth century to the post- World- War- II era. The documents reveal what in the poesy of a blurb one might call a "vivid panorama" of

Parisian existence from medieval artisans to activists of the Revolution to the literary dinners of the Goncourt brothers. What is actually

revealed, though, is the raw realm of chaos on the other side of

Fielding's ironic observations about history-a long catalogue of rape, murder, torture, theft, perversion, brutality. Contemplating these documents, Carnejoux is simultaneously aware of the senselessness of history and of the incomprehensible brevity of all human life. As he writes, he is rapidly, irrevocably, rushing toward the point where he will be no more than a few scratches on the historical record, like Mestre Giles the tile-maker and Richart the baker, listed as residents of the Rue de Bussy in the Tax-Book ofParisfor the Year 1292. Atthe end, the

author draws particular attention to this perception: "Bertrand

Carnejoux records in his novel, and I record in the novel in which I have given life and speech to Bertrand Camejoux, that impossibility of conceiving what seems so natural in others, what one has spent one's life fearing, knowing oneself ineluctably threatened by it in the beings one loves and in oneself: death" (p. 309).

Some readers may feel that Mauriac is too explicitly direct in the way he reveals these fundamental matters of motive and design in the making of his novel, butthe fiction itself bears out in concrete detail what otherwise might seem portentous assertion. A writer, about to vanish like every human being born, has only words to grasp with at oftenuous, dubious permanence. Words console, words are the most wonderful of human evasions; but the writer, using them as some sort

truly as a writer of fiction can-which is to say, with a consciousness of how their enchantment transmutes reality into fiction-comes to perceive profoundly what words help us to evade. The seriousness and 228

the ultimate realism of the novel that mirrors itself could have no more vivid demonstration.

Perhaps the most basic paradox of this mode of fiction, which functions through the display of paradoxes, is that as a kind of novel concentrating on art and the artist it should prove to be, even in many of its characteristically comic embodiments, a long meditation on death.

Myth, folktale, fable, and romance, all the archaic forms of storytelling from which the novel was a radical historical break, overleap or sidestep death as an immediate presence in the timeless cyclicality of divine lives or in the teleological arc from "once upon a time" to "lived happily ever after." The great realist novels of the nineteenth century, though they may be filled with scenes of disease and dying, are in another sense also an implicit evasion of death because, as the paradigmatic instance of Balzac makes clear, behind the vast effort to represent in fiction a whole

society, the spawning of novel after novel with crowds of personages overflowing from one book to the next, was a dream of omnipotence, the novelist creating a fantasy-world so solid-seeming that he could rule over it like a god.

When the writer, on the other hand, places himself or some consciously perceived surrogate within the fiction's field of probing consideration, his own mortality is more likely to be an implicit or even explicit subject of the novel. It was Diderot who observed that one should tell stories because then time passes swiftly and the story of life comes to an end unnoticed. The novel as a genre begins when Don Quixote, approaching the grand climacteric or fiftieth year, which was old age in his time, realizes that his existence has amounted to and proceeds before it is too late to make his life

nothing

correspond to a book.

The knight's peculiarly literary quest is a revealing functional

analogue to that of the novelist, the literary man who invented him, through the don's adventures but contemplating, in the most oblique and searching way, the unthinkable prospect posed by his own imminent and so Cervantes is not merely mocking chivalric romances

end.

I suspect that death in the novel might be a more useful focus for

serious discussion of the genre than the death of the novel. What I have in mind is of course not the novelistic rendering of deathbed scenes but 229

how the novel manages to put us in touch with the imponderable impli­ ca tions of human

mortality through the very celebration of life implicit in the building of vivid and various fictions. This is the ultimate turn of

the Copernican revolution in the making of fictions that Cervantes effected. The impulse of fabulation, which men had typically used to create an imaginary time beautifully insulated from the impinging

presence of their own individual deaths, was turned back on itself, held up to a mirror of criticism as it reflected reality in its inevitably distortive

glass. As a result it became possible, if not for the first time then surely for the first time on this scale of narrative amplitude and richness, to delight in the lifelike excitements of invented personages and adven­ tures, and simultaneously to be reminded of that other world of ours, ruled by chance and given over to death. The mirror held to the mirror of art held to nature, in Cervantes and in his countless progeny, proved to be not merely an ingenious trick but a necessary operation for a skeptical culture nevertheless addicted, as all cultures have been, to the pleasures and discoveries of fabulation. Ongoing literary history is always modifying our vision of earlier stages of literary development, and the course of the novel from Joyce to Nabokov and beyond may to some degree require a shift in perspective upon what happened in the novel during the three centuries before our own. Today, as varieties of novelistic self-consciousness proliferate, the mode of fiction first defined when a certain aging hidalgo set out to imitate his books appears far from exhausted. On the contrary, in the hands of gifted writers it comes to seem increasingly our most precisely fashioned in­ strument for joining imagined acts and figures with real things.

Notes 1. Flann O'Brien. At Swim-Two-Birds (New York: Pantheon. 1939). p. 33.

2. The Atlantic Monthly. 220 (August 1967). pp. 29-34.

3. J. L. Borges. Labyrinths. ed. Yates and Irby (New York: New Directions. 1964). pp.

213-216.

4. Robert Coover. Pricksongs & Descants (New York: Dutton. 1969). pp. 76-79.

S. Raymond Queneau, Le Chiendent (Paris: Gallimard, 1933). p. 206.

6. Claude Mauriac, The Marquise WentOutatFive. tr. Richard Howard (New York:

George Braziller.I962). p. 69.

230

Contemporary fiction and criticism Edward W. Said

1

Most of the influential and the penetrating criticism of fiction in

general and of the novel in particular has a strong mimetic bias. This is not entirely surprising since most novelists have worked in the major realistic tradition for which Stendhal' s metaphor of the novel as a mirror has been conventional wisdom. The best mimetic, or mimetically inspired, twentieth-century criticism (Lukacs' Theory of the Novel, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, Harry Levin's The Gates ofHom, Rene Girard's Desire, Deceit and the Novel) has grasped very sensitively the way in which imitation can be neither exclusively" creative" nor wholly institutional. Thus even so apparently unanimous an assumption as mimesis has given rise not only to different sorts of imitation and theories and techniques of imitation, but to a binding logic of institu­ tional relations between criticism of fiction and fiction itself, or between the theory and the practice of fiction. If the world of fiction has been

dominated by the practice of imitation, then also the discourse of criticism has been dominated by a theory of imitation. This is not to say,

however, that novelists are less under the theoretical influence of mimesis than are critics, nor that critics are not responsive to the 231 TriQuarterly

practical demands made by a theory of imitation; in fact the influences work in both directions. from theory to practice and back again,

together.

These fairly obvious remarks are useful as foils that set off certain theoretical currents in recent French criticism. My point will be to show how these currents illuminate examples of contemporary American fiction, which. on the whole. is inspired neither in predisposition nor in practical terms by the sort of imitation so important to classical realistic fiction. I have no intention of proving the uselessness of imitation nor, for that matter, of describing the ideological or formal scheme of contemporary American fiction. My task is much less ambitious and more impressionistic than that. It is simply to suggest how, on the one hand, the intellectual imagination and, on the other, narrative praxis in France and America respectively have collaborated at a distance from each other-and can collaborate at that distance-in seeing novel opportunities for writing. These come primarily out of attitudes to language, which is viewed as not restrained nor completely framed by a dominant "outside" reality. Language is considered an integral and constitutive component of reality, a component whose combination of mystery and positivity the writer can discover and experience endlessly.

The relations between language and reality are therefore less rigid, and, from the writer's viewpoint, language is not at all a passive reflection of "outside" conditions. Yet such a viewpoint, paradoxically, affirms rather than abrogates the social function of fictional language and of fictional form.

But instead of being dictated to by "reality" American fictional

discourse has its own history, thematic, and mythology to take account

of, and these are the direct almost material pressures upon the producing writer: through them "reality" engages fiction, somewhat less directly, perhaps less urgently, than otherwise. It is because of the

interventions of language and its claims on the writer that "reality"

speaks. Whether this is preferable to a classic mimetic approach is, for now at least, a secondary concern of my remarks.

2 Fiction as language. Mallarme' sLes Mots anglais (1877) is one of the least known and most interesting of his works. Jean-Pierre Richard has 232

called it a philological poem, I for in this

long and sustained encounter with a foreign language that he had imaginatively and intellectually mastered, Mallarme gave disciplined rein to his pure attention to

language. to his love (Phi/ologia) of words. Written over a period of fourteen years. Les Mots anglais is especially notable as a serious effort to understand language considered as an entity with its own laws, mysteries, delights. and capacities. Such an effort gained enormously from its author's eminent poetic gift: appearances notwithstanding, the work is no dry exercise but a formal. creative feat. Even as he classified and analyzed, Mallarme wished always to remain in touch with the

language's deepest and most vital powers. He speaks of a generative idiom (idiome generateur) inside English, of a vitalizing current of intel­ ligence (un courant d'intelligence [qui] met en mouvement) animating the words, and, when discussing the conflict between pattern and anomaly, he speculates on the interplay between symmetry and chance tsymetrie et hasard) in it.

Everywhere he is concerned with the unique movements of which a language is generally capable. English is like other languages-is ex­ pected to express all the phenomena of life, and like life it lives. The characteristic movements of language are complex and orderly. About one of them in particular Mallarme is extremely perceptive. He de­ 2

3

scribes the relation between isolated words and families of words, that

is. the way by which words either remain separate or attach themselves to each other (as in house and husband, or well and wealth). Such rela­ tions are attempted in fact by the student of language (Mallarme him­

self) who "allows such and such a word to pass from the ranks of Isolates to those of Families, or who detaches from amongst Families a word

that seems a distant cousin but is in fact a parasite, or who corrects the mistakes and supplies the missing parts to the the work of other 4 students." For such a task, Mallarme says one needs a sense of play

(jeu), since "too strict rules end up by transgressing more than just laws, namely those thousand certain and mysterious intentions of language."

The associative movements of words in a language then appear governed by something rather like the "play" Mallarme had recom­ mended for the student. That words associate with other words is as

certain a fact as one can discover, but how these partnerships are

formed, or how some words remain aloof from others-these facts, 234

5

while also empirically certain, are empirically mysterious. A little later in the same chapter, using the same suggestive terms, he discusses those

techniques, like alliteration, available to all users of the language. Here Mallarme weaves carefully between" les mysteres sucres ou perilleux du Langage" and" /'imagination desireuse;" the former withholding its secrets, the latter always anxious to fetch them out. In one sense, the play of language is what we might call an interplay between forces in the language: for example, the tendency to associate versus the tendency for a word to remain isolated, and so on. In still another sense, play sug­ gests the mock seriousness of a scholarly investigator who knows that what he is dealing with is not as stable nor as scientifically reliable as his research implies. Finally, play suggests the whole interlinguistic field in which language and language-users---each with those specifically linguistic capacities for combination, alternation, recurrence, and reference-play their own roles to and with each other. All three senses of the word suggest affirmation-and also the peculiar joy of playing-as well as a sort of anxiety that for the language- user language can only be played with, not seriously grappled with; that in its fundamental mystery, language resists anything but provisional rules for its understanding (like the rules of a game); that language itself plays with the writer or speaker, involving him in the precarious swings from symmetry (what traditional grammarians since Varro have called analogy) to chance (or anomaly), and back again, positive yet unpre­ 6

dictable.

What elevates the whole of Mallarme' s investigation to high serious­ ness is the

implicit claim made for language study and language play­ that they are experiences and not mere adjuncts for Experience. Despite the emphasis on play inLes Mots anglais and despite Mallarme's ex­ clusive attention to words and their play, there is no concession to the attitude which rules the subject of attention in the work to be only language, something not only rarefied but definitely secondary to such issues as Life, History, Reality, or Society. Philology is nothing more, and nothing less, than" la marche a suivre dans la Connaissance d'une Langue." Like the language itself, philology has its topic, memory, and intellect, all capable of movement and play. Moreover, philology is based on an irreducible desire for knowledge and experience of lan­ guage; philology cannot be substituted for by history, nor by sociology.

7

235

It is experience. Some years later than Mallarme, Freud was to make the

point about dreams-that they are experiences of an irreducible sort, that they fulfill a wish of a very particular kind, that they have their own "play" which only one approach, the psychoanalytic, can interpret and intentionally experience.

We should be quite hesitant about calling Mallarme's type of ap­ proach metalinguistic. It is true that he is interested in the language of languages, as it were, and also, according to Richard, in the semantics and thematics of language. Yet Mallarme's approach is that of a poet investigating language as a field of possibility. Thus Richard correctly assesses Mallarme's true project, which is to find a place, the field, same

8

where his poetry can occur: C'est ailleurs [tbat is, not in tbe deptbs of language I que Mallanne va situer son alcbimie: non plus dans I'epaisseur, desormais contingente, du vocable, mais dans I'espace Iibre, dis­ ponible • I'esprit, qui separe les mots les uns des autres. Une fois de plus I'intenalle, ce qu'on "nomme du jeu," servira donc de cbamp • la metamorphose. Et une fois de plus, encore, celle-ci s'appuira sur une mise en relation. Cest • nouveau par Ie canal de I. synthese que Mallarme va tenter de relntreduire dans Ie langage I'eelatante simplicite de I'origine, et de se redonner la transparence d'une pleine expression. Le neuf, ce sera encore pour

lui I'etemellement renouvele.'

Mallarme's concern with language turned about its infmite relational

capacity, its "forged feature," as Hopkins was to call it, its ability to use a permanent "deep down freshness" in the interests of novelty.

Mallarme was less interested in the controlling drive of a metalinguistics than he was in letting the play of language happen in a more orderly and a pparent way than is normal. And also letting it happen as a result of mental activity directed toward the spaces between words.

The influence in France of Mallarme's attitudes toward language has been widespread, especially among the so-called New Critics for whom ecriture (writing) is the principal focus of attention. Curiously, however, those speculations on language and writing that begin with Mallarme and continue in the French New Criticism have their American analogy in the formal speculation of certain writers of fiction.

By formal speculation I mean to include speculation on both the form and the language of fiction, in much the same way that inLes Mots anglais Mallarme views language as both a material and a formal phenomenon.

For such novelists as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth (particularly in 10

236

Chimera), Donald Barthelme, fiction is a language with its own field and play, its own internal system of reference, its own sense of the

opportunities available for inventiveness. Fiction is viewed not as an intervention into reality, nor as an addition to it-as was the case with classic realist fiction-but rather as an intervention in other fiction, or in other writing. Thus in Barth's "Dunyazadiad," the first story in

Chimera, novelty is seen lurking in the scriptive spaces carved out

already by The Thousand and One Nights. In and because of these spaces, which invite the writer's play, further writing can take place; by exaggerating the ornamental aspects of narrative (for these stories are told to stave off death, and at the same time to increase sexual pleasure), this series of "tales-within-tales-within-tales" enhances and enlivens the original field which now, to use Mallarme's phrase, is "eternally renewed."

The obviously romantic possibilities of The Arabian Nights, with the constant interplay between frame and enclosed story, are matched by

Barthelme in some of the subjects picked for treatment in City Life. I

put it this way to emphasize that rewriting is the essence of the fiction, and the SUbject, which is frequently writing, is treated as a pretext for other, or more, writing. Is such an attitude a form of parasitism? Not

really, since anyone arguing that the flaw in rewriting as an esthetic is that the first writing is more original than the second must also argue that the sheer priority of the first also necessitates the fact of its comple­ tion. But this completion need not ever be the case, as all writers of

narrative since Homer have known very well. For there is a sort of internal dynamic between past and present writing-as between current and old forms of speech-that makes it possible to regard an early piece of narrative as requiring perpetual revision; the interrelation of the first and second parts of Don Quixote are an example of what I mean,

especially if they are taken together with Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Mallarme put it subtly when speaking of lin­ guistic formation: a language is the perfect mixture (un melange parfait) "d'une langue quasi faite versee dans une langue presque faite."

When Barthelme returns to The Phantom of the Opera (the Claude Rains version rather than Lon Chaney's), it is to spin out what in that early film narrative only seemed to be finished, but which was 11

237

actually desperate for further recognition and attention. Not the romantic phantom but his solicitous friend-with him lies the story now, "the hot meat of romance cooled by the dull gravy of common ...

sense."

12

Fictional inventiveness is constrained by an often severely restricted notion of fictional pertinence; this is why consciously resourceful

contemporary fiction has something of the nostalgic about it. Because it is haunted by its own past, with associations and agglutinations that come to it as

"naturally" and as modestly as gravy to meat, this fiction is perpetual recurrence to itself. If novelists return less easily, as Joyce and Faulkner did, to the noblest monuments of their romantic past, they nevertheless delight poignantly and satirically in the adjuncts or supplements ("intermedia") created by past fiction. Thus Walker Percy's protagonist is, like the Phantom's friend, attracted to those experiences "certified" in his memory by movies," and Pynchon's V "found love at last in her peregrinations through (let us be honest) a world if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig."

Even the most mundane facts are made more interesting because they were once close to, or part of, the general atmosphere of past writing generally and past fiction in particular. The cleverness of fiction resides a great deal in how interest­ ing it makes going over something seem, interesting and consistent with itself. This is like what Richard says of Les Mots anglais: in it Mallarme wanted "first that English be made consistent with itself, and he did this by reforming and representing it as an organized landscape."

Self-consistency argues a closed, or quasi-closed, world of experience.

In such a world there can really be no absolute originality, and, more­ over, there is a good chance that one will feel impatience with the cult of originality romantically understood. The consistency of parts of expe­ rience with each other comes not from a general principle of imitation enabling the consistency of fiction with reality, but rather from a cult or mediumistic community of sameness tempered by difference within the now more than ever a kind of

14

15

world of fiction. Barth has said (using the novel's traditional mimetic

predilection only to undermine it radically) that he writes "novels which imitate the form of the Novel [and they are] by an author who imitates the role of Author."

16

Such authors and such novels are, almost by

definition, virtuosic or, using Borges' special understanding of the 238

baroque, they assume that the possibilities of novelty have been pretty well exhausted. Barth is notably impressed with Borges' "library of Babel," for it "houses every possible combination of alphabetical char­ acters and spaces, and thus every possible book and statement, including your and my refutations and vindications, the history of the actual future, the history of every possible future.

The novelist "17

confronts the world of his work with Mallarme's attitude toward lan­

guage-that it exists only to be reconfirmed with a maximum of intel­ ligence and, Barth says of contemporary novelists, with "very special gifts."

One of these gifts seems to me to be an ability to treat the past as past, as novel, and as an often peculiar amalgam of the familiar and the foreign. A consequence of such treatment is that the author acts the role of an autodidact, learning things about the past by making the past over again in his fiction. Pynchon's visit to the Fashoda incident in V, Barth's to the mythological and fabulous past are continuous with Twain's Connecticut Yankee, whose principal purpose is to recompose the chivalric world according to American drives and idioms. I think that such a current is American quite assertively, especially when one re­ marks the comparative "extraterritoriality"

18

of some important non­

American recent fiction: Borges, Beckett, Naipaul, Nabokov, Robbe­

Grillet, and others. All fiction has a national consciousness of some sort, but in American fiction what impresses one is not only the special status assumed for "the American novel" (or even "the Great American

Novel," which is a certified phrase enjoying privileged standing) but the notion that American fiction, more than fiction generally, is a partic­

ularly aptfictional extension of past fiction. Just by being American-­ as in Chimera Barth himself appears as a genie to the Arabian Nights narrators--one can enter the discursive world of past fiction with

notable ease. This is like Mallarme, the Frenchman, regarding English as the

place in which the Battle of Hastings is still being fought.

Fiction as text. Ever since James, Conrad, and Joyce, many novelists

have incorporated into their work an exacerbated awareness that what

they are producing is a formal text, not a piece of music or a collection of words held together by a story. The late Jamesian novel exceeds the ordinary intercourse of everyday life because it is a written text that formally assembles what, in spoken language, it would not have been 239

possible, likely, or desirable to express. Almost all of Conrad's fiction is dramatized as the written account of reported speech; the obsessive alternation in Conrad between the ambition "to make you see" (as in the manner of seamen

sitting next to each other and swapping yarns) and

the literary exigencies of producing a written text explains the peculiar

interpretive demands his fiction makes, as well as the ornate narrative frames within which he regularly worked. Joyce's later works, despite their musicality, are highly organized texts both in their internal struc­ ture and in the external schema upon which Joyce relied. In these and other cases, an unavoidable primary fact about fiction is that it is written and that much of its play may occur precisely because it cannot be spoken. Therefore one of the signs of fiction (signs in the Saussurean sense of the word) is its difference from speech, its reliance upon all the resources available more or less exclusively to the text, which tradi­ tionally is always written.

Jacques Derrida is the contemporary French critic and philosopher who has adumbrated the ties binding difference, written language or texts, and the problems of presence to each other. In Saussure's view, language is a system of differences "without positive terms. Yet "

difference is by no means an irreducible concept, as Derrida argues

cogently in his celebrated essay "La Differance." (We shall see that the silent change from "difference" to "differance"-the change of e to a -is part of Derrida' s reasoning.) On the one hand, difference means "to differ" -' 'the sense of not being identical, of being other, of being discernible, etc."

19

On the other hand, difference can be traced to the

verb "to defer" -"to temporalize, to resort, consciously or

unconsciously, to the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of 'desire' or 'will,' or carries desire or will out in a way that annuls or tempers their effect."

20

By differance, then, Derrida intends both senses together; in other words differance isthe movement of play that "produces" (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences [the ones described by Saussure as playing the central signifying role in

language], these effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, non simple "origin"; it is the structured and differing ori­ Retaining at least the schema, if not the content, of the demand gin of differences formulated by Saussure, we shall designate by the term differance the movement by which •

....

240

language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes "historically" constituted as a fabric of differences Difrerance is what makes the movement of sig­ nification possible if each element that is said to be "present," appearing on the stage ....

only

of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past ele­ ment and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future ele­ ment. This trace relates no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past,

and it constitutes what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not, to what

it absolutely is not; that is, not even to a past or future considered as a modified present.

In order for it to be, an interval must separate it from what it is not; but the interval that

constitutes it in the present must also, and by the same token, divide the present in Itself, thus dividing, along with the present, every thing that can be conceived on its basis, that

is, every being-in particular-the substance or subject. Constituting itself, dynamically di­ viding itself, this interval is what could be called spacing; time's becoming-spatial or space's becoming-temporal (temporalizing). And it is this constitution of the present as a ''primordial'' and irreducibly nonsimple, and, therefore, in the strict sense nonprimordial, that I propose to call protowriting, synthesis of traces, retentions, and protentions prototrace, or difrerance."

•

•

.

This is a very complex series of ideas, but much of what is meant in it can be

understood, without insuperable difficulty, as a radical attitude

to written language. Every text is made up of writing whose sense and

coherence derives from the systematic differences binding the words to­

gether; to simplify even further, the differences between Pip and Miss Havisham, or between Fabrice and Mosca, make up the largest part of the meaning of each character. The same is true of the words' 'tree" and "man" in other texts. Yet in a text there is a tendency to understand words either in terms of an origin (like Borges' Aleph) outside the text, which informs each word and legislates meaning, or in terms of a presence (a speaking voice and hence a "real" presence, or person) outside the writing, more "real" and speaking. Derrida's point is that both of these explanations violate the true operation of written language by making ecriture (writing) seem only to be a second -order, or debased form, of speech; this, of course, writing is not, since a great deal of modern writing (like the word differance) can only be read, not pro­ nounced, and since such writing gets its meaning from the very fact of its having been written (e.g., Mallarme, Nietzsche, Proust, etc.). Dif­ ferance therefore identifies the play of differences constituting a text as text, not as failed speech.

But in a text there are references made to what is not before the

reader, to what is not present. Written language operates-as it must­ by gesturing at, pointing toward, differingfrom what is not there in the writing, not there because it has been there, or because it will be there 241

and has been deferred. Writing is a system of

temporalizing and

spatializing differences, which are words as traces of what words have been used before, or prototraces of what is yet to be, and so on. Even when an authorial presence, or "1," or subject is

designated, that is in constituted the of presence play difference, or by differance: the authorial presence has no extra privilege merely because it denotes a human presence outside writing. Moreover, differance itself cannot be pure ideal presence or present, since each written trace (difference) by

definition also means its effacement as trace (differing difference). It follows too that differance plays havoc with the notion of a text as presence. Space and time themselves, then, as much as the subject, are effects of difference; they designate intervals in the play of signs,

intervals which are part of the extended field (viewed as a system of traces, retentions, and protentions) inscribed by the writing.

There is much in Derrida that derives from Nietzsche's views on

language, particularly from those passages in the Will to Power that deal with perspectivism and the "lack of philology" (fragment 479, and others like it from 1888). Yet Derrida's originality is in keeping with the interplay of words in writing, without at the same time rushing off to explain them as the product of some "presence" beyond them. Writing is itself what is differant from speaking, and from other forms of in­ tentional activity; it is capable of spatial and temporal measurement with reference exclusively to the notions of deferment and nonidentity given rise to simultaneously with the production of writing, by the writing. In this sense, differance is not primordial-it is not a principle of anterior meaning that certifies with significance what comes after it.

Consequently also, differance accounts for identity, division, structure, and style in writing; writing, in short, is production of meaning, or the composition of written language and signification in a text. This is not to say, however, that differance is a phenomenon of pure simultaneity, but that spatialization and temporalization are intervals in the writing, constituted by it but not according to the presence (or absence) of a speaking voice.

Mallarme's speculations on the Book ile Livre) similarly emphasize the textuality of a text. The purity of such a work as the ideal Book implique la disparition elocutbe du poete, qui cede I'initiative aux mots, par Ie beurt de leur inegaIites mobillses; iIs s'allument de reflets reciproques comme une virtuelle trainee 242

de feux sur des pierres vives, remplac;ant I. respiration perceptible en I'ancien souffie

Iyrique ou la direction personelle enthusiaste de la phrase. U In such reflections Derrida and Mallarme are concerned more with the

theoretical, or at least the paradigmatic, case of writing as text. Fiction, however, must engage the theoretical with the actual even if-as is the case with one recent American

example of fiction-it is quite clear that the practical obligations of the novel form are much less important than the writing's explicit encounter with textuality as a mediated instance of differance. I have in mind Charles Newman'sA Child's History of for which there is a America: Some Ribs and Riffsfor the Sixties, in albeit many ways dissimilar, counterpart in Helene Cixous's striking, The latter is aptly described as a textual opera in which the Neutre. "players" (joueurs, pieces, et revenants) are the analyst, the subject, the 23

24

narrative (Ie Recit), the text, and so on. Newman's work is more ex­

plicitly humanistic and autobiographical than Cixous's, but in his text, as in Neutre, there is no prior commitment to the form or the protocols ofthe novel. Instead he avows "writing without genre" which, later on, will cause his text to take a very unusual (if traditional) textual road for

itself. From the outset, then, Newman writes out his recalcitrance

("Those experiences which resisted both plausible fiction and straight 25 reportage" ) as a project of the purest sort of difference, difference

examining itself to try to get atthe differance producing differences: I cared to dwell no more on my origins than on my death. And I knew that I would

become fully alive only if I could somehow learn to write not well nor even easily, but sim­

ply write books that no one else could write; for the difference between everyday speech and literature is that the former is the established record of our interpersonal reverbera­

tions, and tbis established language at anyone time threatens to.silence us as much as it frees us. But literature is the continuous assault upon the established language of the moment."

The language as much as the subject of Newman's book is a series of

peregrinations in America, Europe, and Africa during the sixties. So in­ tense is the episodic, operatic quality of the experiences articulated that

the textual space Newman employs in the book must itself be highly dif­

ferentiated from other books. Since the overt manner of the book is

autobiographical, the deployment of language in the text-by way of marginalia, scholia, commentary, parallel script, and so on, all em­ ploying a considerable range of typographical and typesetting devices243

is at once self-referential and, Newman says in a particularly

interesting

passage, impersonally traditional: ...

the illuminated manuscripts from which this book takes its

tated in the margins by generations of argument,

shape-those books anno­

counter-argument and commentary,

recapitulated and revised history, contradictory assertions unfolding into space, which must be read as it was written-from the inside out. They remain the highest coUaboration of technology and personality, echo the most intense relationship between the tactile and

the intellectual, the analytic and the celebratory-those manuscripts which themselves, like stelae, hold Time.

And though the marginalia here are mainly words of others, they are still mine, alas; self-referential, autodidactic, desperately appropriated, signed by my own hand. This is our 17 world now-a world in which this is never tIuIt, and it only about itself; becoming ..•

Whatever in this passage is despondent gets amplified a little later: there was a time, we are told, when it happened that a text was "the oral

[word of God] written down," which means that man's beginning as picture was sacrificed to God's dictating letter as script. Newman's explanation, such as it is, recedes from the discovery of differance in the text, as if the personal cannot tolerate the pure play of signs released by writing without genre. Newman's actual text compels the normal autobiographical signs that would normally help to keep the whole text in quotes ("Newman says this or that about Oxford, San Francisco riots,

Russia, Budapest, French philosophy") to remain part of the detour by which writing delays (defers) presence. At the end "he" asks the text about his place: "What on earth am I doing here?" To which the written response in the text is the reproduction of adeaf-mute's card, handed to "him" without a word: I am a DEAF MUTE

Forgive me for bothering you.

WILL YOU? I am selling this card to SEE my way through.

ANY PRICE you can pay will be appreciated. 11

Writing without genre, with obsessive textuality, moves inexorably to the silence of differance, to the loss of quotes as well as of the com­

forting ontology of presence. Neither the author nor the deaf-mute stands before the other, except as visible and silent difference produced one after the other in the text. This is the remarkable achievement of

Newman's writing: that its final silence shifts-as the e shifts away to be

replaced by the a in differance-and subverts the old authority of Being 244

and presence which has always commanded either the novel or narrative discourse. Here is no imitation of Being, no nostalgia for presence, no

anxiety for the name naming reality once for all.

So here is the desired oasis

•..

where all the senses exist coextensive with their stimuli,

where history is simply geography, where all signs are their own essences-you touch

yourself, but you are not there, you hear what you can't see, see what you can't hear, and there is nothing on which to use speech, nothing to name, and the body cancels out its signals for recognition simultaneously as it renews itself in the void. The news here is that no explanation is required. Ever. The peace not of life nor death, but of the hinge between."

I am less impressed in this passage, taken from the description of a

sojourn in Yugoslavia, with the easy reductions and reversals than I am with the writing's deliberate, increasing defenselessness: "the peace not of life nor death, but of the hinge between." The words no longer speak of something one can imagine, nor of something one can "understand" as a function of the syntactical pattern of reversal (hearing but not seeing, seeing but not hearing, etc.). Rather the writing stops, then redeploys away from the desire to name something which can thereafter be a symbol for presence. Away from naming, language plays; it is a trace bringing together an economy of here and there, of inscription and effacement, or of cancellation and recognition as aspects of the play of differences. If finally this play of differences returns him to a historical America, and to an airport ("the mausoleum of the modern world, where everything connects yet nothing happens" ), it is to find­ marvelous touch-" am useum of myself, where a battery of machines 30

wait to entertain me while I wait." a machine

31

The human difference has become

producing differences: he is examined by one of those

"electronic" gadgets purporting to do character analysis. It is the

parody of differance, and named as such: The electronic graphology machine balances the picture by making an appropriate distinction between my mind and brain, and as I sign my name, the IBM card is drilled with my aptitudes. I am, by the holes, by the numbers, discreet, forceful, dependable,

sincere, aesthetic, friendly, imaginative, observant, realistic, reserved, patient, systematic, poised, perceptive, attentive, individualistic, analytical, sophisticated, unconventional, contemplative, dignified, original, funny, tender-hearted, mature, truthful, intuitive, tolerant, and very temperamental!'

Fiction as specialized discourse. Within a given language, as between two different sub-languages, conflict of a very sharp sort can exist: this is 245

one of the most

interesting and persistent motifs in literary history. Is

this kind of English used by such-and-such a poet better, or closer to

reality, than so-and-so's? Is not there a profound hostility between the poet's or the novelist's language and that of the critic, or that of "the public"? These are some of the questions raised by the conflict, although rarely with such influential and central import as by Words­ worth and Coleridge in 1800. Wordsworth seems to have accepted as definite a marked separation between "the gaudiness and inane phraseology" of modern poetic language and language "really used by men." His account of this rupture between the two modes is not only formal but historical as well. "It is supposed that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, Known habits of associ­ but that others will be carefully excluded." ation are formed in time, accumulating for themselves a kind of institu­ tional persistence that either admits or forbids entry to ideas, writers, and readers. Behind these rules stands the guild of poets for whose pro­ fessional protection (not, according to Wordsworth, for any more serious moral cause) the going codes of poetic behavior, roughlyequiv­ alent to Swift's notions about polite conversation, are enforced. Yet unlike Swift, Wordsworth confines his disparagement of the specialized jargon to its dismissal in his Preface. And both in the Ballads themselves and in his prose preparation for them he innovates in 33

the real language

.•.

(by whicbl men hourly communicate with tbe best objects from

whicb tbe best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in

society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under tbe influence of social vanity, they convey tbeir feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosopbicallanguage, tban that whicb is frequently substituted for it by Poets, wbo think tbat they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art In proportion as tbey separate themselves from tbe sympathies of men, and indulge In arbitrary and capricious babits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of tbeir own creation....

Wordsworth's appeals are both to novelty (since poets contemporary with him avoid "real language") and to the true communal bonds

between people. With his usual bristling sophistication, Coleridge tinkered with his friend's arguments, introducing innumerable com­

plexities that Wordsworth's rather monolithic declarations had over246

looked. But whether Wordsworth was practically correct or not, the

ideological demarcation he had portrayed was for two generations of writers a timely and influential one, at least in thought about language.

It allowed embattled authors, just beginning to feel alien to the modern polities, to claim that they, and not official speakers of any sort, spoke with the real language of men; if that truer speech happened, as in the cases of Blake and Shelley, to seem obscure because it was visionary or intense, that was because the effectiveness of "mind-forged manacles" hampered understanding. The driving impulse of Wordsworth's obser­ vations continued to nourish writers, and indeed to fertilize the most

public and generously social ofliterary forms, the novel, for quite some time to come.

However, when the language "really used by men" takes on a political

meaning, as when a colonial writer who, like Joyce, remarks that "their" use of English is different from his, the intralingual tension develops in other ways than before.

Joyce's position in English literature is so commanding that it is diffi­ cult to think of him as a colonial writer. When Eliot and Pound spoke of him as one of the greatest masters of English prose, they did not, I think, take sufficient account of his genuinely Irish and burdensome feeling of

natal subservience to English. His achievements in the language over­ shadow that feeling but never eliminate it entirely. His regard for Swift,

however, has been described often enough, although the writers of these

descriptions usually ignore Joyce's understanding of Swift's political meaning. Joyce admired Swift less as a master of language and more as a figure of moral and verbal authority in Ireland. It is true that Swift, unlike Joyce, was English and was exiled in Ireland; yet he used his tremendous verbal powers both to berate and to defend the Irish--so much as to become a symbol of Irish independence, however futile the

battle seemed. Swift's hopeRemove me from this land of slaves, Where all are fools, and all are knaves; Where every knave and fool is bought,

Yet kindly sells himself for nought;-

only in fictions like Gulliver's Travels, which in subject and literary reputation is respectively an escape from Ireland and a triumph of English letters for "Irish" writers. Joyce's case is roughly analogous. was fulfilled

247

His works are read as part of English literature, despite a frequently

overwhelming sense of Irish colonial pathos exuded by them.

Only a colonial writer can have as complex an awareness of the circles of camaraderie and isolation, of interlocking groups of provincial club members and lonely outcasts (often the same people), of garrulous native community muffling vast native despair and even vacancy, as Joyce did. His choice for the role of all-round man is a Diaspora Jew, a man both more and less a citizen of Dublin than anyone else in Ulysses; the intricacy of this man's position is further stressed by comparison with Odysseus, since Bloom maneuvers his way around Dublin as skill­ fully as the clever Greek did in his world, but he is vulnerable spiritually and in his home (Dublin or Eccles Street) as Odysseus was not in Ithaca.

Nevertheless Bloom's plight severely and objectively reflects the, to Joyce, greater intimacy of Irish despondency to be found in Stephen Dedalus. The opening chapter of Ulysses fully exposes the treacherous webs in which Stephen feels himself caught. Steeped in English litera­ ture and Irish traditions, "grown out of Wilde and paradoxes," Stephen calls himself the servant of two masters, the Imperial British state and the holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Between Haines's English patronizing and Mulligan's sporty Irish sentimentalism, Dedalus must bear the weight of a native's haunting inferiority and an artist's pride. This has never been easy for him. Yet since he can accept Irish neither as a language nor as a nationality (the old milk-woman represents both: "A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquearun a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favor."

He must make his own 35

way. This is a source of his bitterness, that of a writer forced to use a

language not his, forced to run the risk of creating an art that seems servilely to imitate accepted British originals. "Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:-It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking glass of a servant."

While Joyce obviously sees himself in Stephen, he also protects himselffrom the latter's crippling self-pity. As a result, Stephen's personality is allowed to develop characteristics like melodramatic pos­ turing, grandiose and inflated projections of itself, and spiritual afftli­ ations whose radical import Joyce accepted in a more insinuating way.

36

248

So the disparity between Stephen and Joyce is also the connection between them. For what the fictional hero broods over, the actual writer acts upon; the former talks, the latter writes. Yet Stephen prepares and

examines the ground upon which Joyce will base his career. If, as I said

above, Joyce was a colonial writer, then Stephen's role is to create the

position Joyce was to fill, that of heretic son, in relation to the language he used and to British Ireland (thefaubourg Saint-Patrice).

The triumphant irony of Joyce's achievement as a writer is that he transformed servitude to Britain and the Church by putting their resources to his use. From the former he took its language; from the latter, as Harry Levin has remarked, he withdrew his faith but kept its categories. In so doing he re-created both in his work, but did so vio­ lently: hence the difficulty and specialization of his art. The characters in Dubliners, of whom Gabriel Conroy is the most self-conscious

epitome, are locked in precisely those debilitating national and verbal shackles that Stephen was designed both to experience and break. One brief scene inA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man crystallizes Stephen's awareness with poignant economy. It is Stephen's chance en­ counter with the British Dean of Studies in Chapter V; its most suggestive moment runs as follows: The dean repeated the word yet again.

-Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!

-The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth, said Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought: -The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ; ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."

A short while before, Stephen had tried to write some verse, whose

weakness is linked to his walking "on in a lane among heaps of dead

language. His own consciousness oflanguage was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and dis­ band themselves in wayward rhythms."

38

His own verdict on the verses is that they are drivel. His meeting with the Dean explains the verdict for

him politically. In Ulysses Stephen's increased defiance will enable him 249

to transform his observation that "the

language

...

is his before it is

mine" into poetic anger at universal usurpation and artistic

banishment. Stephen Hero, on the other hand, had explored the

personal setting in which young Dedalus first discovers the conditions of his servitude.

The technical structure of Joyce's novels before Finnegans Wake was

designed to contain the meanings of usurpation, whose political version is colonialism. whose sexual version is adultery, whose moral version is sin, whose verbal equivalent is an echoic language---and consequently to remed y them. But how can the latter be done if not by attempting to supplant one usurpation with another? Thus Joyce doubles the artist's prerogative. For every injury done him, the only retaliation is a doubly intensified answer in kind. The colonial usurpation produces in Joyce a universal (Aryan) art that dislodges the primal tyranny with a secondary. fabulously exacting esthetic that tyrannizes the reader. The English man of letters gives way to a monstrous Irish artist. Paternal dominance is replaced by Joyce's male authority employing for his own ends idees­ meres. knots of ideas that conceive a whole brood of subsidiary varia­ tions of them. And yet despite all this effort, the initial usurpation waits for an opportunity to reassert its power. It does. For at Joyce's funeral in Zurich the British Lord Derwent spoke these official words: I consider it eminently suitable that this cosmopolitan gathering should be assembled here today to bid a last farewell to a man who wherever he domiciled

...

seems

to have

had no creative thought in his mind that was not intimately connected with the Ireland of

his birth. And since chauvinsim is, by force of circumstance, the order of the day, I cannot avoid saying that if the obstinate grandeur of Joyce's work puts him in the pantheon of

Europe's literature, it belongs to us English, too-for, after all, it is not written in Erse, but in English-and what a superb shaking-up he gave our old Anglo-Saxon!"

This is what Joyce has sometimes amounted to. No less than Joyce, Fanon shakes up the language of the white who reads that angry oeuvre,

since the language is not Fanon's really. Fanon tells this story: ...

In Lyon, I remember, in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between Negro and European

poetry, and a French acquaintance told me enthusiastically, "At bottom you are a white man." The fact that I had been able to investigate so interesting a problem through the white man's language gave me an honorary citizenship."

Lord Derwent and Fanon's French acquaintance confer the same

praise, with the same damning power. When Andre Breton says of Airne 250

Cesaire, "Here is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today can," is not that the same power asserted more subtly?

He really says that the Frenchman, with a history, a tradition, and a language of his own, handles those well enough for his purposes (one of which is the ability to recognize black innovation); so the foreigner

handles the language in a supplementary way, and that enhances

French, and the uniquely endowed foreigner.

Perhaps all American writers have felt the complexities of using a language not originally' 'begun" by them. Certainly the burdens placed historically upon the novelist, and the preeminent position in American literature given to the novel, reflect these complexities. When the American novelist accepts the injunction to be original, this has always made his attitude to reality professionally original. Consequently the novel speaks, or rather professes, realistically, which is to say a novel does not represent reality so much as brilliantly prepare it for use, as a skilled teacher prepares the subject matter of a course. The novelist interposes himself as showman, teacher, or original, drawing attention to the very difficulty, not of experience or reality, but making statements about it.

Moby-Dick is as pure and dignified an example of the didactic novel in the American tradition as there is. Ordinarily a novel will resist so gross an affront (as teaching) to its artistic independence, yet Moby­ Dick does nothing of the kind. Its extraordinary literary virtues derive audaciously from its presentation of reality as a sequence of coded messages too obscure for untutored comprehension. To the decoding of reality and, proleptically, oflater American fiction, Moby-Dickdevotes its tireless energies, educating the reader even as it overwhelms him with its zeal. A world so curious in its habits as a whaling ship, a subject so foreign to the layman's experience, and a background so unremittingly dense in its peculiar associations-all these are transformed into meta­ phors of difficult reading and learning for the reader. The ship is a college, whales are virtually a library, the ethic of whaling is a set of quotations (a primer that prefaces the novel) from the great books of the past.

Not every message can be read out of reality, however, no matter how perfected a professional's knowledge. Ahab, who is to whaling as a renowned scholar is to learning, cannot make out the inscrutable pur251

pose of the universe; the whale's forehead, a map of hieroglyphs, cannot be read for its secret meaning. The white whale is as mysterious as life

itself. And Aha b is fated never to capture Moby- Dick, only to be cap­ tured and killed by him. Indeed, Ishmael insists all along that his lessons to us in whaling are no substitute for the experience of whaling. More­ over, all whaling is of only preparatory school interest when compared

with the Pequod's hunt for Moby- Dick and the ultimate experience of

closing with the white whale. But when this climactic experience is at hand, knowledge fails, the experience slips out between the professional knowledge that precedes it and the disaster that follows: Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line and hold it so; and commanded the crew to tum round on

their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!

When Irving Howe once spoke of a cult of experience at work in American fiction, he was pointing, I think, to an ideal more realized in

the aim than in accomplishment. The American novelist creates a

special environment by his polytechnical style (the observation is Richard Poirier's), only to confront either disaster (like Melville with Ahab) or failure (like Hemingway) in the effort to have and hold the experience at hand. InA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, for example, enacts the predicament of a writer who attempts to incarnate a world in which experience is doomed always to slide away like soap on a slippery floor.

An accomplished Yankee mechanic debunks the European Middle Ages with professional know-how and no-nonsense=only to destroy with modem efficiency the world he neither belongs to nor adequately understands. Huck, a specialist in disenchantment-like Dwight Macdonald in his essay on "How toism," like any innocent abroad in the

professional world-heads for the territory. And what seems a prelude to direct experience-the glorious liberty of being one's own master, finding one's own truth-turns, during the course of the novel, into preparation for avoiding experiences for which there are no special tools. Similarly, Faulkner, whose baroque rhetoric and spiritual acro­ batics bar all but the most trained of his readers from entering a Southern realm mercifully unrelated to ordinary human existence. Or 252

Hemingway, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rise.t--able to expend passion only vicariously, at a cruel remove from the "true" experience he so hugely desires. Or Fitzgerald, like Hemingway a specialist at special problems in a world disintegrating after experiences missed and longed for. The bad dream as well as the true action of the classic American novel is that in spite of careful preparation, experience will find the hero wanting in either grace or skills and therefore will seem to elude him. Indeed, it is this very overestimation of experience that is the surest defense against the power of experience to make natural changes in the individual American.

Some recent examples come to mind. Phillip Roth's fiction since and

including Portnoy's Complaint parodies a sort of private encyclopedia of the grotesque. The mode of comic excess in his writing is based on manic specialization, and this in turn seems to inhibit "normal" experience in the interest of a highly eccentric, even totally eccentric and repetitive experience. Mailer's astonishing versatility and inventiveness make him the most impressive literary personality now writing; yet what first meets one is the all-pervasive air of expertise enveloping the work.

Bull-fighting, boxing, politics, writing, ftlms, manhood, scholarship: each with its own vocabulary as a tremendous verbal substitute for the experience, which remains the object of a desirous, asymptotic imagination. Even in such works as Capote'sIn Cold Blood or David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, the impression is of feats of vast research and recapitulation.

The motive for the writing-an attempt to understand, see, and condemn the making of violence=-can never be successfully incorporated into the work, so great is the tech­ nical verbal effort expended in trying somehow to regain and re­ experience what by definition a relatively powerless writer cannot live at 41

close hand.

In all this, that is, the relations between the specialized user of lan­

guage like the American novelist, his sense of distance from the expe­ rience, and the pressures on him to invent techniques in English for

dealing with experience in a language he uses at a second or perhaps third remove from its beginning, fiction is a discourse with relatively limited ways of making statements. The point I have been trying to make in this section is that, from the perspective of language use, there has been and always will be a system of social and ideological limitations 253

on the

language of the writer. He will always feel that saying something inevitably means a taking account of, or a struggle with, what is sayable.

And of all recent French critics it is Michel Foucault who has codified

these institutional yet intradiscursive limitations on the making of statements-or on the formation of discourse-with the most sugges­

tive results and with the most detailed historical evidence.

The analysis of discourse, he has said, "does not reveal the univer­

sality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation."

42

For the American writer,

"

Engl ish is already' 'imposed rarity. By force of history, circumstance, or cultural fate he writes in a language "given" as to a second person (to him himself, like Stephen Dedalus) on whom the injunction is laid to be original with it. He discovers that such a change does not take place in the abstract for, as Foucault says, "in every society the produc­ tion of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized, and redis­ tributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its largess, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality." These procedures include prohibi­ tions of certain sorts, internal rules for the production of discourse, and, most interesting for our purpose here, principles of authorhood.

43

Not, of course, tbe autbor in the sense of the individual wbo delivered the speecb or wrote the text in question, but the autbor as tbe unifying principle in a particular group of writ­

ings or statements, lying at the origins of tbeir significance, as the seat of their coberence.

Tbis principle is not constant at all times. All around us, tbere are sayings and texts wbose meaning or effectiveness has nothing to do with any author to wbom tbey might be

attributed: mundane remarks, quickly forgotten; orders and contracts that are signed, but bave no recognisable author; tecbnical prescriptions anonymously transmitted. But even in tbose fields wbere it is normal to attribute a work to an autbor-Iiterature, philosopby, sel­

ence-tbe principle does not always play tbe same role; in tbe order of scientific discourse, it was, during tbe Middle Ages, indispensable tbat a scientific text be attributed to an

author, for the author was the index of the work's trutbfulness

•...

But since tbe sev­

enteentb century this function bas been steadily declining; it barely survives now, save to

give a name to a tbeorem, an effect, an example, or a syndrome. In literature, however We ask autbors to answer tbe autbor's function bas become steadily more important for the unity of tbe works publisbed in their names; we ask that tbey reveal, or at least display tbe bidden sense pervading their work; we ask tbem to reveal tbeir personal lives, to account for tbeir experiences and tbe real story that gave birth to their writings. Tbe autbor is be wbo implants, into tbe troublesome language of fiction, its unities, its cobe­

...

....

rences, its links witb realities

....

But for some time, at least, the individual wbo sits down to write a text, at the edge of wbicb lurks a possible oeuvre, resumes tbe functions of the autbor. What he writes and

does not write, what be sketches out, even preliminary sketcbes for tbe work, and wbat be

254

drops as simple mundane remarks. all tbis interplay of differences is prescribed by the author- function. It is from bls new position, as an autbor, tbat he will fashion-from all he might have said, from all he says daily, at any time-the still sbaky profile of his oeuvre.

Commentary limited tbe bazards of discourse througb tbe action of an identity taking the form of repetition and sameness. The autbor principle limits tbis same cbance element througb the action of an identity wbose form is that of individuolity and tbe I."

Is it inappropriate to say that contemporary American fiction, as I have been trying to understand its language and discourse, explores its

authority? Does it speak for itself or for the culture at large? For whom is it intended-for the institutions that socially circumscribe it, for a consuming public, for the internal exigencies of its producer, or for the indulgence of its creator's "creative" impulses? How does it address those millions of readers to whom, for political and historical reasons, American English has become a "world" language? In short, is the field of its rarity a sign of its freedom and its freedom-bearing effect, or rather a sign that American fiction is a systematized difference rationally to be resisted? These are questions entailed by any consider­ ation-whether here or in France=of fiction as language, as textuality, or as discourse. Only, perhaps, when we note the absence in America of such universal novelistic figures as Solzhenitzyn, or the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez-writers for whom mimesis with a profoundly moral social engagement is still potent--do own

the socioesthetic limitations of American fiction become apparent.

Notes 1. Jean-Pierre Richard,L 'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmeii'esis: Seuil, 1961), p. 530.

2. Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 902, 903.

3. Ibid p. 901.

4. Ibid., p. 919.

5. "Ce qu'on nomme dujeu, il en faut, dans une mesure raisonnable, pour reussir quelque ..

chose comme ce travail complexe et simple: trop de rigueur aboutissant a transgresser, plfltot

que des lois, mille intentions certaines et mysterieuses du langage." Ibid p. 919.

6. Ibid., p. 921. Mallarme's attitude corresponds in many ways to that of many other writers, roughly contemporary with him. whose interest in language combined the technical with the mysterious. There is Gerard Manley Hopkins; there is the early Ferdinand de Saussure (see Jean Starobinski.Zes Mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure, Paris: Gallimard, 1971); there is Walter Benjamin (see his 1916 essay "Uber Sprache iiberhaupt und tiber die Sprache des Menschen" in Schriften, Vol. 11); there is Joyce (see the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses); and so on.

7. Ibid., p. 901.

8. L 'Univers imaginaire, p. 533.

9. Ibid pp. 535-36.

10. See the interesting article on Barthelme's CityLife by Morris Dickstein in The New York Times Book Review. April 26. 1970.

11. Oeuvres completes. p. 915. ..

.•

255

12. Donald Barthelme, City Life (1970: reprinted New York: Bantam Books, 1971), p. 109.

13. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer(1961: reprinted New York: Noonday Press, 1971, seventh

printing), p. 63.

14. Thomas Pynchon, V(1963; reprinted New York: Modern Library, 1966), p. 408.

IS. L 'Univers imuginaire, p. 530.

16. John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion" in The American Novel Since World War II, ed. Marcus Klein (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1969), p. 275.

17. Ibid p. 278.

18. Used in this way, the term is George Steiner's. See his Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Atheneum. 1971).

19. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 136.

20. Ibid p. 136.

21. Ibid., pp. 141-43.

22. Stephane Mallarrne, Oeuvres completes, p. 366.

23. Charles Newman, A Child's History ofAmerica: Some Ribs and Riffs for the Sixties (Chicago: Swallow Press. 1973).

24. Helene Cixous, Neutre (Paris: Grasset, 1972).

25.A Child's History, p. 7.

26. Ibid pp. 68-69.

27. Ibid pp. 274-75.

28. Ibid., p. 307.

29. Ibid., p. 226.

30. Ibid., p. 301.

31.lbid., p. 304.

32. Ibid., p. 306.

33. "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads" (1800)in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 446.

34. Ibid., p. 447.

35. James Joyce, Ulysses (1921; reprinted New York: Vintage, 1961). p. 14.

36. Ibid., p. 16.

37. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916: reprinted New York: Viking Press, 1964),p. 189.

38. Ibid., p.179.

39. Quoted in Leon Ede1,JamesJoyce: The Last Joumey (New York: Gotham Book Mart.

1947), pp. 40-41.

40. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 39-40.

41. This is also true, of course, of the Pentagon Papers. nonfiction-fiction par excellence. ..

..

..

..

42. Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," trans. Rupert Swyer in The Archeology

ofKnowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 234.

43. Ibid

..

44. Ibid

..

256

p. 216.

pp. 221-22.

Fiction hot and kool: dilemmas of the experimental writer Morris Dickstein

I noticed that howls and rattles had been added to whistles and drums. Is it some kind of

revolution?

...

Cynthiaformerly believed in the "enormous diversity of things "; now she believes in Kong.

The man whose pronunciation I had corrected emergedfrom the kitchen. "Probably it is music. he said. nodding at the windows. "the "

new music. which we older men are too old to

understand...

-Donald Barthelme, "The Party"

The tribulations of fiction in the early seventies have been (as the phrase

goes) fatal but not serious. If practitioners of fiction no longer believe in the "enormous diversity of things," the blessed abundance of God's creation, they have filled the void with an astonishing variety of their own artifacts. Today's writers are heirs to a liberating chaos of new forms, running from the Borgesian miniatures of Donald Barthelme to gargantuan miscellanies like Nabokov'sAda, Alan Friedman's

Hermaphrodeity, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. But freedom can be a burden and a terror as well as an exhilarating opportunity, and in the following pages I'd like to look again at some of the experimental short fiction of our period to see how the liberated writer has dealt with 257

TriQuarterly

his dilemma. What all these novels and stories have in common is a

degree of creative freedom and seriousness about art that was alien to the generation of John O'Hara. American fiction has joined the camp of modernism with a vengeance, just at a time when the modernist impulse seemed to be exhausted.

But modernist writing does not sell, or sells only to intellectuals and to

posterity; the dark side of the healthy abundance and variety of fiction is the collapse of the commercial market, which has driven novelists to little magazines with a minuscule audience and even to self-publishing, an "underground" usually inhabited only by the poets. Publishers stop buying novels or hesitate to promote those they do buy; they retreat to old middlebrow staples like history, biography, and reportage, which provide the narrative element many of the novelists have abandoned, and sometimes even deliver news about a world outside the writer's head. A recent Newsweek issue on "The Arts in America" gave all its

emphasis to the performing arts, almost none to writing. Along with professional sports, the performing arts at least convey a solid reality, a kinetic human presence that today' s writers often refuse even to simulate.

How much are writers, then, responsible for their own commercial

decline? More seriously, how well has the newest experimental work de­ livered on the promises of the tumultuous sixties? How do the aims of

the younger writers compare with those of classical modernists. who

themselves endured opprobrium and neglect before achieving wide

recognition? I won't really answer the last question, except to point out that an experimental attitude and a rebellion against nineteenth-century realism were important features of the modernist achievement. But they were accompanied by a heroic effort to master reality, to interpret the world in new ways, through new forms. Though a writer like Kafka may feel anything but heroic, may feel the victim of circumstances at every turn, as an artist he turns his helplessness into mastery by creating a mode of apprehension that we recognize on every page, in every sentence. His work has become a way that we see reality, which helps us to grapple with it too. But in the 1960s an impressive and influential body of fictional theory codified the modernist attitude in a way that almost leaves reality out of account. The essays collected in 258

Alain Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel. Richard Gilman's The Con­

fusion ofRealms. and William H. Gass's Fiction and the Figures ofLife all stress the esthetic autonomy of the work of art, its nonreferential status as an object in itself-neither mirror nor lamp, neither imitation

of life nor emanation of the self-a new reality bodied forth in words.

Robbe-Grillet had the example of the nouveau roman, which his essays aimed to validate, but there was little in American fiction in the

early sixties to justify so extravagant a theory. The characteristic novels ofthe period, by men like Barth, Berger, Pynchon, Heller, and Vonnegut, had indeed broken with the realistic conventions that predominated in the forties and fifties-not by junking them, however, but by subsuming them, as Kafka and Joyce had done, in an immense ironic structure. The worlds they created were virtual or contingent ones, which oddly mixed fact and fantasy and directed much attention to the artist's own ingenuity, but they were worlds nonetheless, full of the same "solidity of specification" that James called the hallmark of the realistic novelist.

It remained for the writers of the late sixties to press toward a mode of

fiction that would make the novel a body of words and no more: its own devices would become its only SUbject. Using techniques of abstraction,

fragmentation, and discontinuity-borrowed from sources as diverse as Dada painters, surrealist poets, New Wave filmmakers, Brechtian dramatists, as well as modernist writers of fiction-the stories they wrote deliberately alienate the reader, inhibiting his identification with the "characters" of the story, short-circuiting his suspension of disbe­ lief. Barthelme's recent stories, whose protagonists have names like Perpetua, "the genius," or "the catechist," announce themselves immediately as fictive constructs, verbal machines with all their gears exposed. Yet all sorts of words and deeds are attributed to the puppet­ characters, who imitate life so inexactly that they mock the very principle of imitation. Reduced to a collection of verbal and emotional mannerisms, tics of behavior severed from an elaborated human con­ text, Barthelme's world foppishly parades its superficiality; yet with such themes as "the rise of capitalism" it also toys with an air of por­ tentous generality, even of parable, teasing us with Kafkaesque hints of

remote, inaccessible symbolic depths.

259

All things considered, however, the freshest and most boldly realized

experimental fiction of the late sixties, such as Barthelme's earlier stories collected in City Life (1970), does not correspond to the astringent formalism of such critics as Robbe-Grillet, Gilman, Gass, and Susan Sontag. It is not free of that "heavy burden of 'content' and moral seriousness that Miss Sontag deplores in contemporary litera­ ture: it has not abandoned worldly ambition for a purer realm of style. I can explain this by citing some comments made by Philip Rahv in 1949 on the Kafka vogue of the late forties, which resulted in some good examples of fake modernism, misconceived imitations of that most "

el usive of models.

To know how to take apart the recognizable world is not enough, is in fact merely a way

of letting oneself go and striving for originality at all costs. But originality of this sort is

nothing but a professional mannerism of the avant-garde. The genuine innovator is always trying to make us actually experience his creative contradictions. He therefore employs means that are subtler and more complex: at the very same time that he takes the world apart he puts it together again. For to proceed otherwise is to dissipate rather than alter our sense of reality, to weaken and compromise rather than change in any significant fash­ ion our feeling of relatedness to the world. ("Notes on the Decline of Naturalism")

The limitations of this position are evident enough. Under the guise of

high standards and loyalty to the "true" avant-garde (read: some previous avant-garde), it can become a conservative defense of established forms and of acceptably humanist feelings of "relatedness to the world." Much later in the sixties, Rahv himself fell victim to this sort of embattled traditionalism, and became an indiscriminate foe of

all attempts at innovation in literature. The seeds of this decline are

already present in these earlier gibes at "letting oneself go," "originality at all costs," and the "professional mannerism of the avant-garde."

Yet however easily misapplied, Rahv's dictum is basically sound. All modernist writing is in some ways experimental and revisionary, thriving on the decadence of previous forms and norms like Swift's tulips rising out of dung. Modernist writing is ebulliently parricidal and cannibalistic. It revels apocalyptically in the end of culture-the death of the novel, the death of rhyme, the exhaustion of narrative, the end of the nineteenth century-yet feeds lustily on its murdered forebears, as Kafka sups ironically on the techniques of realism while undermining 261

their grip on causality and "reality," as Joyce turns Ulysses into a

parodistic anthology of traditional styles.

But in all the best modernist writing this negative and parodistic element never predominates, however large it bulks. Some modernist techniques do aim at pure destruction and chaos, a form of esthetic terrorism, but where this polemical side is dominant we often find publicists rather than artists, Dada rather than symbolism, Dali rather than Picasso. Otherwise, where modernist or experimental art seems unstructured, incoherent, anarchic, even nihilistic, as is often the case, it usually means that we have not yet recognized the new norm, the new

principle of coherence or mode of awareness that the artist has invented.

Often enough, though, we sense that it is there, for our instinct is sounder than our esthetic, which is still grounded in the idees recues of the past. The function of criticism is to interrogate that feeling, to turn into new categories, a new esthetic. Bad criticism spins clever theories; good criticism justifies unexpected intuitions.

In the experimental fiction of the late sixties, the largely negative strain shows itself most clearly in John Barth's stories in Lost in the Funhouse, in Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants, in Barthelme's novella Snow White, in the insubstantial and self-indulgent anti-world (" Antiterra") of Nabokov'sAda, and in the catatonic ambience of *

Rudolph Wurlitzer'sNog and Flats, to name only a few examples.

There is much to praise in all these books: corrosive ironies, flights of fantasy, nuance of language that we expect more from poetry than fiction. What they too frequently lack is poignancy, intensity, a recog­ nizably human framework. I don't mean realism, which is only one of many conventions by which art approximates the human. Without being representational, the paintings of Kline and Pollock, with their sweeping swathes or dense multiple layers of paint, boldly suggest the energies of their composition, the turbulent circumstances of their own inception. These works are not really "about" themselves, however, because their reflexiveness takes us through and beyond technique, *

I have discussed most of these works in previous articles, including a review of Ada in The

New Republic (June 28. 1969), a review-essay on Barthelme in The New York Times Book Review (April 26, 1970), and a review of Wurlitzer's Quake, also in the Times Book Review

(October 22, 1972).

262

back to a world of gesture, feeling, and movement as well as shape and color. But some of the new fiction is really about fiction itself, paralyzed

by self-consciousness, caught in an infinite regress of writing about writing. Thus, bereft of a full human SUbject, embroiled in problems of craft rather than art, it readily devolves into a parochial whine or ascends to a cerebral high, manipulating words and worlds with a meaningless impunity.

At its best, this fiction evades such criticism to achieve a genuine if narrow ness

intensity. Nabokov'sPaleFire is partly saved from mere clever­

by its obsessiveness, which well accords with the problem-solving

mania it depicts. Some of Barth's stories, like" Lost in the Funhouse,"

"Title," and "Life-Story," turn the prison house of authorial self­ consciousness into an almost adequate subject, especially when set off

against an impotent nostalgia for the happy credulities of tradition: Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infmitum! Who doesn't

prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn't continually proclaim "Don't forget I'm an artifice!"?

Though his critics sym­ ...

pathetic and otherwise described his own work as avant-garde, in his heart of hearts he disliked literature of an experimental, self-despising, or overtly metaphysical character, like Samuel Beckett's, Marian Cutler's, Jorge Borge's. Tbe logical fantasies of Lewis Carroll pleased him less than straightforward tales of adventure, subtly sentimental romances, even densely circumstantial realisms like Tolstoy'S ....

By Jove he exclaimed to himself. It's particularly disquieting to suspect not only that one

is a fictional character but that the fiction one's in-the fiction one is-is

sort one least prefers.

quite the ("Life-Story")

This may not be great fiction-what is?-but it has a certain

wry pre­ cision and point. Its self-referential quality is earned, dramatized, by the playful dialectic of unwillingness. Like the

proverbial cynic with a

sentimental core, Barth in all his fiction oscillates between a mock traditionalism and a coyly hesitant vanguardism, in a way that at least

approximates Rahv's formula that "the genuine innovator is always trying to make us actually experience his creative contradictions."

The weakness of such writing, as Barth himself indicates, is that it has no subject apart from the writer's problem in being a writer. This can be a rich theme, as it is for Henry James in his fables about artists and if but writers, only problems of technique and creative choice come to 263

represent more general features of our common fate. Since the early Romantics of the late eighteenth century, the fate of the artist has re­

peatedly become an intensified version of the whole human situation.

For this to happen convincingly, however, the writer must genuinely risk and expose himself; he cannot simply dawdle about the private, paro­ chial problems of his craft, no matter how apocalyptically he interprets them. But the Barthian apocalypse is a game without risk, a purely intellectual game that scribbles in the margins of the history of art without adding to the basic text. Recent critical theory endows fiction with total imaginative freedom, making it no longer "subservient to the actuality from which it draws its instigations and energies." But what the Barthian writer caught in his dead-end self-consciousness most completely lacks is imagination, the deep SUbjectivity that enables the imagination to take wing. For all their personal reference his cerebral musings about art foster an escape from SUbjectivity, an escape from personality. He eschews not only characters but character, including his own; his incursions into the self are as hollow as his excursuses into the world.

This escape from personality, perhaps an understandable reaction to the fury of self-assertion that predominated in the sixties, threatens to rob the writer of everything but his' 'voice," the distinctive accent of his prose (distinctiveness we associate with poetry more than with fiction).

At the same time it makes possible the celebrated "cool" tone of much recent experimental fiction, a cleanness of manner that partly redeems

the pervasive irony and emotional distance. Experimental fiction �lears away the debris of prevailing styles-such as popular realism-which

usually debased versions of styles that were radical in their own day.

(Eliot's poetry challenges Swinburne and Robert Bridges, not Blake and are

Wordsworth; Barthelme undermines Bellow, not Balzac.) After we've read Barthelme and Borges it's hard to be told that so-and-so got into a car, slammed the door, turned his key in the ignition, pressed his foot on

the gas pedal, etc., unless this sequence of gestures advances the

meaning (as it does, for example, in Truffaut's neo-Hitchcock film The Soft Skin). In most popular (and some serious) fiction, however, such filler merely aspires to verisimilitude--to convince the reader, as Robbe-Grillet remarks, "that the adventures he is hearing about have 264

really happened to real characters." In Balzac, setting and description are like an overture which introduces a set of musical

themes; in con­

temporary realism they merely strain to convince us we're in a world.

Faced with the debasement of realism into lazy conventions, the writer can clear the ground by abstracting from reality, perhaps by con­

densing the story from thirty to three pages, essentializing it into pure narration; but unlike the painter he cannot recoil wholly from repre­ sentation into pure abstraction. A painting by Jules Olitski can be "about" its acrylic surface or other layers of paint the surface suggests but half-conceals. Still the canvas remains an object of sensuous contemplation. But words are abstract to begin with; they lack sensuous address. The pulpiest novel, dead on the page, can make a good movie: the sounds and images, the moving presence of the actors, can bring the thing to life. As Mary McCarthy puts it, "language, unlike paint and sound, cannot slough off its primary function of saying something.

When it tries, we simply stop listening. This is why large audiences cannot be attracted by every sort of non-objective art and 'concrete' music but so very few people will consent to turn pages from which no meaning emerges."

Admittedly Miss McCarthy is discussing an extreme example, the French "new new novel," which, like so many other "new" develop­ ments in French cultural life, is more a triumph of publicity and fashion than a true avant-garde, But some of the younger American writers of the seventies have been moving toward this kind of abstraction, insu­ lating themselves from criticism by a coterie mentality and donning tattered modernist robes of neglect and artistic martyrdom. Abetted by the genuine foolishness of publishers, critics, and lazy readers, they have begun to create an underground fiction that even in its weaknesses resembles the so-called underground cinema of the early sixties, and that will remain underground until it overcomes its own conceptual limitations. Few will consent to turn the pages because their work

neglects the sequential, durational element which is much more impor­ tant in fiction than in painting or poetry, and more important in long fiction (or films) than in short.

As John Barth's Chimera (1972) made clear, even a novella can seem

interminable when it doesn't move on its own-when the author must 265

prod it onward, like a stubborn nag, from page to page. And arbitrary sequence is related to lack of affect, the absence of deep subjectivity, the failure to engage the reader's full being. Philip Stevick, in his fine essay on the new fiction in

TriQuarterly 30 (Spring 1974), acknowledges this

when he quotes Kenneth Burke's point that "Form in literature is an

arousing and fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence." Barth, whose recent work almost disarms criticism by forever saying the worst that can be said about it, himself admits as much in one of his self-reflective digressions: How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn't my cup of wine; isn't somebody's; my plot doesn't rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself like a whelk-shell or the snakes on Hermes's caduceus: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies.

("Belleropboniad")

Barth deliberately directs the three novellas in Chimera at the crisis of

self-consciousness that he perceives in experimental writing, which had been the problematic subject of Lost in the Funhouse and had sub­

sequently given him his first taste of writer's block. He is caught in conflict between his affinity for traditional fiction and his acute sense of its exhaustion, a feeling that its historical moment has passed. His solu­ tion in The Sot- WeedFactor(1960) was to outflank the social and

psychological realism of the nineteenth century by mimicking an earlier mode. His solution in Chimera is to leapfrog even further beyond the conventional novel, "back to the original springs of narrative"; he will return to the earliest myths and legends like those of Scheherazade and Greek mythology, whose patterns, repeated instinctively in so many later stories, he will consciously develop and modernize (on the premise, false in my view, that' 'to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mytho­ Better to address the archetypes directly"). As Barth puts poeic stick it earlier, "He declared with pleasure that thanks to the inspiration of Scheherazade and to the thousand comforts of his loving wife he believed he had found his way out of that slough of imagination in which he had gone forward by going back, to he'd found himself bogged: the very roots and springs of story." Thus, he hopes, without smothering his self-consciousness, by mimicking an archaic mode he can write ....

...

266

stories that are aware thatthey are stories but also "manage to be

seriously, even passionately, about some things as well."

Barth's recognition of the value of a subject makes him something of a conservative of the fiction scene of the early seventies, but it does little to save his book. Greek mythology and the Arabian Nights are tough leagues to bat in, and Barth's three novellas manage few palpable hits.

Caught between the simple integrity of traditional stories and the demystifying problematics of modernist self-consciousness, Barth realizes neither one nor the other. In The Sot- Weed Factor, whatever its

limitations, Barth almost had it both ways, by writing a half-loving,

half-mocking version of the eighteenth-century novel. There he invented stories, not yet knowing it couldn't be done. But nothing could seem further from' 'the original springs of narrative" than the chatty, trivializing tone of Chimera, punctuated only by mock -literary pom­ posities, never by the unselfconscious simplicity of the storyteller.

Storytelling is rooted in wonder, in the marvelous, in magical charm, enchantment, even possession. Barth's versions utterly lack vividness, let alone the power to charm or possess. The stories themselves are pallid and hard to follow, swamped by digression and commentary. Barth babbles on about domestic problems, his writer's block, quotes verba­ tim from his sources, even delivers a critical lecture on his work to date.

Some of this is funny, ingenious, and even enlightening, but it all

belongs to what Walter Benjamin calls "information," the modern journalistic mode that is the fatal enemy of traditional storytelling, however many stories it claims to tell. As Benjamin puts it, Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories.

Tbis is because no event any longer comes to us without being shot through with ex­ planation Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from ex­ The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are planation as one reproduces it related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not •...

•...

forced on the reader.

("The Storyteller")

Instead Barth tries to control the reader's response at every turn, sub­

stituting cleverness for imagination, gossipy prattle for myth, the manipulations of the will for spontaneous affect (or effect). There's more feeling for Greek myth in the two pages of Freud's little essay on "Medusa's Head," though Freud makes no pretense at storytelling, 267

than in Barth's laborious novelistic version of the same myth. Barth fre­

quently tries to identify his characters' situation with his own-they too are storytellers, or are entering middle age, or are minor celebrities and feel past it, etc.-but the connections are willed and superficial. For all their comic intent, the three stories betray that fear of intersubjectivity which Paul Goodman identified as a prime cause of writer's block.

The relative failure of Chimera underlines the limitations of nostalgia as a solution to the dilemmas of experimental fiction.

Nostalgia really does take the writer backward rather than forward. Traditional stories, however conscious they may make us of the writer's "creative contra­

dictions," in themselves provide no instrument of creative break­

through unless the writer experiences them in a new way. Barthelme's Snow White (196 7), though circumscribed, is a much more successful book, for in its purity of intention it breaks more drastically with its traditional source. Where Barth's style is mock-dainty, or chatty and low, a lesson in the art of sinking in fiction, Barthelme's language is a model of planned incongruity. Like some of the New York poets, whose playfully surreal styles have similar roots, Barthelme has a background in the visual arts; he has edited art journals, done the design for Fiction magazine, and illustrated many of his own stories, including a children's book. All his books are attractive objects, informed by an easy elegance and urbanity, and his fictional method is similar to his visual one. Barthelme the designer is primarily a collector, who does bizarre collages of nineteenth-century engravings, the effect of which is neither wholly satiric, nor antiquarian, nor camp, but poised in a vacant, eerie zone between nostalgia and irony, mad and mod. Barthelme the writer is also a connoisseur of other people's styles, not so much literary as sub­ literary ones-the punishment corner of language, where curious things happen-from Victorian kitsch to modern pop, from professional jargon and journalistic formula to the capacious regions of con­ temporary cliche. Snow White is a book about language, a collage of styles bleached and truncated into one pure and rigorous style of its own. Its fairy-tale subject is a hollow sham, the eye of a word-storm, the common theme of an anthology of ways of not saying anything. Its purity of purpose is cold and bracing: a good book for writers to read, like a verbal purge; or like ordinary-language philosophy, always 268

sharpening the tools. But the book suits the theory of the new fiction a little too well; its surface is rarely ruffled, let alone subverted, by any

actuality.

Snow White is an extreme case. Dominated by an austere, bookish wit and a negative appetite for verbal trash, it is a work of severe ironic dis­ tance. The perfection of Barthelme's method, now so widely and ineptly

imitated, comes in half a dozen stories of Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), and nearly everything in its successor, City Life,

still the most brilliant collection of experimental fiction these last years have produced. In stories like" Brain Damage," "At the Tolstoy

Museum," and "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" the cool mode heats up electrically, and experimental writing proceeds from critique to creation. Where Snow White is a clearing of the ground, these stories construct a new fictional reality. They show what even Snow White

made clear, that Barthelme is no mere collector but a writer who

juxtaposes strange forms and fragments in a way that creates new form and releases new meanings. Where Snow White is mainly an ironic book, CityLife is also an impassioned one. Snow White is more sophisticated and condescending, but experientially vacuous; CityLife gives free play to another side of his temperament, a melancholy nostal­ gia for traditional art and old-fashioned feelings-unlike Barth's, a nostalgia that animates rather than inhibits him. The longing is of course--he can't be to he can But hopeless, try Tolstoy. plumb his ambivalence and make that contribute to the enigma, adding thick shadows to his subject. The Barthian writer escapes from personality; though he babbles about himself incessantly he discovers very little and achieves no deep SUbjectivity; his self-consciousness tells him that no art, no imagination, is still possible, and the prophecy is self-fulfilling.

The Barthelmian writer is scarcely ever present; he loses himself in the oddest, most unpromising SUbjects: Kierkegaard, Robert Kennedy, angels, the Phantom of the Opera; but the space between passion and irony is filled with new perceptions and connections, self-discoveries, as in all the best fiction. The art is not confessional but it is hauntingly personal, full of mood and mystery, and the author is arrestingly present. Where writers like Wurlitzer, proclaiming the death of feeling, merely betray their own emotional poverty, Barthelme finds new 269

imaginative life in the heart of the contemporary wasteland, in the land of' 'brain damage," where art shacks up with kitsch and tradition lies down with the New. This art of incongruity brings Barthelme's stories closer to the comic-apocalyptic writers of the early sixties=-such as

Pynchon, Heller, and Vonnegut, who meet reality halfway and strike a Faustian bargain-than to the verbal austerities of, say, Gass's fiction or of his own younger admirers.

Unfortunately Barthelme has so far been unable to sustain his creative elan in the early seventies, and his difficulties are symptomatic of the problems of experimental writing during this period. Fiction is one of the few areas of our cultural life where the breakthroughs of the sixties have been sustained, if not carried forward. Newsweek tells us that Barthelme has become the greatest influence on our developing

writers, but neither the established nor the younger writers have de­ livered the body of innovative work that the late sixties seemed to

promise. Other writers imitate Barthelme's manner rather than his in­ ventive rigor, while he himself has frequently fallen into shallowness,

decadence, and self-imitation. On both sides this has resulted not in the kinds of stunning collage and fable that made CityLife fresh and im­

portant, but in an epidemic of the easy-to-write pastiche or put-on, many of which would have been at home in a college humor magazine of

the 1950s.

It's to the credit of Barthelme' s latest collection of stories, Sadness

(1972), that he's very conscious of the perils of repetition and

self-parody. His main sadness is the fear that he's already said what he has to say: When one has spoken a lot one has already used up all of the ideas one bas. You must cbange the people you are ipeaking to so tbat you appear, to yourself, to be still alive. ("The Party") It is difficult to keep tbe public interested.

The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders.

Often we don't know wbere our next marvel is coming from.

The supply of strange ideas is not endless

....

Tbe new volcano we have just placed under contract seems very promising.

("The Flight of tbe Pigeons from tbe Palace")

The realistic writer, who may take his form for granted, in principle need only find another corner of reality to portray, another "subject" 270

for a novel. If he has the energy, he can write a Comedie Humaine; this may be why writers like Updike and Joyce Carol Oates are so prolific.

But the writer who interrogates and subverts his form at every turn has no such luck. He can run out of new wonders

manner that

very easily. Or stick to a

quickly degenerates into mannerisms.

Though it contains a few good stories, Sadness is a sad case in point, for it exposes the underside of all the writer's virtues. It shows how the

collage method fails when the fragments remain disjunctive, unillumined. It shows how the fascination with cultural trash can de­ volve into a taste for trivia, lovingly collected but barely transformed. It exposes the merely campy side of Barthelme' s interest in melodrama,

kitsch, and old-fashioned iconography, or the snobbish side, in which the artist flaunts his cultural status while sl umming and loving it. The book even betrays the limitations of Barthelme's most basic virtue, his

purity of language and narrative technique, which cleans up too much-psychology, description, interaction-leaving only plastic figures with curious names, leaving elegant surfaces which, in the pages of The New Yorker, mesh all too well with that magazine's waning cult of style.

Barthelme is at his worst where the realistic writer is best-in

describing the relations between men and women. There he retreats en­ tirely into the satiric and ironic mode of Snow White but without that book's freshness and wit. (I suspect this is why he has not yet delivered his long-promised novel.) Sadness is much too full of the trivial and the inconsequential, the merely decorative or the merely enigmatic. I have no idea why Barthelme has regressed from the passionate fabulistic manner of his two previous books, except for the reasons he himself suggests, but the lesson for experimental fiction is clear enough. The "cool" mode has its limitations, especially in a

period of disengagement Kennedy Saved from Drowning" (arguably Barthelme's best story) appeared in book form in and disintegration like our own. When "Robert

the late sixties, William Gass dismissed it, no doubt in alarm over its

topicality. But the story is both fervently engaged and formally daring.

Barthelme needs a great SUbject, an immediate subject, to draw him at least halfway out of his irony and esthetic detachment. The feverish immediacy of life in the late sixties, the energy and pressure and swirl, 271

which affected all of us, worked its way into his fiction with a fas­

cinating indirection, just as it ruined some writers who tried to devour it too directly. Now. without that stimulus, without the pull of social ferment and spiritual possibility. Barthelme's work looks the same but feels listless and remote. sketched rather than imagined.

Given the fetid character of the age. the young writer is at a dangerous crossroads. He can pursue his quest for new forms. new spectacles, new shapes for our consciousness. but he must try to do so without aban­ doning experiential vividness, emotion, actuality. (I assume, perhaps wrongly. that he has a choice.) Whether or not he makes peace with realism he must somehow cope with reality-if possible in a fresh way­ as the early sixties writers did, as the Latin American novelists do. If the sixties were hysterical (in more ways than one), the seventies risk becoming sterile and catatonic, and the writer, bent on refining his instruments. risks becoming part of that reaction. The times have gone from bad to worse. but the artist who is not part of the sol uti on may become part of the problem.

272

The corpse of the dragon: notes on postromantic fiction Frank McConnell

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man 's.

-William Blake

I want to take Blake's manifesto as seriously as possible in this essay,

both as an important text in the history of modern writing and as a counsel to critics hoping to make some general sense of that writing. It seems to me one of those statements which not

only make, but include,

their own intellectual history: a summary and transformation of movements in thought and imagination preceding it, and a prophecy

<though an ironic one) of the future it helps generate. Centrally romantic in its assertion, it is also centrally modern, postromantic in its

implicit negations.

Those negations, of course, are more murderously conscious, operative for us than they were for most of Blake's contemporaries.

Whatever the justice or accuracy of Arthur O. Lovejoy's famous discrimination of romanticisms as "positive" and "negative," there can be little doubt that our own best writing, as inheritor of certain crucial romantic dilemmas, has come increasingly to resemble the "negative" side ofthe romantic vision. And, indeed, the "romanticism" our critics and scholars have been rediscovering for some years now-after an age 273

TriQuarterly

of disfavor under the reign of the New Criticism-is a

peculiarly negative. dark version of the movement. Byron, for example, that darkest and most problematic of all romantic poets, has recently attained a prominence in the canon which had been denied him almost since his death in 1824. And the Wordsworth discussed by such brilliant commentators as Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom-obsessive, wrestling with deep psychic evasions which at once create and occlude his poetic genius-bears little if any resemblance to the Wordsworth who, for John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, seemed to offer a radiant possibility of sanity and peace amid the bewildering antitheses of nineteenth-century thought. Coleridge, at the conclusion of The

Eolian Harp, speaks to his beloved Sara Hutchinson of the God Who with his saving mercies healed me, A sinful and most miserable man,

Wilder'd and dark, and gave me to possess

Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!

I think it is fair to say that, while an earlier reader of these lines would have been most moved by the characteristically romantic conclusion, the collapse of the incomprehensible God into the quotidian mani­

festations of a peaceful day with mild Sara, we-veterans of fiction since Joyce and of poetry since Eliot and Pound-are much more struck by another tone: the words "Wilder'd and dark," which resonate

through that peaceful concl usion as a reminder of how desperately Coleridge--our Coleridge-needed and failed to construct such an elegantly humble sanity. To alter Wilde's famous epigram about Caliban and mirrors: the poet as monster not only desires to see his own face in the mirror of the past, but forces the critic (an Ariel of uncertain

loyalties) to forge that mirror, even if it means introducing bubbles and distortions into the surface of the glass.

I do not mean that an attempt to read modern writing as post­ romantic is simply a distortion or caricature of the impulses of romanticism. Rather, I am suggesting that the most efficient sense we can make of

poetry and fiction of the last two decades is in terms of a

revision of our ideas of romanticism and of the history of thought which itself produced the romantic movement. My point is that distortion,

though inevitable, is sometimes a way to the truth-and to a truth 274

which "accurate" interpretation could not attain. I return to Blake's manifesto. If the terms of existence are, as he suggests, total freedom­ creation-or total loss of freedom--enslavement by another man's

system-then any attempt to explain, either by poet or by critic, is fore­ doomed to the antinomies of capriciousness and imitativeness, must locate itself on a spectrum ranging from absolutely perverse orig­ inality to absolutely uninformative faithfulness to the History of All Previous Thought. Thus this essay is that oldest and most idiosyncratic of literary forms, an anatomy. It is, literally, a sketch of the origins and continuity of romanticism: one which tries to map the relationship between the romantic movement and that contemporary fiction which it

is my main purpose to examine. In imitation and perhaps parody of

Blake, I have tried to "create" a system which allows me to make sense of Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and John Gardner in

continuity with the history of language and fiction in the last three hundred years, rather than in distinction from that history. But the system I have invented is a parallel to the problems faced by post­ romantic systematizers like Bellow or Barth, and is caught on the same polarities of self-consciousness described by Blake's statement itself. That is, if all men are faced with the necessity of creating systems for themselves, as a pledge of their authenticity, then we shall have a great deal of difficulty trying to connect one system with another, trying to constitute out of that romantic universe of autonomous individuals a

polity, or a society of individuals who can talk to one another.

"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets," quotes Blake at the beginning of Milton. The irony of the romantic prophecy is that its wishes, at least in literature, are granted. For if all the Lord's people do become prophets-i.e., romantic poets-then it becomes nearly impossible to identify a "people" at all, in the sense of a shared community of belief-or even information-within which the poetic word can realize its efficacy. A brilliant young critic, Robert D. Hume, has suggested that romanticism is important for modem writing not in its temporary solutions, but only in the problems it has bequeathed us.

I should like to extend that insight even more generally to suggest that romanticism-the only romanticism we can tum to human use--is primarily the discovery of a self-consciousness, an historical neurosis 275

even, from which we cannot, and cannot desire to, escape. Man must

"create a system," a language and an idiosyncratic rationality for

controlling the world: trying not to do so is like trying to make up a series of absolutely random numbers, or like trying to kill yourself by holding your breath. But now-unlike, perhaps, Aquinas or Chaucer-we are aware of the impossibility. And since we are aware of it, our writing and thinking take on the form of a struggle against it, a struggle to assert, in the face of the artificiality and facticity of all thought, an authentically human voice, a civilizing idea. "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt...

Berryman entitles one of his Dream Songs (#225); may they perish who have written our poems, thought our thoughts before us: Madness & booze, madness & booze.

Whlch'll can tell who preceded whose?

What chicken walked out on what egg?

This is not simply the fear of "unoriginality" but, rather, a terrified

"originality" itself, the ideal ofthe originating Word, may be only the behavioristic illusion of a predestinarian universe. It is one of the grimmest parallels I know to the thesis of Harold Bloom's study of the modern tradition, TheAnxiety ofInfluence, in which Bloom sense that

describes the obsessive concern of the modern writer that his own

imaginative life is threatened, impinged upon by those very figures who are his strongest source of inspiration. The modern writer who, like Berryman, directs his energies-in a profoundly romantic experiment-toward the invention of a voice which may distinctively carry his vision is caught by the discovery that that invention of a voice implies, also, the fictiveness, the artificiality, of all speaking voices.

Until fmaIIy, that "vision" becomes an obsessive concentration upon the velleities and possibilities of the articulating voice itself: Nabokov' s ape tracing, again and again, the bars of its cage.

I hope the reader shares my slight embarrassment at the word "inspiration" in the last paragraph: it is an important feature of exactly the history I am trying to describe. "Inspiration" is an old-fashioned, somehow excessive word for our sense of literary relationships. And it is the romantic movement, in its concentration upon the personality of the inspired poet and the process of poetic inspiration, which paradoxically empties the word of any real usefulness for our own speaking about 277

literature. Romanticism, that is, like modernism is quintessentially a

self-unfulfilling prophecy, a mythmaking shot through with a tragi­ comic distrust of myth itself.

Concerns of myth and language, moreover, are obviously central to my own scheme for describing the permutations of the modernist

imagination. Of all the characteristics that have been identified, in one way or another, as crucial to the postmodernist tradition in writing-free play, "writing degree zero," the escape from (or the end of) history, etc.-the one truly consistent and creative difficulty of that writing seems to remain the basically romantic (post-Cartesian) problem of the nature and status of language as (a) an accurate reflection of the universe man confronts and (b) an incarnation, indeed the first and necessary incarnation, of human freedom. Problems (a) and (b) are, to be sure, indistinguishable from each other at the deep­ est level of their urgency-the level at which, speaking at once about the nature of the outside and the nature of the inside, the universe and our

position as secondary creators of that universe, we approach the status of mythological, cosmogonic thought. Thus, in this introductory cartoon of romantic history-and in the discussion to follow-I begin with Descartes and Milton, the two seventeenth-century writers who most firmly establish the new ambiguities oflanguage and mythmaking. The Discourse on Method, after all, may be viewed as a heroic attempt to reconstitute the ideas of matter and consciousness, res

cogitans within the lost paradise of Descartes' own urbanized, technological imagination. And Paradise Lost, on the other hand, is itself a discourse on method: the method whereby the Christian

extensa and res

,

soul cast adrift in the infinite universe of Cartesian mechanics may

attempt a re-creation of the myth of the Fall. It is by now conventional wisdom that cosmogony-myths about the origin of the universe-sis

always to some degree confessional autobiography, myths about the origin and importance of the self. Both Milton and Descartes, considered as confessional poets, help us see the connections between the poetic careers of Wordsworth and Byron-two crucially influential romantic language-myths which determine, respectively, the possibilities of poetry as a verbal reintegration of self and world, and the possibilities of poetry as a disintegration of that primal unity which 278

leaves the poet at once denuded of all his fictions and at peace with the

resulting void.

The Wordsworthian and Byronic examples are, even in the context of

fiction after World War II, extreme: no writers since them have

surrendered quite so unremittingly to the alternatives of the Word as

repletion or exhaustion of human meaning. human freedom. Blake, alone among the romantics, was able to forge a mythology which could include both those alternatives in a creative, profoundly rational tension with each other. Blake, indeed, may be the first truly postromantic writer, precisely because, in his anticipation of the major terms of the nineteenth-century romantic dilemma, he managed to see so far beyond that dilemma into its basic-and therefore contemporary-linguistic manifestation. Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler muses that the real problem with the barbarism of '70s New York is its total closure as a grammar of "

pure inanity. Like Marcuse's "happy consciousness, the cosmogony of the Silly City is too yielding, too pluralistic, too comfortable even to admit the possibility of negation: The labor of Puritanism now was ending. The dark satanic mills changing into light

satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the

seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, AlIL'iterdam, London.

But Blake, the inventor of the phrase "dark satanic mills," also

anticipates Bellow's refutation of that phrase and that vision. He seems. more and more as his work progresses, to understand that the poet's problem is not so much an escape from the burdens of mechanism, industrialized society, and-their literary analogue---the overwhelming weight of tradition, but rather that the problem is to find a way of creating, of civilizing both language and society through the medium of those characteristically contemporary debilities. Blake's apocalypse, finally, is an apocalypse oflanguage in its deepest mythic, cosmogonic implications: language which is at once transparent and opaque, confessional and anticonfessional, manifesting and obliterating the personality of the artist from the structure of his work. And as such, it is not simply an analogue or a progenitor, but a competitor with the intricate fictions of Bellow, Barth, and Gardner.

The point I am trying to make is that the visionary linguistics of 279

contemporary writing, like that of romanticism, must be understood in terms of its fundamental union of contraries, rather than as a mere set

of mental-physical, spiritual-mechanistic antitheses. Writers as

disparate as William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Noam Chomsky have been indicating as much for some time now, of course; but remarkably, the antiquated (Arnoldian? Wildean?) antinomies about romanticism persist in even our most recent attempts at explication.

Wimsatt-by now, I think, obviously the most perspicuous and valu­ able of the New Critics-is certainly no friend of romantic ideas of selfhood or language. Yet, in The Verbal Icon, discussing the evolu­ tion of romantic diction out of its eighteenth-century predecessors, he precisely locates that genesis in the philosophical (Cartesian and of the phenomenal over the noumenal, of qual­ Lockean) "victory ities over things." To a mind so ardently Thomistic, of course, the ...

"noumenal" is never very far from the "numinous." And indeed I am not sure that Wimsatt is not, perhaps even unconsciously, punning here

between the two terms. But his conclusions about the fate of romantic

language, negative though they may be in their implied judgment, are of undeniable value for the kind of argument I wish to pursue: When the proper names and essences of things had been deprived of any special dignity, the

things themselves easUy became less impressive than their definitions, their periphrases, their qualitative connotations.

The disappearance of the noumenal, ofthe thing grasped in itself, of the idea of essence: this is surely the fate of words from Shelley to

Barthelme, from the "Wilder'd and dark" Coleridge to Berryman

trapped by "Madness & booze." But at the same time that this destiny seems an exile from the world of things into the infinite regressions of the self-beholding mind, it also implies a kind of freedom, a liberation into the radical structuring of periphrasis and definition which is part of what Blake meant by "creating one's own system."

Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, in Language and Mind, identifies himself as an enthusiastic participant in the romantic ideal of linguistic originality. There, more explicitly than in any of his other books, he acknowledges the debt of transformational-generative grammar to post-Cartesian ideals of "universal grammar" and a 280

massive, almost vatic humanitarianism. Paraphrasing Schlegel,

Chomsky observes: The medium of poetry-language-Is unique In that language, as an expression of the human mind rather than a product of nature, is boundless In scope and Is constructed on the basis of a recunlve principle that permits each creation to serve as the basis for a new creative act.

This "recursive principle" of speech, though (which Chomsky

elevates to such a dominant position in his own conceptualization of language) may be seen as not only an infinitely creative function of the human Word but also an infinitely uncreative one, the generative vision not ofthe Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Ulysses but of Mont Blanc and Watt. For Chomsky, though his system does not permit the terms "noumenal" or "numinous" to be used with any efficiency, is

describing, no less than Wimsatt, their disappearance from our believ­ able myths of language, and the agonies such disappearance leaves behind it.

I do not, indeed, suggest that the history of imaginative writing since

the romantic age is a matter of linguistics; rather, I wish to propose that

linguistics itself, perhaps the most characteristically self-conscious of twentieth-century disciplines, is a late product of the romantic sensibility, and therefore a particularly efficient one for describing the evolution of that sensibility. Linguists are fond of speaking in terms of "metalanguages." As I attempt to describe the grammar of a specific language, that is, I produce a description which is in effect a second language, a coherent system of verbal norms, whose subject is the system of norms, the first language, I set out to describe. And if I try to determine a more general set of rules governing the grammar I have developed, I create another metalanguage, at a yet higher order of abstraction. It is a useful concept for literary history as well as linguistics. For it allows us to talk aboutthe relationship between contemporary fiction and poetry and the achievements of romanticism, not in terms of "influence" or of an inherited set of logical propositions

problems, but as a progressive development, a "meta-myth," which elaborates, renders more complex or more conscious, some of the generative insights of the romantic system of mythology. or

Wimsatt and Chomsky help indicate how truly ambiguous the 281

romantic legacy ofvisionary linguistics is. Far from being a simple warfare of spirit against mechanism, of sublime madness against arthritic rationalism, it is, rather, an attempt to make a civilized peace between those terms. A book like John Vernon's recent The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture can be taken as

representative of a great number of apologies for the contemporary (Poirier, Sontag, Stevick) which, by ignoring or simplifying this complex tension, in fact disserve the real profundity of our best writers. Vernon's position, that the value of Barth, Burroughs, Roethke, et at is their enthusiastic embrace of irrationalism (the

"garden" sensibility) against the three-century narcosis of Cartesian logic (the "map" mind), will nottake us very far toward understanding NakedLunch or Chimera; moreover, the position itself suffers from a pseudo-Cartesian innocence of categorization. Between the garden and the map is a third term, the city, neither Edenically infantile pastoral nor mathematicized

wasteland, at once both and greater than both, the

true field of human civilization-just as language itself is both within

and outside the mind, the condition of all we can say and the means

through which we can escape from conditioned, inauthentic existence.

And it is this field, the human city constructed on the foundation of our own fictiveness, which I think the high romantics and the so-called "postmodernists" most seriously explore.

We have spoken of the impingements which the romantic and post­ romantic writers characteristically feel and which, as a counterforce to the expansive imagination, effectively constitute the nature of their art. The question is whether those impingements have not

become, for the contemporary writer, insurmountable: whether the creative antagonism between personal system and public structure,

solitary voice and common rationality, has not become a murderous, uncreative warfare generating a literature of frivolity and aridity. Two writers with quite different vantages on the romantic spirit have re­ cently suggested that this is so. Gerald Graff, in an essay on "The Myth of the Postmodernist 'Breakthrough' ," argues that the practice of what he calls romantic "poetolatry" has produced a tradition of phoney -and, currently, self-deluding-individuality which both hampers real 282

imaginative vitality and subtly enforces political repressiveness. For Graff, that is, creating your own system and being enslaved by another man's are not alternatives but correlatives. And in The Anxiety ofIn­ fluence Harold Bloom makes an even more serious=-since more em­ pathetic---case against the modern tradition. For Bloom, the romantic revolution is the" Fall," which constitutes both the consciousness and the guilt ofthe modern writer. And though that Fall offers us

only chance of a regained innocence, a poetic glory, Bloom argues that it also makes inevitable its own defeat, the exhaustion in our day of its own best promise: our

The death of poetry will not be hastened by any reader's broodlngs, yet it seems just to assume that poetry in our tradition, when It dies, will be self -slaln, murdered by Its own past strength.

An ImpUed anguish throughout this book is that Romanticism, for all its glories, may have been a vast visionary tragedy, the self-baffled enterprise not of Prometheus but of bUnded

Oedipus, who did not know that the Sphinx was his Muse.

It is an extraordinarily gloomy vision. The quality of Bloom's

intelligence as well as Graff s demands that we take their pessimism seriously. While I do not share that pessimism, it is nonetheless clear that such critics, in their considered nay-saying, perform a better service to the understanding of the modern tradition than many of that tra­ dition's most enthusiastic defenders. They both ask serious questions about the morality-esthetic and political-of writing. And to ask such questions is to assume the intimate, unbreakable connection between writing and political, esthetic morality which is at the heart of the romantic enterprise-and, I suggest, of the postmodern or contemporary continuation of romanticism. Such questions are not, cannot be resolved by the vision of modernity presented by writers such as Richard Poirier or Susan Sontag. If we choose to see in the best work of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, or John Gardner merely another manifestation of the' 'performing self," or merely alternative' 'styles of radical will," then we have assimilated those works only by avoiding their most important implications. "Play" and "free fantasy" are terms frequently used-almost as frequently as "irony" and "ambiguity" a decade or so ago-to justify and explain the nature of contemporary fiction. But, as all children know and too many of their parents forget, play is a serious business; and few things are less free, more constrained by social and moral considerations than fantasy.

283

Bloom, in fact, rather startlingly echoes the voice which, in

contemporary fiction, seems to offer the strongest chance for the continuing life of the romantic tradition. The modern writer's dilemma, he says, is involved with the recognition that he is not, after all, Prometheus, titanic archetype of the romantic prophet, but Oedipus, the tragic clown of rationalism and archetypal monster-slayer who learns-too late--that his monster is his Muse.

Is this a vision of the death of the imagination? Thinking about such

contemporary retellings of the monster-slayer myth as Burroughs' Nova Express, Brock Brower's The Late Great Creature, Barth's Chimera, or John Gardner's Grendel and Jason and Medeia-and about the

submerged but obsessive importance in Blake, Byron, and Shelley of the monster-slayer motif-one can perceive it, rather, as an insight into the vitality of the imagination, and into its inescapably romantic nature.

I return to the image of continuity I have already proposed: that of romantic language and postromantic metalanguage. It should be characteristic of a metalanguage (if our description of it is efficient) that it clarifies the terms of the language upon which it is based. And in the myth of the monster-slayer, I want to argue, we confront one of the central terms in the continuity of the last two hundred years of writing--central not only because it is a link between the visions of the great romantics and the countervisions of the moderns, but also beca use the real subject of the myth is the efficacy of language itself. Our version of the myth has increasingly, for two centuries, shifted its focus from the freedom of the hero to the gross factuality of the monster he slays-a monster who exists only to be slain by the hero, and is thereby at once

the symbol and limit of the hero's heroism, of humankind's most fondly wished humanity. And in so shifting our focus on this oldest, most

primal of myths, we have come to rediscover a harsh wisdom older than Judeo-Christian versions of rationality, a wisdom which is radically "postmodern" only because it has been forgotten for so long in our culture: the wisdom at the heart of the corpse of the dragon.

The myth is, of course, well-known to us. We have rediscovered its

primacy, thanks to Freud, Jung, Frazer, Levi-Strauss, and Joseph Campbell-to name only a few of its explorers. But to rediscover its 284

primacy is not to recover its real importance. We are adept by now at finding elements of the dragon myth in works like The Faerie Queene.

Pilgrim's Progress, and Frankenstein. And we have a well-established set of formulae to explain the permanence, even in displaced or mutated form, ofthe archetype. The dragon and his heroic slayer, our analysts tell us, may represent the organization of chaos into human order, the creation of time out of eternity, even the evolution of the ego out of the id.

The only problem with this knowledge is that we know it too well.

Information theorists have established that, for a message to be

efficiently transmitted, it must consist of a certain irreducible mixture of real information and redundancy. It is possible, in other words, for a circuit to be too open, to transmit too much information, and thence to become at once significant and meaningless. We know what the myth means, I have said. But of course the moment you think you know what

myth means you have lost contact with the myth itself. Because a myth, whatever else it might do, does not mean in that way. If anything, it is a kind of predisposition toward meaning, a verbal prima materia where narrative and order, drama and metaphysics, the aboriginally linguistic and the insuperably unspeakable all dance together in the moment before all other moments of human utterance. Myth is not about. it is that precarious energy-exchange between self and other, language and silence, word and world which, in romantic theory at least, is the explosive origin of speech. There is a curious doubling. here, between the problems of our discursive understanding of the meaning of myth and the use of myth-or, simply, the sense of language-sin contemporary fiction. For the visions of Barth, Pynchon, and Gardner involve the struggles of characters to survive in a world which is informationallyoverdetermined: a world where there are too many names, too many systems to explain any given fact, and in which, therefore, the definitively human enterprise of language is thrown back into its primal-its mythic--warfare against the namelessly phenomenal, the silent other. We may think here of the contradictory, maddening multiple truths which afflict Barth's Ebeneezer Cooke in The Sot- WeedFactor or Gardner's Grendel. But the most powerful a

statement ofthe dilemma-one which, in fact, reconstitutes the 285

archaic struggle of language against chaos=-comes near the center of

Pynchon'sGravity's Rainbow, as V -2 engineer Horst Achtfaden reflects upon the metaphysics of flight: Right here, at the Interface, the air wUl be riling. You follow the edge of the storm, with another sense-the flIght.seme, located nowhere, flUlng all your nerves as long as you stay always right at the edge between fair lowlands and the madnen of Donar It does not fall you, ••.

whatever It is that flies, this carrying drive toward-is it freedom? Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity Is till he reaches the Interface of the thunder?

"The interface of the thunder": Pynchon's genius for fusing the

languages of technology and apocalyptic poetry here gives us the hidden epigraph to his entire gigantic novel. The interface of the thunder is not simply the meeting point between the shaping mind and the shapeless, terrifying phenomenal world: it is the interrealm, the no-man's-land where the two antagonistic systems, mind and world, simultaneously operate, each in its own terms and each in the other's. On the pathological level, it is the realm of paranoia and schizophrenia; but on the level of language and the psychic history of the race, it is precisely the realm we have already described as that of aboriginal myth.

Martin Heidegger, in one of his late works, On the Way to Language, contrasts the philosophy of language to the technological enterprise,

which in his view contemporary linguistics amounts to. For Heidegger,

philosophy is that mysterious and yet intimately familiar state of attention, that return to the profound simplicities of the pre-Socratic shamans, which is such an obsessive concern of his own later thought.

Linguistics, on the other hand-the science of language-is, for him, the soulless discourse, not of men, but of globe-circling satellites, the "language of rocketry." No reader of Pynchon's book can help but be struck by this startling anticipation of the brooding, evil, other figure of the Rocket in Gravity's Rainbow, just as no reader of Blake can help but notice the Blakean overtones of' 'enslavement" -mental and

political-in the passage from Pynchon I have cited. Between the humanistic anguish of Heideggerian philosophy and the killing geometries of Rocketspeech lies the interface, the realm of fiction and mythmaking in their aspect as the most urgent acts of human primacy and human risk. The Rocket, avatar of Gravity, of the world's mute weight, of what Pynchon calls the' 'irreversibility of the Lord of Night," is the Dragon of the archaic myth. And it is a measure of Pynchon's 286

courage, as well as of his deep indebtedness to the tradition of

romanticism, that he has given us a book which rediscovers, at the most elemental level, the uncertainty of the struggle between the civilizing, human hero and his Great Adversary.

The energy of romanticism, I suggest-and of its contemporary

progeny-needs to be seen as just such a revision-re -vision--of the implications and problems raised by this oldest of tales. The dragon myth, until the end of the eighteenth century, is preserved in Western literature primarily in a displaced forms: variants of the St. George legend, allegorizations of the dragon into Satan, Pride, Lust. The dragon, that is, is seen as a Fall, a possible error or sin which a man might commit, but not as a real force, sufficient unto himself and existing independently in his own universe. He is baptized, defined in terms of a moral and linguistic myth which robs him of his greatest, unbaptized, terribleness. (We may think of St. Augustine here, in his revulsion against Manichaeanism-defining Evil, not as a principle but as a deficiency of the transcendent, omnipresent Good-as the seminal obscurer of the dragon's meaning.) Frequently in early Western literature, the dragon becomes comical in his immensity and clumsiness. And the focus of dragonslayer tales comes to be on the hero, the knight of holiness, rather than upon the awfulness of the monster he must defeat. With the end of the Renaissance and the be­

ginning of the modern period comes the recognition, by poets and philosophers, of the dragon's perennial, if forgotten, importance.

Who is the dragon? He is the oldest other. If the hero, in slaughtering him, affirms the triumph of civilization and reason, he also, through the necessity of slaughtering him, reaffirms the difficulty, permanence, and perhaps final illusoriness of the struggle. He is, at least in one romantic acceptance of his meaning, the baffling, insurmountable fact that things happen and that we have no control over their

happening. When you make love for the first time, when your car, unbelievably, collides with that car you previously accepted as a harmless part of the landscape, when war is declared or someone you love dies, then you are face to face with the dragon in his oldest, most threatening, and most mythic aspect. You do not need a Heidegger or a Pynchon to realize the primacy or the omnipotence of the dragon, as a figure of unwilled impingement upon your illusion of centrality and 287

control. And yet. at least in the history of Western thought, it

pparently took the romantic movement to rediscover that impingement. Or. at least. it took the romantics to create the myth of that impingement in its distinctively modern sense. Literary eras are distinguished. not so much by their solutions to existence as by the varieties of existential malaise they discover-a new headache for every a

age. And with the romantics. the lineaments of the monsters of antiquity and the Renaissance take on the shape of our nightmares.

Legions of critics and commentators have argued about the "meaning" of the figure Demogorgon from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. But surely Demogorgon is-like Blake's monster Urizen or Coleridge'S seductive vampire Christabel-the consciousness that we are here, things are there, and they happen to us. Sexual awakening (for Coleridge). the imprisonment of the mind in a self-limiting system (for Blake). or the inhuman dynamics of cosmic history (for Shelley) are all manifestations of the dragon, of the immortality of the monstrous, and-most shatteringly-of the perishability of human names and human explanations in confrontation with that monstrosity.

Great civilizations-though not, until the romantics, our own-have been constructed upon the basis of this inhospitable mythology of the

dragon; and to these we might turn to comprehend our own most civilizing fabrications. One of the oldest tales in the world is the Babylonian creation-epic, the EnumaElish. It tells how the primal dragon-goddess Tiamat creates the Babylonian pantheon and how the gods and goddesses of the pantheon rebel against their tyrannical mother. They send Marduk, their strongest and best. to fight against her. Marduk slays her and creates, out of her corpse, the world of men and beasts as well as the new heaven of the gods. As he returns to the other gods from his labor of destruction and creation, they-and the first men he has just created=-sing a litany to his beauty. power, and terror.

The Enuma Elish is one of the eeriest tales we have, since its latent

subject is the origin of writing--the origin, in a way. of itself-out of inarticulate nothingness. As few later versions of the dragon myth can afford to, ittakes the primacy of the dragon seriously. Tiamat's preparations for the battle with Marduk are the revelation, in fact, of all 288

that threatens language, civilization, humanity most primally and most

intimately. Tiamat's warfare is the creation of the monstrous, the other: Now they ali gathered around Tlamat, and they worked furiously on their plans,

night and day, they aU worked In a great rage, they were Impatient for the final fight.

Then she made fierce dragons out of fire,

flaming and hateful, fateful to look upon, they flew with shrieks of terror through the air, for they were truly strange and dangerous.

Then she created lions and spiders,

hornets and scorpions, great angry apes, sullen vultures and screaming hyenas, with loud howling to pick out their victims.

Now Tlamat was pleased with these creatures for she could see that they were terrible.

We are not surprised to see N. K. Sandars, a contemporary translator and commentator of the Enuma Elish, compare Tiamat to the principle

of "Entropy" -to universal Gravity, that is, or to the title and subject of

Pynchon's first published story. The dragon-goddess is, in this version ofthe myth, the opponent of all that is rational, organizing, or civilizing in the god-her child-Marduk; we cannot help catching, in lines like "Tiamat was pleased with these creatures/for she could see that they were

terrible," the echo and reversal of God's" And He saw that it was

good" in Genesis. This monster, granddam of Descartes' and Blake's fiercest visions, is the origin of all that is not "good," not civilized and ordered, tov in the Hebrew myth. And the Enuma Elish is unrelenting in its judgment that such things, since they are not humanly assimilable, are terrible.

The poem is cosmology and logology at once, a story about the crea­ tion of the world and the creation of language. But this double genesis is significantly grimmer, more problematic than in its Judeo­

Christian version. We are all creatures of a splendidly rational god, but formed from the corpse, the wrecked but still existent body, of

immitigably irrational monster. That is the knowledge, the primacy of the material and its eternal impingement upon language and thought, which the EnumaElish brings. The litany to Marduk with an

which it concludes, writing on stone in praise of a sky god, catches 289

profoundly the subtlety of the Babylonian literary metaphysics. The poem, graven on earth, becomes the Other on the defeat of which (whom?) its grandest assertions are founded.

To comprehend the language-myth, we need only remember its later

epochal parody in the first chapter of Genesis. The sublime fiat of Genesis is the perfect contradiction to the story of the Enuma Elish In this myth the word is not posterior to the material universe, arising from it and returning to it: it is the Word, creative, generative, self­ ratifying, beyond matter and calling matter into existence. We are not children of the monster; we are heirs of the divine language which

.

created and controls the monster

The triumph of the Judaic over the Babylonian cosmogony may well be the signal, constitutive event in the history of Western rationalism and Western writing. It was with extraordinary insight that the

rhetorician Longin us chose FiatLux as one of his prime examples of the

literary sublime. At least, its implicit and powerful assumptions about language, materiality, and the role of reason remain without successful challenge until the reemergence of the older, dragon-centered myth we have suggested the romantic movement to represent. Two figures, particularly, anticipate and give impetus to the massive shift in thought which was romanticism and is the tradition of the modern: Descartes and Milton.

Descartes' Discourse on Method drives a wedge between word and

world; a wedge whose magnitude, apparently, we have not even yet finished measuring. Writers as unlike each other as Sartre and Noam

Chomsky have located, in Descartes, the originating point of their central concerns: language, freedom, and the possibility of an alliance between language and freedom. The Cartesian opposition between free thought and physical limitation, the dualism of res cogitans­ what thinks-and res extensa-what is there--rnanifests itself in the Discourse as more than simply the isolation of mind in infinite space.

It is a rediscovery of the monstrous, the other, under its aspect as

silence and mechanism. Descartes was fascinated with the problem of automata, in much the same way contemporary linguists are interested in the possibilities of machine translation or talking machines, or

writers like Beckett, Burroughs, and Barth are concerned with the media of tape recorder and computer as narrative tools. Can the mind, 290

operating only on its own certainties, construct an efficient replica of reality? Yes, answers the Discourse: and metaphysics has already become the supreme fiction of a counterplot to the divine creation. But Descartes goes farther. Can the mind, then, he asks, construct by itself a human being? Can it become God, finally bridge the gulf between its aspirations and its involvement in the physical, the phenomenal, the other? No, answers Descartes: for, however convincing and accu­ rate might be the automaton constructed by such a hypothetically omnipotent human mind, the robot would still lack the power of speech, of language, that God-given power which is the sure sign of our humanity and of our ultimate deliverance from the world of res extensa.

Later writers and thinkers have had the sorry task of discovering just how gratuitous Descartes' confidence really is. But the terms of the debate remain his. Language, after the Cartesian revolution, must be viewed as either our ultimate liberation from, or our ultimate bondage to, our own materiality.

So Milton, in Paradise Lost, makes the myth of the Fall a parable, among other things, of his own ferociously Christian confrontation with the terrors of the Cartesian universe. His primal serpent is at once the most heroic and most pitiable character in the epic, for he alone, of all the protagonists of Paradise Lost, wanders through an infinite Cartesian space. His exile and fall, in fact, are, precisely, his exile into that space-the space of the modern mind. Early in the poem, Satan utters what was to become, in many ways, the romantic manifesto of

consciousness: "The mind is its own place." But that manifesto, as Milton knew and the romantics experienced, is an admission, finally, that the mind cannot be any other place but its own-that the world of matter has resumed its original identity as threat and limit to the soul.

Milton's Satan does not want to be the serpent. He wants to exist in the

freedom of his own vitality; but the poem will not let him, as the new

physics of Milton's and OUt era will not let us. Satan is exiled, in a sense, into the world his rebellious Cartesian mind has created, just as Adam and Eve, who create history through their sin, are punished for their sin by being driven from the prehistorical state into the history they have generated. Paradise Lost, in other words, is not only a poem about the Fall; it contains a recapitulation of the Fall in a more bitter-and more modern-formulation. Consciousness, fallen consciousness, is no 291

longer an exile from the Garden, but an exile into the Garden in its altered existence as temporal, material universe. But the romantics­ who were called, among other things, "Satanists" by their contemporaries-were to accept the exile which Milton denied, to acknowledge their parentage from the ruined Garden and the monster's corpse as a precondition, rather than an annihilation, of their own attempts at prophetic speech.

Two modern poets beautifully catch the conjunction of Cartesian and Miltonic obsessions in the formation of our own visionary obsessions.

Yeats writes, in "Fragments": Locke sank Into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

Locke's swoon-Blake frequently spoke of it as "Newton's sleep"-is

the ungenerative trance of the new, phenomenological Adam: a counter-creation which, since it emphasizes the alien ness of the

"garden" in which we are born, in effect kills the Garden. The new Eve of this anti -Genesis is the spinning jenny, the machine with a grimly punning woman's name, a delusive promise of peace with the universe which we can now call, also, gravity's rainbow. Wallace Stevens, in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, is even more explicit: The orst idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes

And Eve made air the mirror of herself

••••

The preexistence ofthe Cartesian universe-not as phenomenal fact, but as myth-confutes ideas of the creative possibilities of language.

Our words are all quotations upon the surface of impenetrable matter which we inhabit: the first idea was not, nor could have been, our own.

"Paradise lost" is a slogan of epochal irony for the poem behind so much of romanticism. For under the new dispensation the paradise of

Judeo-Christian myth is, indeed, lost, supplanted by the more

problematic myth of the Garden as monstrous corpse (res extensa), and the mind as inescapably secondary, inauthentic in the face of that otherness (res cogitans), This is the vision, preeminently, of the prophet of Leviathan, Blake himself. The dragon Tiamat had been a female; 292

and Cartesian space, whether as passive or as "swallowing," has often been mythicized as a female principle. Blake. in his own revision of the Miltonic persona. Milton, describes the Satanic or female space of the fallen world: The nature of a Female Space is this: it shrinks the Organs Of Life till they become Finite & Itself seems Infinite.

And Satan vibrated In the immensity of the Space, Limited

To those without, but Infinite to those within: It feU down

Became Canaan, closing Los from Eternity In Albion's CUffs.

A mighty Fiend against the Divine Humanity, must'rlng to War.

Blake's enterprise is an exploration of the hemmed-in universe be­

queathed us by Descartes, and a nervous experimentation with pos­ sible modes of liberation from its trap. His language is a language, not of mysticism or "vision," but crushing physicality. And as such, it is one of the first appearances of the modern fictive voice, a speech whose "substance" is precisely the difficulty of using words to clear a space for consciousness in the world of things.

But Blake can still employ the language of prophecy, one which­ though parodistically-invokes the tradition of the creative Word whose demise is his subject. William Burroughs, in Nova Express, describes a universe where even that option is no longer possible. For Burroughs, all language has become entrapment, addiction and bondage to the entropic powers he visualizes as the galactic gangsters of the "Nova Mob": Bring together state of news-Inquire onward from state to doer-Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did

they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was?Listen: their Garden of Delights is a terminal sewer.

If we regard postmodern writing as a metalanguage of romanticism.

Burroughs represents perhaps the most extreme elaboration of that metalanguage on the matter of writing itself. If "Life Time and Fortune" have been monopolized, turned into junk (addictive res extensa), then the only hope for the writer-indeed, for the man-is a literature which somehow does away with words altogether, which

obliterates the writer as conscious creator, freeing the man inside the 293

writerfrom "other men's systems" in a liberation so austere that it

threatens to obliterate his humanity itself.

There are many good reasons why our examination should take us from Blake to

Burroughs, from an English romantic poet to a dis­

tinctively American antinovelist. Leslie Fiedler once called America a land doomed to play out the imaginary childhood of Europe-the childhood, that is, of Rousseau's noble savage, Chateaubriand's

metaphysical Indians, Schiller's "naive" poet or Wordsworth's in­ fantile "mighty prophet, seer blest." But then America, as projection and living quotation of European romanticism, is also a land doomed to live out the attendant nightmare of that fantastic child­ hood: a civilization condemned to invent its possibilities within the very landscape of the Garden as Dragon's Corpse. This is partly what Gertrude Stein meant when, in TheAutobiographyoJAliceB. Toklas, she called America the most modern country in the world because of its

"abstract disembodied" quality. But Claude Levi-Strauss puts it more

precisely in his own discovery of America, Tristes Tropiques, when he comments on the "naturalness" of American cities. The found land of

European mythological yearnings is a cartoon, a caricature, of the romantic sublime: Our [European] judgments are.

•

•

permeated and deformed by this difference of scale.

Those who call New York ugly, for instance, have simply falled to make the necessaey change of registration. Objectively, no doubt, New York I. a city, and can be judged .. one; but the

spectacle which It offers to a European sensibility Is of a different order of magnitude: that of European landscape; whereas American landscape offers 01, In tum, an altogether more monumental scheme of things, and one for which we have no equivalent.

"No equivalent," that is, save in the infinite and terrifying prospects

of Goethe's Faust, Byron's Cain, or the vertiginous, seductive and

dangerous foliage of Chateaubriand's Ata/a. Levi-Strauss's own Rousseauistic vision is, in fact, perhaps the last historic instance of Europe's psychic imperialism over its most interesting colony. For he insists upon having discovered the key to all mythologies among the not -quite-noble savages of Brazil at the very moment-the eve of World War II-when American writing, like American civilization, was to assume the full mantle of its heritage of romantic self-consciousness: its immitigable exile into what Robert Lowell called at that time the Land of Unlikeness, its double bondage to the conviction of its own fictiveness and the pressure of the world's mute weight.

294

Nuclear fission and information theory, the two great American artifacts spawned by the War, are terminal versions of res extensa and res cogitans in their mutual closure. Norman Mailer's prophetic

analysis of the modern American psyche works not only as a description of the problems of the writer, but also as a description of the agonies of most of our populace. We are caught in a civilization which, while owing

great debt to eighteenth-century myths of liberation and of the imperial self, nevertheless increasingly manifests its own plastic, a

preproduced unreality and the corresponding impossibility of real communication within our gigantic information network. The

solipsistic games played by the heroes of Burroughs' novels-and the heroes of Mailer's Why Are We in Vietman?, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot49, or Robert Coover's The UniversalBaseballAssociation-are in

archetypal games of anti prophecy, elegant graffiti which announce the death of the realistic, sacramental Word unendingly, since there is nothing else to announce, no other message which does not compound the already overfull network of "facts" which is smothering us. one sense

To say this much is to reiterate the now familiar attitude toward current fiction as the "literature of silence" or the self-reductive

"Pythagorean genre" celebrated by George Steiner. But this attitude, as I have suggested, actually distorts the tradition of the "postmodern."

The invocation of the Babylonian creation story helps us see the creative aspect of the materialistic counter-genesis discovered by the romantics.

For if the dragon's corpse spells the end of one kind of civilizing myth-and one idea, perhaps, of the civilizing power of language-it is also the originating point of another. It is in American writing the of Malcolm work Saul -especially Lowry, Bellow, John Barth, and John Gardner-that the fiction of the New Foundation and the return of the myths, though radically inverted from their" classical" form,

frequently achieves its greatest complexity and power.

Lowry's Under the Volcano, published in 1947, is to postmodernist fiction what Ulysses was to its predecessor: indeed, Lowry's novel, patterned self-consciously on aspects of Ulysses, is a "metalinguistic" transformation of that source, and of the nineteenth-century literary history which Ulysses itself implicates. Both books involve the action of 295

a

single, cataclysmic day in the lives of their central characters; both

are set on the eves of the two

great Wars which were to initiate their

respective fictional eras; and both are written by and about exiles­ Joyce in Trieste on the Irish Jew, Lowry in British Columbia on the English consul in Mexico-men for whom the "quoted" life is not only imaginatively, but politically and demographically, central to their experience.

Lowry's private demons did not allow him to complete the series of books whose center Under the Volcano was to have been. But in an

important way the series is implicit, and splendidly complete, in that single book. Dana Hilliott, the hero of Lowry's first novel, Ultramarine, describes himself as living a life "in inverted commas," a terrified sense of inauthenticity which reduces Hilliott's life to the level of helpless fantasy. It is this apprehension of quotedness, of the inadequacy of consciousness to make meaningful order out of the riot of the world, which generates the creative warfare of Under the Volcano.

Geoffrey Firmin, the alcoholic consul who is the Faustian center of the book, lives out his last day in a drunken haze of regret, hallucina­ tion, fear, and ferocious pride. At the heart of his frenzied life is the terror ofthe world, of history, and of his own inability to control it. He is an alchemist, an adept of the cabala: a familiar of the monsters of history and his own delirium tremens, and of their "official" ancestors in the ancient magic. And he is an immensely civilized man whose speeches and nightmares are packed with allusions, with drunkenly askew quotations from Jacobean tragedians and romantic poets.

His civilization, indeed, is the point of his tragedy. For the consul is not only a witness to his own damnation, he is also its critic. In him we recognize the father of so many of our central characters, damned and laughing at their fall. For he understands soberly, at every point, the full silliness of his self-indulgence and self-destruction. Addiction to alcohol, the absurd dependence of consciousness upon things, is the book's key icon. The consul is both himself and Other, poet and addict, creator and monster. At an important point in the novel, Firmin talks with his friend, film-maker Jacques Laruelle, about a film the latter had planned to make of Shelley's Alastor. But if the poet in Alastor, archetypal romantic quester, was destroyed by mistakenly seeking a

296

beauty in the outer world that existed only in his own projective imagination, the consul's doom is even more frightening: he must follow the same quest while realizing, from the beginning, its innate delusion. He must attempt to make the process of the quest real even

though he understands the fictitiousness of its goal. His battle, in other words, is a battle for a revived myth, for a vision of adequate humanity which his own humanity will not betray.

The consul himself observes his deep bondage to the myth we have been tracing, the myth of the ruined, monstrous garden: "I've often wondered whether there Isn't more In the old legend ofthe Garden of Eden, and 10 on, than meets the eye. What If Adam wasn't really banished from the place at aU? That Is, In

the sense we used to understand it..

.

.

What If his punishment really consisted," the Consul

continued with warmth, "in his having to go on living there, alone, of course, unseen, cut oft' from God

...

?"

The consul, as Lowry observes in one of his letters, "has turned into a man that is all destruction-in fact he has almost ceased to be a man

altogether, and his human feelings merely make matters more agonizing for him, but don't alter things in the least: he is in hell."

This hell is also the inversion ofthe creativefiat, the undermining of the logos by a world where accidentally encountered signs, posters, and snatches of verse take on a preternatural weight of doom, where" other words," "other systems," are the only words a man can use, and are never enough. The brilliant stylistic web of Lowry's narration is an equivalent icon of the consul's situation, a tapestry of quotations du­ plicating Firmin's own paralyzed self-consciousness. For, of course, Firmin is also the projection, the monster, of Lowry's own creative self.

If Lowry's consul is a signal casualty ofthe "that-thereness" of the world, Saul Bellow's Herzog, in a complementary way, is crucified in his attempt to intellectualize that materiality, to master it in a total conversion of res extensa into res cogitans, the dragon's corpse into revivified garden.

Bellow's enterprise has always been to locate meaning in the tawdry, to put the life of the cities in touch with the humanistic, philosophical traditions of which the cities are the deformed children. In Herzog he succeeds because his central character is so much, so familiarly, the prey of the absurdities against which he wrestles. If Geoffrey Firmin, an adept of mythology, is destroyed by history-by the inevitable ticking 297

away of the clock-time of his last day alive-Herzog, a student of

history, is frozen to the bone by his yearning for a myth of redemption, penance, and permanence. Firmin's ruined garden is also the ruined garden in which Herzog begins and ends, the hero's gone-to-seed yard in the Berkshires. Herzog desperately tries to maintain an innocence in the face of his career's and civilization's wreckage, and that innocence finally succeeds because it manages to establish itself in a field of irony, of self-doubt and moral decision based upon self-doubt, which is the

distinctive language of American fiction after Bellow. Here is Herzog, at once living his life and writing one of his interminable letters to the

living and dead: I bought a gaudy vest In the Burlington Arcade last winter, and a pair of Swiss beets of the type I see now the VOIage fairies have adopted. Heartlore? Yes, he further wrote, and dressed·ap, too. But my vanity will no longer give me much mUeage and to teU you the truth I'm not even

greatly Impressed with my own tortured heart. It begins to seem another waste of time.

Herzog's letters are a double of, and advance over, the consul's drunken fantasies in Under the Volcano. For they are writing, even if writing in and against the void; and Herzog and Bellow, good Talmudists that they are, understand the value of scripture, even the scripture of the absurd, as the first of human technologies and last, most apocalyptic of human hopes.

Probably no author since Bellow has concentrated more obsessively upon the nature of fiction as writing than has John Barth. Nor has any author more courageously placed himself at the center of the fictive enterprise. For it is Barth's insight that the primal struggle of civilizing myth has become in our age not simply the struggle as narrated, but the struggle of the narrator. With Barth the myth of the dragon ceases to be an over- or undertone of writing, and becomes the subject of the postmodern novel. We may remember here Bloom's comment aboutthe modern poet as Oedipus and his muse as the Sphinx. For Barth's fiction has progressed, from The Sot- Weed Factor on, toward an admission of itself as ineluctable quotation, ineluctably inauthentic, and toward a direct treatment of the story of the hero and the dragon--eventuating, in the astounding Chimera, in a fiction which reestablishes the possibility of creation by asserting that man is the principle of the monstrous against which, at his most creative, he wages war.

298

A venture like Barth's is, of course, fraught with risks, both psychic

and stylistic. And many readers predictably dismissed his penultimate

book, Lost in the Funhouse, as a terminal failureofimagination, a red uction of his powers to the most manic degree of involution. Roughly

the first half of that vol ume, indeed, is involved with chasing down to its last absurdity the idea of the postmodern as "play," as stories within

stories for the sake of stories within stories. But Barth's real genius is to work through that progressive involution to a voice which talks about

important things-life, love, death, "inspiration" -without ignoring the weight of self-consciousness our century has piled atop them. By reinventing the principle of framed narration as the very body of monstrosity, he also humanizes that monstrosity in the difficult sense that is the only sense available to us. The best tale of Funhouse, "Meneleiad," begins fiction all over again by assuming those quotes-within-quotes as the necessary condition of narrative, as Menelaus tries to tell the story of his fateful question to Heleni.e., why she returned to him after the Trojan War. And Helen's response to that question, at the very center of the multiple narrations, is"

•

"

•

"

•

"Love!"

,

"

,

"

, "

At that moment, with the utterance

of the most fragile and civilizing of all fictions, the quotation marks

begin to fall away, Menelaus begins to extricate himself from the nearly suicidal self-consciousness in which he has been trapped.

It is one ofthe great moments of recent fiction. "Love" in inverted commas is the subtlest delusion of the fictivized

mind, but is also the

first impulse of a fully human one. And the triumph of "Meneleiad" continues through Chimera.

The Chimera Bellerophon slew was another of the children of the

dragon, another primal monster; and her name has come to signify dreams, fantasies, the irresponsible and perhaps insane freedom of the imagination. Barth's Chimera. with profound wit, is an exploration of that dual nature of the monstrous. The text is the monstrosity, the final and first artifice in which the self can be located and nurtured. In

"Dunyazadiad," the first ofthe three tales, a genie who looks and talks like John Barth addresses Dunyazade, Scheherazade's younger sister, on the eve of her

marriage to Scheherazade's husband's brother. His

question to her is an appropriate epigraph for contemporary fiction: 299

"All those nights at the foot of that bed, Dunyazade!

You've had the whole literary tradition transmitted to you-and the whole erotic tradition, too!

What are you ...

...

going

to do to entertain him, little sisler? Make love in exciting ways? There are none! Tell him

stories, like Scheherazade? He's heard them all! Dunyazade, Dunyazade! Who can tell your story?"

The brilliance of the passage is in the question; for to ask the question is already to tell Dunyazade's story, that difficult tale of creation and

civilization in spite of secondarity, quotedness, the numbing sense of human inauthenticity. "The key to the treasure is the treasure," Barth

gnomically reiterates throughout "Dunyazadiad": which, in terms of history of postmodernism, may be roughly translated as saying that our sense of loss of a creative tradition, regarded intelligently and creatively enough, can become our creative tradition.

After the overture of "Dunyazadiad," the other two tales of Chi­ mera, "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad," explore the dragon myth and its implications for the nature of writing more explicitly than any previous contemporary fictions. Perseus and Bellerophon, a major and a minor monster-slayer from the infancy of fiction, both live past their great achievements, into middle age, to find that the problems of the monstrous are not soluble by anything as simple as killing. The two tales are, among other things, Bildungsromane: but stories, not of the education of youths but ofthe much more agonized education to be undergone by heroes, writers, and cultures like our own in the embarrassed discovery of their own finitude, their middle age. Perseus must rediscover and love his victim, the Gorgon Medusa-must learn to see the beauty and inevitability of the rockface. And Bellerophon, whose monster-victim gives a title to the book, must make the even more crucial discovery that he-his life, his obsession with "heroic patterns," with archetypes and systems-he is, in the profoundest way, the monster he has slain. This is the discovery that is Barth's most indelible achievement, the discovery that monster and monster-slayer, civilizing hero and the perennial entropy undermining all civilizing quests, are not contradictory but contrary principles, allowing us to reassert values not in spite of but upon the basis of the fictiveness, the sham which we have our

,

found to underlie all human value systems.

The novels of John Gardner carry this difficult humanism to a higher

level of complexity than do Barth's. Gardner structures his work around 300

the intimation of mortality, of the "that-thereness" of the world which may well be the only human impulse for taletelling at all. In his work,

this structuring is the most fully developed "metalanguage" of those romantic visions of inescapable fictiveness whose morphology we have been tracing. From The Resurrection on, the central situation of

Gardner's novels is this: a philosopher realizes that he is going to die.

And the consequent, archetypal plot of his novels becomes the

passionate debate of systems against the knowledge of death, the welter of conflicting metaphysics which, though they do not avail against the primal void, nevertheless illuminate, in their very self-contradiction, the instinctive and terrible duty of the mind to thread and humanize that void, even with lies.

In Grendel it is the voice of the monster himself which speaks, more human, more

familiarly tormented by fear and vision than the

conventional hero who, we know, will slay him. All systems are other to Grendel, and all-the impossibly superhuman Beowulf, the exis­

tentialist Dragon who instructs him in futility, and the ancient scop who awakens him to the melancholy of beauty-simultaneously impel him toward and clarify the abyss which is his end: I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my wUl I know In advance that I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feetfrom the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, Into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, mOl'ing me slowly to my voluntary tumble Into death.

The landscape of Grendel. like the landscape of Barth's best fiction, is that of ventriloquized epic: the narrator assumes, and in assuming,

parodies. the self-confident voice we associate with the certainties of classical epic and the daemonic assertiveness of epic heroes. It is a purification of our fictive language, then, by the antithetical assump­ tion of a narrative speech which implies all the powers our age so deeply lacks.

Gardner's completion and antithesis ofthe Blakean formula with which we began is this: we must create, not a system but a way of

inhabiting the infinity of systems which are our birthright and our curse, or be enslaved-not by another man's system but by the paralytic

consciousness of all systems as other; we must, in other words, locate a 301

fiction which will allow us to utter words like "honor" and even

"courage," though we knew that those words can never appear outside their

inverted commas.

"Honor" and "courage"-and "charity," another word which Gardner reinstates- are rather old-fashioned concepts for the vortex of the contemporary imagination to reveal at its center. But that, of course, is the nature of revolutions: they return, revolve, to their point of

origin, but in a clarified, more dangerous context. Jason and Medeia contains a number of great snakes-not just the serpent-guardian of the Golden Fleece whom Jason and Medeia deceive, but the primal serpents, monstrous originators and annihilators of civilization, here articulated as the myth of Kadmos (Kosmos) and Harmonia, founders of Thebes whose names mean universe and music: King Kadmos-Kosmos, rightly­ loved so well, old legends claim, that after his perfect joy in life-his faultless rule

of soaring Thebes, great golden city where for many centuries

nothing had stirred but the monstrous serpent Kadmos slew­ the gods awarded him power and joy after life. Zeus filled his palace with lightning-bolts, and the well-matched pair was changed to two majestic serpents, now Lady and Lord of all the Dead.

Nothing prospers but the soul, as Gardner has said. But that prosperity itself, mythicized more severely and creatively in Jason and Medeia than in any other contemporary fiction, is implicit with the making and unmaking, resurrection and repeated death, which is the common history of cities, languages, and stories. The serpents, once city-founders and now Lady and Lord ofthe Dead, who breed over the action of Gardner's epic, are complemented by his most archetypal­ perhaps the archetypal-blind man, the Oedipus who inherited the civilization forged by Kadmos and Harmonia and destroyed it through the self-binding fire of his own lucidity.

Gardner's Jason is another monster slayer in middle age, tormented by the noonday devils of declining faith in his own rationality and the nagging sense that his great quest, the voyage of Algo, in fact marked the end of the heroic era and the beginning of a diminished, more difficult and dangerous age of statecraft, moral canniness, measured defeats and measured triumphs. The cataclysmic end of his love for 302

Medeia is, above all, the end of a marriage. of a human world and therefore of the world; but it is also, in its very violence, a reaffirmation of the dignity, even if fictive and earth-breaking, of human love.

Gardner's befuddled narrator, caught between our world and the world of myth we witness along with him, reenacts at every point in his tale the

paradox of the Lord of the Dead, the serpent whose existence makes possible as it cancels our dream of human cities. And, as a book whose language presents itself as a translation of itself-simultaneously its own voice and "another man's" system-Jason andMedeia becomes a metaphor for its own deepest vision. For this language, at once original and" derivative,

"

is an icon of the ancient serpent ouroboros, the

world-snake with its tail in its mouth, the cyclic history which is our

perennial fall into the delusions and accomplishments of human time, human mortality, and human decency.

In the best of contemporary writers, conservative and anti­

apocalyptic as it may seem, the business of writing is still the survival, within the myth of the dragon's corpse, of the myth of the City, of a human world which can absorb even our worst-clearest-visions of Last Things. That this business involves, in Barth, Pynchon, or

Gardner, as much canniness and self-contradiction as it does is the sign, not of its great difficulty only, but of the ongoing vitality and necessity

of the task.

303

Babbitt at the abyss: the social context of postmodem American fiction Gerald Graff

Characteristics of the angry young book: The angry young book should be a good true book

ofafamiliarand reliable pattern. It should itself with human emotions ofstan­ dard issue plus at least one (1) non-standard It emotionfor seasoning and piquancy should have a good true spine to which the pages are attached by sewing and strong glue. and no page shouldfly out of the whole save by prior arrangement. as when the author is especially angry. The same should reflect strong dissatisfaction with. frustration by. and rebellion against tradition and society. concern

....

-Donald Barthelme, "The Angry Young Man" But we mustn 'tforget how quickly the visions ofgenius become the canned goods of

the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler's "Prussian Socialism. "the com­ monplaces of the Wasteland outlook. the cheap mental stimulants ofAlienation. the cant and rant ofpipsqueaks about Inauthen­ ticity and Forlornness.

-Saul Bellow Herzog •

Literary history reflects changes in society. The connection between the historical decline of the realistic novel and the deteriorating confidence of the bourgeoisie as a class is a case in point. T. S. Eliot, in a famous review of Ulysses in 1923, theorized about the connection when he speculated that the narrative method of the realistic novel, which had been adequate for dealing with the relatively coherent society of the nineteenth century, was useless as a means of giving order to the 305

TriQuarterly

chaotic, fragmented reality of the twentieth, what he called "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary

history." In speaking ofthe obsolescence of fictional realism, Eliot was declaring the obsolescence of the world-view of liberal bourgeois individ ualism, with its optimistic belief in progress and the rational intelligibility of experience.

Eliot went on to say that Joyce, in abandoning "the narrative method" of realism and adopting what he called' 'the mythical method" -that is, "the manipulation of a continuous parallel be­ tween contemporaneity and antiquity" -had taken "a step toward making the modem world possible for art." Henceforth, Eliot implied, a novelist interested in seriously coming to terms with the modem world would have to abandon realism and take up the mythical method. This prediction has been validated to a large extent. Subsequent criticism has shown in detail how modernist fiction self-consciously over­ turns the conventions of bourgeois realism, thus registering in its form as well as its content a criticism of the bourgeois social order and its world-view. Modernist fiction radically disrupts the linear flow ofnar­ rative, frustrates expectations about the unity and coherence of human "character" and the cause-and-effect continuity ofits "development," and calls into question, by means of ironic and ambiguous juxta­ positions, the universalizable moral and philosophical "meaning" of literary action. Often there is a tone of epistemological self-mockery­ again a symptom of declining bourgeois values-for its target, the target of all these devices, finally, is the naive and pretentious epistemo­ logical sobriety of bourgeois rationality.

Since World War II, however, it has seemed necessary to speak of a "postmodern" mode of fiction, one which departs not only from realistic conventions but from modernist ones as well. In retrospect, I think it is now possible to say that it took postmodern fiction to carry to

its logical extreme the break with traditional realism which critics like Eliot ascribed to modernist fiction but which modernist fiction had

actually executed only in part. Indeed, one of the strengths of modernist fiction was that it could often incorporate within its own structures much of the bourgeois realism which it was undermining. To put it another way, modernist fiction, except in a few instances, did not 306

actually effect the total subjectivization and privatization of human experience called for by certain modernist theories which defined literature as an expression of inward "consciousness" set over against the rational discourse of the public, objective world. By contrast, postmodern fiction, which tends to carry the logic of such modernist theories to their limit, has often been weakened by its inability or refusal to retain any moorings in social reality. For once it is permitted to slip those moorings, the fictional imagination, in Robert Alter's words, tends to" go slack." It indulges in the trivializing freedom of infinite fabulation, trivializing in that the writer is not taken seriously enough to be held to verifiable standards of truth. Though apparently a sign of high respect for literature, the deference we extend to the writer's "vision," our tendency to grantthe creative writer his donnee (in a far more permissive sense than Henry James had in mind in laying down this dictum), is a form of indirect condescension, presupposing that it can make no real difference to anybodywhatthe writer says, or whether he adopts this vision of life rather than that. This critical permissive­ ness, however, has the short-run virtue of protecting types offiction whose lack of serious intellectual content would be otherwise all too obvious to everybody. If the novel has been floundering in the postwar

decades (and I believe it has been), one reason may be that novelists have simply not had much of importance to say about the way we live now, a deficiency which cannot be

indefinitely concealed by the theory

that fiction has no obligation to offer such statements. If this deficiency

exists, then one reason for it may be that in the kind of mass society which has grown up in the last three decades, our personal relation­

ships, public val ues, and the connections between the two have become so

disoriented, scrambled, and confused that writers, as well as

everyone else, have found it peculiarly difficult to arrive at clear,

coherent, and convincing generalizations.

Fiction in relation to bourgeois society It is one thing to reject bourgeois values, as modernist novelists often

did, and another thing to come on the scene when these values have been

thoroughly eroded that it is unnecessary and pointless to reject them-the position I take to be the starting point of postmodern fiction. so

307

If modernist writers aimed at unmasking the hypocritical illusion of the

bourgeois belief in the material and moral progress of civilization, postmodernist writers begin at a point after this myth has been exploded and such demolition is needless-though a certain number of writers continue, anachronistically, to practice such demolition, as if unable to break their dependency on an ingrained literary habit. Whereas modernist fiction presupposed the solid existence of its bourgeois adversary and the clear-cut determinacy of that adversary's ideology, for postmodernist fiction no adversary presents itself in so coherent and usable a form. The social context of modernist fiction was a bourgeoisie whose values still approximated the nineteenth-century model, stressing the prosaic moral austerities and the production-oriented disciplines of the Protestant ethic and the conventional respectability idealized by Victorianism and the American genteel tradition. The social context of postmodernist fiction is an amorphous mass society that has lost contact with these earlier traditions and beliefs.

This mass society presents nothing approximating the stubborn resistance to cultural innovation, personal freedom, and creative, individual self-definition which had marked earlier bourgeois society and had energized both the realistic and the modernist novel, and therefore nothing like the sharply dramatic model of social struggle upon which the novelistic presentation of conflict may be founded. In

bourgeois realist fiction, the hero makes his way through the resisting densities of a many-tiered social order, in search of fortune and success within it; in modernist fiction, the hero's struggle is more often for the survival of his individual autonomy against the social order, now seen as the mere dead weight of a decadent past. The social order and its ideology, nevertheless, are amply and solidly present as a coherent resisting force, the dialectical setting against which individual character is formed. Such modernist novels as The Counterfeiters, The Trial, and The Man Without Qualities contain more than a residue of social realism: they present the rich and ponderous intricacy of a bourgeois society seen in process of disintegration but nevertheless solid and specific enough to furnish the material of drama.'

In contrast, the type of bourgeois society which has emerged since the end of World War I I, for all the immense oppressive weight of its 308

technological power and bureaucratic organization, is a considerably more elusive and shadowy entity. It is a society marked by mass boredom, apathy, and passivity, which seek relief in hedonistic consumption, and by a flabby end-of-ideology tolerance in its official attitudes. As such it does not present the type of sharp resistance requisite for individual self-definition. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that censorship and repression would be desirable, but rather that the tolerance of diverse viewpoints in contemporary society is primarily a reflection of contempt for ideas, which are seen as impotent, and not of a disposition to take them seriously. Though there is some truth to the allegations of certain social critics that this society "processes" and "indoctrinates" individuals, the typical product ofthis processing is not the robot-like conformist of of anti-utopian science fiction and radical folklore, but a diffuse, unfocused, protean self which cannot define issues in any determinate way. A confused self, after all, is as good as an

ideologically conforming self for the purposes of the ruling class, though the situation is complicated by the fact that the "ruling class" itself often shares in the confusion. In contemporary society, if one excepts the oppressed racial minorities, the obstacle to individual freedom is not the stifling weight of inherited institutions and beliefs-an obstacle which may have an energizing effect-but the anomie meaninglessness and triviality of freedom itself, which is unable to locate any bearings amid the incoherent and apparently aimless massiveness of society. (Even the oppression of minorities is increasingly a purely economic affair-a fact which makes it no more bearable, of course-without any particular ideological rationalization.

The language and symbolic motifs of the black ghetto were long ago absorbed by advertising and popular entertainment.) Despite all the talk about "future shock," it is actually the surprising absence of shock, the amiable passivity in the face of change which characterizes contemporary society.

Gide, Kafka, Musil, and other writers of the modernist generation had the advantage of being able to take for granted what it was that they were opposed to. The opinions, values, institutions, and aspirations of bourgeois society were sufficiently well defined so that the representation of external setting, action, and manners could serve as a 309

symbolic or typological shorthand for exemplary psychological, social, and historical conflicts. This holds true, too, for American fiction of

that period. For example, when Nick Carraway, in his climactic

conversation with Gatsby, says, "They're a rotten crowd.

You're worth more than the whole damn bunch put together," Fitzgerald and .

..

we know who

"they" are--not only Tom and Daisy Buchanan but the whole class of spoiled wealth the manners of which they reflect. As Irving Howe points out, writers of Fitzgerald's generation could take for granted, without necessarily being highly aware of them, "various theories concerning capitalism, the city, and modern industrial society.

These ideas had so thoroughly penetrated the consciousness of thinking men, and even the folklore of the masses, that the novelists could count on them without necessarily being able to specify or elaborate them." These explanatory theories about the nature of society, as Howe says, are what enable the novel to achieve that "symbolic compression of incident" through which it translates setting and action into a typification of society at large. But Howe notes that with the advent of postwar mass society such theories" are no longer quite so available as they were a few decades ago." As it becomes more difficult to give representative social significance to the presentation of individual character and action, the tendency for a SUbjectivistic or solipsistic consciousness to take over the novel's point of view is all the .

.

.

greater.

2

This tendency toward subjectivistic distortion and hence the evanescence of the

objective social world from the novel was widely

noted by critical analysts of modernist fiction. Both the defenders and attackers of this tendency, falling prey to the error of taking modernist esthetic propaganda too literally, often exaggerated the anti- realistic

character of modernist fiction. They ignored the fact that the subjec­

tivization of experience in this fiction was usually held in check not only by what Eliot calls' 'the mythical method" of construction and

by various devices of so-called "spatial form," but also by the retention of a realism of setting. Thus Georg Lukacs, in Realism in Our Time, equates the "ideology of modernism" with the reduction of experience

charge which applies more accurately to modernist literary theory than to its practice. Lukacs' own examples reveal the shortcomings of his argument. He says, for to SUbjectivity and' 'psychopathology,"

310

a

instance, that Ulrich, the hero of TheMan Without Qualities ,aims by his own admission "to abolish

qualities,'

"

reality," "subjective existence, 'without

being "the complement of the negation of outward reality."

Lukacs quotes Musil's statement: "I have not, I must insist, written a historical novel. I am not concerned with actual events

interested

...

in what one might call the

....

I am

ghostly aspect of reality." It is

surprising, though, to turn to the novel itself and find how much less

"ghostly" it is than later "anti-novels" motivated by the same anti-realist esthetic theory. In the novel itself, Vienna, "the ancient

capital and imperial city," is as much a dominating presence as is the London or Paris of nineteenth-century realistic novels-though, in contrast to them, it is presented as a city whose physical and spiritual coherence are in process of disintegration. The confused dynamism and discontinuity of the postbourgeois city, that which is to dominate the imagination of later writers, has at this point in history not yet displaced the containing background of historical tradition which it plays against-as Musil's imagery suggests: So no special significance should be attached to the name of the city. Like aU big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change,sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and

affairs, and fathomless points of sUence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembled a

seething, bubbling flald In a vessel consisdng of the solid material of bulldlngs, laws, regulations, and historical traditions.

Literally, the "solid material" of traditional social order is still sufficient in this novel to contain the irrational, seething fluid of discord and dislocation which will soon burst it asunder. I do not mean to force Musil's novel into the category of realism, but rather to

point representation in the process of dramatizing its departure from realism-quite a different procedure from that of the postmodernist writer, who begins at a point beyond realism. In the one case, the presentation of change has a background of continuity which lends change significance; in the other, change appears only against the unresisting background of earlier change, and dialectical meaning is lost.

The thesis I have developed here-=and which I hope to extend further in the remainder of this essay-was applied to American fiction in the late fifties and early sixties by critics such as Lionel Trilling, Richard out that it is a type of novel which includes realistic

311

Chase, Alfred Kazin, John W. Aldridge, and Irving Howe, from whose 1959 essay, "Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction," I have already

quoted. It was persistently noted by these critics that in much of the best fiction of the fifties, society seemed to have become so abstract, remote, and incoherent that writers were finding it particularly difficult to delineate highly individual characters. Characters in fiction seemed increasingly to inhabit a kind of narcissistic isolation (Holden Caulfield, the Invisible Man), totally estranged from society, or else they had to strain to stimulate artificially situations of conflict and adventure that their society had failed to provide (Sal Paradise, Augie March, Henderson). To quote Howe once more, "the theme of personal

identity, if it is to take on fictional substance, needs some kind of placement, a setting in the world of practical affairs. And it is here that the postmodern novelists ran into serious troubles: the connection between subject and setting cannot always be made, and the 'individual' oftheir novels, because he lacks social definition and is sometimes a creature of literary or ideological fiat, tends to be not very

individualized." Alfred Kazin, in an essay published in 1958 entitled

"Psychoanalysis and Literary Culture Today," had made a similar point. Writers like John Osborne, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer, Kazin said, seemed to strain to fmd objects adequate to their need for dramatic and ennobling intensities of feeling. Their writing expressed not anger so much as a groping for some "cause to be angry about," or, in Mailer's case, "something to be revolutionary about." In Mailer's essay, "The White Negro," Kazin comments, there is a forced attempt to reimagine the conditions and the feeling of actual social struggle by an "adaptation to the hipster of the myth of the proletariat." A consequence ofthis is the glorification of hoodlum violence as one of the last forms of" daring the unknown. In all this violence, Kazin says, "nothing is really taking place except theoretically Nothing here is taken from the real life of struggle, from life as actual conflict; it is an attempt to impose a dramatic and even noble sig­ nificance on events that have not genuinely brought it forth." This quality of forced melodrama-of searching out pretexts for drama­ tizing the self in heroic and large actions, actions that justify language of heightened intensity-is found, too, in later works such as Burroughs' NakedLunch (1959), Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's "

.

.

.

312

.

Nest (1962), and Mailer's An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (196 7). The apparent social iconoclasm of these works is at

base a species of nostalgia-for a period in which the presentation of

conflict between a heroic individual and a hostile, persecuting

bourgeoisie corresponded roughly to social fact. If one ignored the history of the last twenty- five years and drew one's conclusions strictly from a reading of these (often best-selling and highly popular) works, one would be misled into thinking that the reciprocal enmity between the creative and conventional factions of society were still as intense as ever.

Nonnan Maller: scatology as sociology

Mailer's case seems particularly symptomatic, since in the sixties he was

ambitiously trying to make his fiction a testing ground of the historical and social forces of his age. What obstructed this effort was Mailer's

inability to arrive at an analysis of history or society that went beyond crude schematization or mere confusion. On the one hand, Mailer reduced contemporary history to an apocalyptic myth of liberation,

counterposing the hipster and the square, the id and the rational consciousness, the "existential" individual and the plastic, life-denying power of "Technologyland." The content of the social criticism contained in this scheme was summed up in Mailer's statement, in

Advertisements forMyself (1959): "The shits are killing us."

Transferred to the novels, this simplistic diagnosis became the principle of characterization of such corporate establishment figures as D. J.' s

"asshole" father, Rusty, and his "medium asshole" associates in Why Are We in Vietnam? Scatology, in other words, tried to do the work of

sociology. On the other hand, the element of schematic moralism in Mailer's fiction-as in that of Kerouac and Burroughs-was confused, though not really mitigated, by the frequent expression of a diffuse, semi-mystical enthusiasm over the vibrating, electrokinetic dynamisms of technological society itself. Thus Mailer's point of view was simultaneously remote from the actual society which he sought to understand and unable to separate itself from the confused processes of that society.

"Social communication is the doom of every truly felt thought," Mailer writes in Advertisementsfor Myself. In this all too 313

quintessentially American sentence--which also epitomizes the antinomian impulse in the modernist esthetic-Mailer rationalizes the subjectivistic turn of his own novels ofthe sixties, novels which reject conventional novelistic typology in favor of privately cooked-up languages of obscenity and personal voodoo. Mailer's reasoning is worth looking into: To communicate socially (as eppesed to communicating penonally or humanly) mean. that one must

accept the sluggish fictions of IOClety for at least nine-tenths of one'. expression In

order to present deceptively the remaining tenth which may be new

...•

To communicate socially Is to communicate by way of the masll-medla-movies, radio,

television, advertising, newspapers, best-selling novels, etc.-which is to communicate by way of the largest and most debased common denominator-which in tum is equivalent to communicating very little, for procedurally one becomes part of a machine which Is

antithetical to one's individual existence. Antithetical, I say, because thli machine attempts to direct the fortunes of men by the obsolete and hence Impractical results of the past.

Two striking reductions are accomplished in this statement: first, all

"social communication" is made synonymous with corrupt and dishonest modes of manipulation, so that, logically, there ceases to be any legitimate use for collective symbols; second, the point of view of the mass media and the

technological bureaucracies is represented as a form of traditionalism-as if this point of view were not in its own way a mode of radical revolt against the inherited forms of the past.' Mailer's repudiation of the common codes of "social communication," which he likes to represent as a monolithic and totalitarian ideology of "Technologyland," is actually a symptom of the breakdown of these public codes, which no longer connect individuals and groups through a common body of assumptions. Both the collective language and the collective past have disintegrated into a form of cant, a development which leaves the writer no choice but to improvise a private typology, in Mailer's case a typology of obscenity. Again, it is a case of one of the central themes of literary modernism being carried by a postmodem writer to extremes not usually reached by its initiators," In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer writes that obscenities are "our human body, and so poor debased gutturals for the magical parts of the they are basic communication, for they awake, no matter how uneasily, many of the questions, riddles, aches and pleasures which surround the enigma of life." Obscenities, in other words, having been protected by taboos from the contamination that results from general 314

social use, remain an

uncorrupted way of speaking about what Mailer calls' 'the mysterious dualities of our mysterious universe," a phrase

suggestive of the vague Manichaean theology which is never far from the surface of his writing. How it all works out in fiction is seen in An American Dream, particularly in the scene in which the protagonist Rojack imagines his alternating penetrations of the vagina and anus of the maid Ruta as an "existential" encounter with the dualism of Heaven and Hell. Mailer's attempt to elevate Ruta's private parts into symbols of the metaphysical axes of reality results in one of the more memorable

examples of unintentional comedy in American literature, and in the process illustrates the difficulty a writer encounters when he attempts to make a wholly private typology take the place of a plausible system of concepts. This difficulty plagues the novel's conclusion. There Rojack is made to sense, through the purely telepathic intuition that is his normal means of receiving information throughout the novel, that only by making three circuits around the parapet of the penthouse apartment of Kelly, his antagonist and millionaire representative of the public world of institutions, can he prevent the death, elsewhere in the city, of his lover Cherry. Rojack fails to make the three circuits and Cherry, subsequently, is found dead. Nothing in nature or previously established convention connects the act of walking a parapet with the preservation ofthe life of a mistress, which is to say there is no connection between Rojack's actions and the public significance of these actions except the arbitrary circumstance that the two things happened to come together in the author's mind. But such arbitrariness of association follows from the rejection of "social communication," which suspends all preestablished assumptions about how things are connected and what follows from what. Rojackconceives his actions here as a defiance of Kelly and all that his type stands for, but Kelly has no awareness of the significance of this defiance and can have none, since, by definition, the authenticity of Rojack's actions depends on their remaining private in their significance, unassimilable within any publicly sharable system. The projection of the writer's most arbitrary subjective fantasies upon the world-a kind of secularized antinomian sainthood---compensates for the lack of a convincing vision of how things actually connect in that world.

The relative nonexistence of a social dimension in American fiction 315

has. of course, been a perennial theme of American criticism-and a source of scandal and fascination for

European observers. From

Cooper and James down to Lawrence and more recent critics, it has been noted that the most powerful strain of the American imagination has tended away from realism toward melodramatic romance and Gothic

allegory, away from the treatment of individual characters within the context of social conventions and institutions and toward the

concentration on heightened subjective states often bordering on

psychopathology, toward what Richard Chase calls' 'radical forms of alienation. contradiction, and disorder." One need hardly reject this theory of the' 'romance" character of the most potent tradition of American fiction in proposing certain qualifications of it. Even in the chief works of this romance tradition-Cooper's

Leatherstocking

novels, TheScarletLetter. TheBlithedaleRomance. Moby-Dick.

Huckleberry Finn, The Sun Also Rises, The Bear�ertain assumptions about established American society are taken for granted: its

materialism, utilitarianism, and moralistic rigidity. It is one thing to dramatize characters in states of radical alienation from society, thus

presupposing a locatable center with which connections have been broken, and another to enter a situation in which the center has been so

fragmented by ideological and bureaucratic diffusion that alienation ceases to be a precise description.

In Mailer's journalistic works, which have drawn his energies away from fiction since the late sixties, many of these problems persist. In TheArmies of the Night, the most successful of these works, Mailer gets around them by openly acknowledging confusion and building this acknowledgment into the texture of the work. Instead of the imposition of dualistic myths-as in the improbable antithesis of "honestly" violent Chicago versus "plastic" Miami Beach, which organizes Miami and the Siege of Chicago, or the hoked up theories of schizophrenia in Marilyn�oherence in Armies of the Night is attained through the confessed bewilderment of the point of view of the observer, a device reminiscent of the Education of Henry Adams.

-

Alienation, Inc.: the community of the alienated self In summary, then, novelists after World War II found difficulties in

adjusting their perspectives to a society which was not so much 316

antagonistic to their visions as bored and indifferent, a diffuse, pro­ tean, blandly yielding mass society whose often maddening

complacency concealed its uncertainty about its beliefs and its appre­ hensions about its future. By the beginning of the sixties, however, a new phase of development had begun: the passivity and anomie loneliness of the fifties had crystallized, become something more self-conscious and, in some respects, more defined and distinct. To be

lonely in the fifties-as those who came to maturity in the decade will recall-meant merely to suffer from a personal problem. In the sixties, though, to be lonely meant being" alienated." This constituted a liberating advance in one respect, for the discovery that one's problems could be traced to deficiencies in the social process might alleviate much of one's personal guilt and prepare the way for positive action. But the new self-consciousness about one's alienation, "growing up absurd," and so forth, could also take unattractive forms, forms which invested alienation with an element of self-dramatization or even self­

congratulation. The honest pathos of the genuine sufferer might give way to the strident theatrics of the professional victim. In the fifties, though sociological writers might describe disaffiliated youths of the period as a Lonely Crowd, the actual members of this group had no awareness of figuring in a significant social tendency, and certainly saw no charm in the fact. The "rebel without a cause" stereotype symbolized

by James Dean and Elvis Presley did lend a certain heroism to the aimlessness of fifties' youth, but it was ahistorical, apolitical, and nonideological. In the sixties, bourgeois alienation ceased being a mere predicament, prosaically coped with as best one could, and became a historically conscious style, a mode of ideological and moral symbolism, the targets of which were traditional "bourgeois values" themselves, as if these values were still fully intact.

Philip Rieff has written of' 'the triumph of the therapeutic" social type over the legendary "inner-directed" individualist in the moral mythology of modern Western society. This therapeutic social type reconceives the older bourgeois melodrama, in which life was seen as a struggle to master nature and the disciplines of work and morality and toemulate public models of authority and achievement, in terms of a new melodrama which sees life as a struggle for private "self-realiza­ tion," unique "identity," and "meaningful" personal relations.

317

"Role-playing" behavior, disapproved of when predetermined by fixed bourgeois social forms, is viewed as a form of authentic liberation when dictated by spontaneous impulse. Moral sensitivity-seen as the antit hesis of bourgeois insensitivity-comes to be meas ured by one's consciousness that one has "problems," and by one's willingness to be "open" about them with others. One's selfhood is understood as a problem, if not as a grievance, a condition of acute vulnerability which is defenseless against even the slightest disturbance and thus requires constant attention, ministration, and" caring." The enemy is not so much external society as the socially ind uced repressions and "hangups" which frustrate one's attempts to be wholly open. A pathetic groping for "warmth" in the outer world tends to become the highest imaginable ideal of collective enterprise. The triumph of the therapeutic, in short, might be described as the Lonely Crowd come to self-consciousness.

It is a mere logical step from the wronged and victimized self­

conception of the therapeutic type, with his problems, to the more optimistic and often aggressively self-assertive styles of "radical therapy." Encounter-group culture-a kind of collective solipsism­ comes to the rescue of the solipsism of the individual. The modest goals of "self-realization" and "interpersonal relating" are given utopian and Dionysian reformulations, and the Lonely Crowd, undergoing yet another change of costume, reemerges as an ecstatic tribal community. The retreat into private SUbjectivity is redescribed as a form of visionary and apocalyptic "transcendence." Ideas which, in a more innocent period of American history, had been couched in the naive rhetoric of self-help and positive thinking are repackaged in chic, "existential" brands and trimmed up with Eros and myth, somewhat as if William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Wilhelm Reich had entered into partnership with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The radical therapies do little more than lend a euphemistic coloration to the philosophy and

psychology of alienation, since they all presuppose an external world that is so irrational, menacing, and unmanageable that the private self becomes the only area of experience subject to one's control.

The objective worsening of many of the crises of advanced society is sufficient explanation for the spread of alienation in bourgeois culture.

The particular ideological forms this alienation has recently taken, 11R

however, can only be explained as an effect of mass ed ucation and its

impact on the mass media, resulting in the dissemination of the art, literature, social thought, and analytical vocabulary of modernist culture. Academic literary criticism has played an influential role in this process. Lionel Trilling, in an essay' 'On the Teaching of Modem Literature" in Beyond Culture, notes the surprising ease with which transactions with the Abyss have been entered into by critics, teachers, and students in the last two decades. In Making It, Norman Podhoretz, recalling a time when he had been contributing to Partisan Review, tells of being asked by a friend ifit were true, as apparently rumored, that the offices of that journal were equipped with special typewriters' 'with entire words like 'alienation' stamped on each key."

The fact that some people reduce the modernist diagnosis of alienation to slogans does not, of course, destroy the possibility of using the terms precisely. Alienation from work, institutions, the past, a coherent world -view, and one's true selfhood is a genuine and serious problem, but the free and easy use of this concept as a slogan trivializes 5

the disease itself. The melodrama of alienated modem man in the throes of his quest for identity and meaning against the experience of

nothingness becomes almost a consoling mythology: the Middle Ages had the Church, the Renaissance had the great chain of being, the eighteenth century had reason, and we have alienation-and the death of God the Absurd, and the rest ofit. Many people who continue to pursue money, jobs, power, and prestige as if these things not only had objective existence but were important have begun to observe routinely that life is meaningless and that reality is no more than a set of "fictions" invented by the SUbjective mind.

But contemporary society not only popularizes the ideologies of modernist alienation; to an increasing extent it subsidizes and invests its capital in them. As Saul Bellow's Herzog observes, people have begun "touting the Void as if it were so much salable real estate" -a statement rendered literally true by the ready marketability of the literature, entertainment, and symbolic appurtenances supportive of the innumerable emergent" alternate life-styles." Nothing is more revealing of the ideological adaptability of the contemporary ruling ,

classes than the fact that a Nietzschean "transvaluation of values" should have taken place within many of our institutions to the 319

commercial disadvantage of practically nobody. It was Joseph

Schumpeter, in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), who suggested that such a turn of events followed the logic of bourgeois capitalism itself. "Unlike any other type of society," Schum peter wrote, "capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest."

Schumpeter's prediction that this process would eventually do away with capitalism now seems more problematical. A formidable

conglomerate of publicists, theoreticians, musicians, bards, prophets, therapists, mystagogues, sexualogues, and ideological dieticians and haberdashers has formed a kind of alienation industry, supported by the expanding segment of society which predicates its very sense of community on the type of "disinherited mind" that was once the monopoly of the antagonists of bourgeois society. The success of this industry testifies to the ability of modern capitalism to profiteer off the very psychopathology that it brings about.

From shock to schlock: the decline of the new

The social context of postmodern fiction, then, is a bourgeois society which by the end of World War II had become alienated from its

earlier traditions, and which in the sixties and seventies has absorbed and commercialized the self-consciously alienated ideologies, rhetorics, and personal styles of literary and cultural modernism. These

developments, which have dissolved the basis of the old antagonism between bourgeois society and the adversary culture of modernism, place literary and artistic intellectuals in a situation for which little in their background and training prepares them. For the consciousness of all modem art is shaped by the avant-garde "tradition of the new," which, as analysts such as Harold Rosenberg and Renato Poggioli have pointed out, presupposes in its very definition a dialectical opposition with bourgeois society. Vulgarized and turned into a commodity, the radical world-view of the avant-garde loses its critical power and is reduced to triviality. As Irving Howe says, in a book significantly entitled Decline of the New, "alienation has been transformed from a serious and revolutionary concept into a motif of mass culture, and the content of modernism into the decor of kitsch."

6

It is not simply that the bourgeoisie has lost the capacity to be 320

shocked, so that redoubled attempts at provocation and epatant la

bourgeoisie are frustrated by the instantaneous popularity and emulation which greets them, the degree of the popularity being roughly proportional to the outrageousness of the provocation. For exhibi­ tionistic provocation is only the most superficial manifestation of the avant -garde spirit, of marginal importance both esthetically and politically. The essence of the avant-garde esthetic is a refusal of the entire bourgeois view of reality, epitomized by the subject-object para­ digm of rationalist epistemology. This paradigm-often somewhat unfairly equated with amoral technological manipulation-is thought to presuppose a passive "mimetic" or "representational" relationship of mind to reality and art to life; it is seen as contributing to the red uction of man to a passive instrumentality at the sacrifice of his individual wholeness and authenticity. The avant-garde esthetic, whether it manifests itself as a mandarin formalism consecrated to a

religion of high art and tradition or as a surrealistic assault on esthetic form, art, and culture, asserts the creative autonomy of consciousness

against the bourgeois reality principle. It is this revolt in the name of the autonomy of consciousness against the material weight of bourgeois society which underlies the injunction to "make it new" -an injunction which entails a permanent alienation of consciousness from any fixed

position and from all previous modes of consciousness and which leads to the irrationalism, SUbjectivism, and worship of pure dynamism or "energy" that mark numerous manifestations of modernist art. The question today is whether making it new in this sense has any justi­ fication now that it seems to represent less a critical departure from the state of existing society than a mere reflecting mirror of it.

In short, the myth of the artist and the philistine, as it has existed in Western culture and popular folklore since the romantic period, seems increasingly irrelevant to reality. Indeed, there was always a certain element of unreality in this opposition: concealed by the hostility, there were structural resemblances between what Renato Poggioli calls the "scientificism" of some avant-garde thought-its worship of dynamism, process, and energy-and the scientific-progressive outlook of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, there was agreement between the romantic devotee of art and his philistine detractor about the nature of the artist, who was defined as a special kind of person, one who sees the 7

321

world in a unique way. Though most early romantic thinkers con­

ceived artistic genius democratically-that is, as an expression of the possibilities of all mankind-the doctrine of creative genius in­

creasingly tended toward the elevation of eccentricity. Though esthetes and philistines at the end of the century disagreed in the valu­ ation they placed on art, they agreed on the assumption that artists are deviant, perhaps even anti-social, beings whose visions have little relation to common sense. This conception of the artist, even when its heroic quality is kept alive by philistine persecution, betrays a certain condescension on the side of the philistines and a certain self-deception on the side of the artistic intellectuals. The latter, in defining art as an" autonomous" activity, accede to an idea of art which, however much it may be couched in tones of defiance, relegates art to a highly marginal social position. With the transformation of old fashioned philistinism into the contemporary veneration of artists as celebrities, these once latent elements of condescension and self-deception become more obvious. The artist is expected to be colorfully mad or eccentric in outlook and personal behavior, while the tolerance by society at large of various quasi-esthetic styles of "revolutionary" defiance becomes a means of pacifying the dissatisfied. In this context, the continued repetition, in contemporary literature and art, of the myth of the artist versus the philistine assumes a peculiar air of unreality. This unreality is caught by one of Donald Barthelme's characters: "Probably you are walking with your husband in SoRo, seeing what the new artists are refusing to do there, in their quest for a scratch to start from."

-

8

Postmodem satire: the solemnity of complaint

But restatements of the myth of the victimization of the artist, either in

the form of hyperbolic melodrama or of kitsch. are not the only literary

by-products of the recent changes in bourgeois society. As the democratization of ideologies of alienation has proceeded, certain patterns have begun to articulate themselves more clearly. Something approximating the type of enabling theoretical idea of society, which, as Howe points out, has been largely unavailable since the collapse of traditional bourgeois society, has begun to cohere. Intrinsically it is a theoretical idea which makes for comedy rather than high seriousness, social farce and caricature rather than documentary realism. For 322

viewed from a certain angle. the spectacle of a bourgeoisie equipped with ideologies devised by the spiritual rebels and aristocrats of

modernist art and literature, a bourgeoisie self-absorbed and nurturing an acute consciousness of

psychological grievance and victimization, is

ripe topic for satire. A group of novelists as diverse in outlook and method as Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Philip Roth, John Barth, and Stanley Elkin have taken' 'the solemnity of complaint," in Bellow's phrase, as their special satiric target. Because their satiric perspective is informed by a coherent historical vision of the bourgeoisification of a

modernist alienation, these writers are able to achieve a type of fiction which incorporates postmodern self-consciousness while transcending

postmodern SUbjectivism.

To see "self-conscious" novelists such as Barthelme and Barth as

social satirists requires a word of explanation. The possibility of social reference in such fiction is often overlooked by its critical analysts and

apologists, many of whom are inclined to see sociological content as inherently antithetical to art and constricting to creativity. But the theoretical opposition between the self-referential autonomy of art and the objective social world is itself one of those hangovers from modernist literary propaganda which, I submit, needs to be called into question. A work like Barth's Giles Goat-Boy is simultaneously self-conscious anti-realism in method and social satire in effect.

Indeed, this vastly overdone work might be regarded as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of both-a fantasy in which the entire universe is

imagined as a university campus, the inhabitants of which are mostly self-conscious, troubled intellectuals. Barthelme's Snow White, in my view a more successful example of this new mode, illustrates this fusion of self-reflexive structure with satiric statement.

Snow White is commonly seen as a kind of pop Americanization of the French nouveau roman-"a book about language," Albert

Guerard, Jr., has called it." But this work might be more profitably

compared with works by Sinclair Lewis than those by Alain Robbe-Grillet. For Snow White is, in many respects, Babbitt brought up to date for an age of bourgeois alienation and self-consciousness.

Barthelme's parody of the jargons of psychology, esthetics,

educationese, political and cultural radicalism, and existentialism fulfills a satiric function comparable to Lewis' parody of the language 323

of realtors, patriots, and civic boosters. Lewis' satire on moralistic

versifying-the poetaster "Chum" Frink-is matched by Barthelme's parodic weaving of quotations throughout his novel from such somber modernist writers as Kierkegaard, Eliot, Malcolm Lowry, and others, whose anguish today seems almost as pervasive as the optimistic pieties of Edgar Guest had been in the twenties. Snow White's seven hapless suitors are self-estranged Babbitts: "Whereas once we were simple bourgeois who knew what to do," they reflect together at one point, "now we are complex bourgeois who are at a loss. We do not like this complexity. We circle it wearily, prodding it from time to time with a shopkeeper's forefinger: What is it? Is it, perhaps, badforbusiness?"

What has altered everything for the seven is their having encountered the personified Spirit of Alienation herself, Snow White, the woman who can find no heroes in her life (only "prince-figures"), who is bored by everything, most of all her own boredom ("Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!"), and who is

unable to discover any "meaningful role." A chapter listing Snow White's college courses provides some clue to the origin of her

condition: Beaver College is where she got her education. She studied Modem Woman. Her Privileges and Responsibilies: the nature and nurture of women and what they stand for, in evolution and in history. including householding, upbringing, peace-keeping, bealing and devotion, and how these contribute to the rehumanizing of today's world. Then she studied Classical Guitar I. utilizing the methods and techniques of Sor, Tarrega, Sego\'ia, etc. Then she studied English Romantic Poets II: Shelley, Byron, Keats. Then sbe studied Theoretical Foundations ofPsychology: mind, consciousness, unconscious mind, personality, tbe self, interpersonal relations, psychosexual norms, social games, groups, adjustment, conflict, Then she studied Personal authority, individuation, integration and mental health Resources I and II: self-evaluation, developing the courage to respond tothe environment, opening and using the mind, indi\'idual experience, training, the use of time, mature re­ definition of goals, action projects ....

....

The irony of this jargon, the lingua franca of modish alienation, is that

the more elaborate and complicated it becomes, the more it contributes to the disabling self-consciousness and self-estrangement it is supposed

to explain and help us overcome. The self-parodic form of Snow White as a

whole, in which ostentatiously "literary" language is used to tell the

story as a means of ridiculing the pretensions of literary comm unica­ tion, is finally a form of cultural statement: it emphasizes the dis­ sociation which has set in between genuine feelings of alienation and 324

the fashionable

literary and cultural languages which pretend to explain them. As Dan, one of the seven suitors, "analogies [i.e., languages] says,

break down,

...

but the way I feel remains."

In this type of self-conscious fiction, there is an inversion not only of

the formal and structural conventions of novelistic realism, but,

concomitant with this, of assumptions about social behavior, about the

relationship between class or occupation and style and ideology, which had been presupposed by those conventions. The key device by which

this inversion is dramatized is the representation, often comically

exaggerated, of characters belonging to prosaic occupations as self-conscious sufferers from esoteric forms of angst. This device, the

principle on which Snow White and her suitors are created, is employed to even more elaborate effect in Barthelme's short story" A Shower of Gold" (collected in Come Back, Dr. Caligari), which presents the more menacing possibilities of a newly alienated bourgeoisie. Significantly, the story inverts the conventional situation in which a struggling young artist comes in conflict with an unsympathetic mass public. The conflict remains, but the characteristics of the antagonists have been transposed. It is the public which burns for discussion of the Existential Crisis of Modern Man-discussion from which the artist feels he must flee in order to save his sanity as well as his art. "Everybody knows the

language but me," says the artist, Peterson, when his barber, "a man named Kitchen who was also a lay analyst and the author of four books titled The Decision toBe ," lectures him in the barber's chair about J- Thou relationships, Pascal, Nietzsche, and the problem of Self and

Other. He concludes by advising Peterson that what he really needs is "to break out of the hell of solipsism. How about a little more off the sides?" Because Peterson needs money in order to support his art, he agrees to appear as a guest on a popular television quiz program, Who Am I? the aim and format of which is described to him by Miss Arbor, ,

a

program representative: "

Who Am f?tries, Mr. Peterson, to discover what people really are. People today, we feel, are hidden away inside themselves, alienated, desperate, living in anguish, despair and bad faith. Why have we been thrown here, and abandoned? That's the question we try to answer, Mr. Peterson. Man stands alone in a featureless, anonymous landscape. in fear and trembling and sickness unto death. God is dead. Nothinguess everywhere. Dread.

Estrangement. Finitude. Who Am f? approaches these problems in a root radical way ....

325

Peterson, primarily interested in the amount of his fee, hesitates to commit himself. Miss Arbor presses him: "What I want to know now, Mr. Peterson, Is this: are you interested in absurdity?" "Miss

Arbor," he said, "to tell you the truth, I don't know. I'm sure I believe in it." "Oh, Mr. Peterson!" Miss Arbor said, shocked. "Don't say that! You'll be "Punished?" "

...

Peterson is punished. For disbelieving in it, absurdity revenges itself on him by means of a series of surreal intrusions into his garret studio by initiates of the new Zeitgeist, who attempt to induct him into the

fellowship of corrosive self-consciousness that has become the official philosophy. Among these are "the three girls from California," who quote Pascal, prepare a dish called veal engage from their rucksacks, and declare they "need love." Peterson escapes to his neighborhood

bar, presumably not yet infiltrated by the advancing new ethos.

On the air at last, Peterson rebels against this absurdist consensus,

blurting out defiance before he can be cut off. The world may indeed be absurd, he says, and absurdity may punish one for disbelieving in it, but finally "absurdity is itself absurd." In such a world, "possibilities nevertheless proliferate. and there are opportunities for beginning Don't be reconciled. Turn off your television sets cash in again life in insurance, indulge a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. your ." the Play guitar. .

.

....

...

.

.

Peterson's attainment of the status of anti-anti-hero or anti­ existential hero is a variation on one of Barthelme' s favorite themes, the comic impossibility of heroism in a world paralyzed by self­ consciousness. Typically, Barthelme dramatizes the pathetic dimin­

ution of the hero in the contemporary world by attributing a kind of agonized yet commonplace self-consciousness to some of the

fragile heroes of popular mythology: Snow White, Batman and Robin, King Kong, the Phantom of the Opera, etc. In "The Joker's Greatest Triumph" (in Come Back, Dr. Caligan), Batman is foiled, knocked unconscious, and unmasked by his archfoe, the Joker. Re­ more

vived afterward in the Batmobile and told that the Joker now knows his true identity, Batman expresses his dismay in a passage which is a

pastiche of comic-book and literary styles: "Great Scott!" Batman said. "If he reveals it to the whole world it will mean the end of my career as a crime-fighter! Well, it's a problem."

They drove seriously back to the Bat-Cave, thinking about the problem.

326

In a story entitled "The

Party" (in Sadness), King Kong reappears, setting is a cocktail party, Kong "is now an adjunct professor of art history at Rutgers," and if he still occasionally performs feats of terror, "he is simply trying to make himself interesting." Like Snow White's suitors, Batman and King Kong are cases of that increasingly common social type that Barthelme is cruelly at adept depicting-the person who is aware that everything he says is banal yet can do nothing about it, and who therefore adopts a posture of perpetual ironic self-deprecation, which he also admits to be banal.

The acute consciousness of verbal cliche in this kind of comedy cuts deeper than the condition of language. It suggests that the general "back in action." Butthe

dissemination of the concepts of advanced intellectual culture has deluded people into believing that all the mysteries of human nature can be explained by the simple act of affixing verbal labels on them. The sudden availability of the diagnostic vocabularies of sociology, psycho­

analysis, and literary criticism seems to have implanted in mass society a vast illusion, simultaneously fatuous and pathetic, of self­ understanding, Herzog calls this' 'the delusion of total explanations."

In Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet, terms like "alienation" are part ofthe arsenal of cant wielded by false "explainers" and "reality­ instructors," cultural opportunists who capitalize on unearned theories-in Herzog these are mostly theories of cynicism and despair; in Mr. Sammler's Planet, of apocalypse and revolution-in what they are quick to recognize as a seller's market for such" cultural canned goods." As one explainer, Lionel Feffer, candidly tells Sammler: "I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up. I've gone to shrinkers for years, and have they cured me of anything? They have not. They have put labels on

my

troubles, though, which sound like knowledge. It's a great comfort, and worth the money.

You say, 'I'm manic.' Or you say, 'I'm a reactive-depressive.' You say about a social

problem, 'It's colonialism.' Then the dullest brain has internal fireworks, and the sparks drive you out of your skull. It's divine. You think you're a new man. Well, the way to wealth and power is to latch onto this. When you set up a new enterprise, you redescribe the phenomena and create a feeling that we're getting somewhere. If people want things named or renamed, you can make dough by becoming a taxonomist."

As Sammler austerely remarks later, "I dislike the modern religion of

empty categories, and people who make the motions of knowledge."

10

As both Sammler and Herzog recognize, such "explanations" purvey

knowingness, not knowledge, and must be resisted if one wants to avoid succumbing to the maladie du temps.

327

In Mr. Sammler's Planet, the historical degeneration of modernist

mythology is not merely the setting but the inner principle of dramatic action and characterization. This degeneration is presented as an aspect of the more general collapse of Western liberal individualism. Samrn­ ler's past makes him peculiarly a nexus of the historical forces, both hopeful and destructive, whose collision has created the present-day world. Samrnler is, on the one hand, a former democratic-socialist and heir of the progressive Enlightenment, a believer in rationality and

planned social change; on the other hand, he is both a victim of the holocaust and one who, in an act of revenge, has participated in its murderous brutality. His past and character thus place him at the inter­ section point of Western liberal individualism and the forces which destroyed it-or, rather, perverted it. For ironically, as it now appears to Sammler, Western liberal individualism has survived the holocaust,

but in forms which parody its original inspiration. This individualism, which began as part of a noble dream of liberating the mass of humanity from the nightmare of historical circumstance by uniting science with

morality, has detached itself from the ideas of good and evil in which it had originally been anchored and split into a variety of perverse forms-a cruel and amoral technological material power comple­ mented by a self-indulgent, hedonistic culture that pursues a religion of "symbolic wholeness." The characters who surround Sammler are possessed by a neurotic "fever of originality," at once arrogant and desperate, which expresses itself in exhibitionistic play-acting, and the questto be "interesting": "theater of the soul" performed "with hair, with clothes, with drugs and cosmetics, with genitalia, with round trips through evil, monstrosity, and orgy Life, it seems, has begun to imitate bad experimental art: "

...

Life looting Art of its wealth, destroying Art as well by its desire to become the thing itself. Pressing itself into pictures. Reality forcing itself into all these shapes. Just look

(Sammler looked) at this imitative anarchy of the streets-these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex toyland, these surrealist warchiefs, Western stagecoach drivers

....

If the bourgeoisie was once aloof or hostile to the dreams of artists, it now rushes to act out the artist's most

visionary fantasies.

One measure of the transformation of bourgeois culture in America is the disappearance of debate over the alleged "provincialism" of 328

American life, a term once hotly argued about and now scarcely ever heard. Much American literature after the late eighteenth century was

generated by a dramatic formula in which one or more members of an advanced" minority are pitted against the stubborn inflexibility of a "provincial" majority-an inflexibility which, depending on the point ofview, may be judged as narrow-minded rigidity and philistinism or as honest, unaffected plain-dealing. As "advanced" literary attitudes have triumphed over the provincialism of the the majority-culture, the old-fashioned, unalienated provincial bourgeois character-type has begun to take on renewed value-seven in the eyes of intellectuals. In recent social comedy, the classic situation sometimes reappears in inverted form: the advanced mentality is depicted as a kind of reverse­ provincialism of the majority, and wherever the old -style, stubborn provincial turns up-that is, wherever he is shown as not having suc­ cumbed to the advanced modes which surround him-he is presented as a model of an alternate life-style, so to speak. That is, fashionable alienation becomes the resisting background against which individual character is dialectically forged. The businessman, the perennial target of the derision and contempt of literary culture, reappears suddenly as a figure of refreshing nonconformity.

Thus Bellow locates the central morality of Mr. Sammler's Planet in the wealthy doctor-businessman and paterfamilias, Elya Gruner, a tough operator with underworld connections. Whatever one may feel about Gruner's Mafia associates, they are at least genuine criminals, not Byronic poseurs dabbling in evil in order to make themselves interesting. This does not mean that Bellow endorses either organized crime or big business, but rather the values of honor and loyalty which some businessmen, at least as much as intellectuals, manage to keep alive, and for which the language of contracts and bookkeeping, a continuous stylistic motif in the novel, is an appropriate image. Gruner, ..

Sammler reflects at the novel's close, has remained faithful to "the terms of his contract," those absolute human loyalties which are the

enabling basis of civilization. These contractual terms are violated by free- floating seekers of "limitless demand," who recognize no scarcity of satisfactions, claim exemption from moral debts, and present to the world "a full bill of demand and complaint Non-negotiable."

In a parallel fashion, Philip Roth actually invokes the name of ....

329

George F. Babbitt at a crucial point in his recent novel, My Life as a Man, in order to define the quality of saving common sense which his protagonist, a young novelist named Peter Tarnopol, singularly lacks.

The novel teems with literary allusions, parallels, and parodies. For example, Tarnopol, like such earlier fictional victims of romantic illusion as Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, and Isabel Archer, has acquired his romantic view of life from his reading. Unlike the illusions of his predecessors, however, Tarnopol's have been induced not by escapist romances but by the masterpieces of anti-romantic European modernism from Flaubert to Dostoevsky, which he has studied at the university and hopes to emulate in his own novels. From these writers-and Roth implies he has distorted their meaning consider­ ably-Tarnopol has acquired a contempt for ordinary bourgeois life and a hunger for "moral ambiguity" and "complexity." So thoroughly does Tarnopol romanticize the Abyss that he ends up marrying into it-only to discover that its fascinations are overrated.

Like Isabel Archer, he disastrously rejects an uninterestingly stable partner for an intriguingly alienated one-Maureen Johnson, a marvelous creation who embodies almost every cliche of cosmopolitan rootlessness and pseudo-artistic emancipation. Her repeated demand-the ultimate slogan of populist narcissism-is that she be treated "as a human being, not as a thing." Reflecting on his mistake years later, Tarnopol imagines that "a worldlier fellow than myself--George F. Babbitt, say, of Zenith, Minnesota," would not have been susceptible to her temptations."

To take one final example, I suggest that the extraordinary linguistic vitality which Stanley Elkin has unleashed in such works as A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show, and "The Bailbondsman" (collected in the recent Searches and Seizures) owes something to Elkin's choice as narrators and protagonists of aggressive, unsentimental, often vulgar

and bullying businessmen, who love their work and are not alienated from it. To be sure, these are metaphysical entrepreneurs who invest

their businesses with dimensions of romance, mystery, and exotic

challenge that go far beyond the mere pursuit of profits. And yet the intricate, concrete facts of the business in question-running a depart­ ment store, radio announcing, making bail bonds-are always profusely and lovingly particularized, something which lends to the 330

characters a more than hypothetical individuality. The talk and gesture of these characters are full of energy because, though complex and

often tragically self-contradictory, they are not overcome by identity

crises, attenuating self-consciousness, and the diffusions of the protean self. In a world given over to equivocation and sentimentality, they fol­ Iowa hard line, knowing whatthey desire even if they fail to achieve it.

Consider, for example, the protagonist of" A Poetics for Bullies" (collected in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers), a story which reverses the conventions of the man confronts a callous

type of plot in which a "sensitive" young

society. Far from desiring love and understand­

ing, Push makes war on them: I'm Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants-and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

A kid Is going downtown on the elevated train. He's got his Uttle suit on, his shoes are shined,

he wears a cap. This Is a kid going to the travel bureaus, the foreign tourist offices to get

brochures, maps, pictures of the mountains for a unit at his school-a kid looking for extra credit. I follow him. He comes out of the Italian Tourist Information Center. His arms are full.

I move from my place at the window. I follow him for two blocks and bump into him as he steps from a curb. It's a collision-the pamphlets fall from his arms. Pretending confusion, I walk on his paper Florence. I

grind my heel in his Riviera. I climb Vesuvius and lack his Rome and

dance on the Isle of Capri.

Push receives his proper comeuppance, but this does not negate the

pungency of his character-he knows who he is and what his work is.

The satiric attitude found in the above examples connects a variety of otherwise disparate or antithetical types of current fiction. To be sure, one must

distinguish between Bellow's reliance on conventions of

traditional realism and Barthelme's overturning of these conventions.

And it is necessary to acknowledge the differing views of language and

its debasement which underlie these opposed methods. Barthelme's

irony toward official, institutional, professional, and artistic jargon does not stop at these targets, but spreads and envelops all language,

including Barthelme's own authorial prose. His stories are self­ parodies, calling attention to and ridiculing their own inability to over­ come their imprisonment in the artifices oflanguage and the solipsism of consciousness in order to make statements about the objective world outside art. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by contrast, though it incorporates awareness of these problems, transcends them by 331

making unqualified statements. Bellow is no less deeply aware than Barthelme ofthe immense deterioration of the traditional languages of cultural authority: "It was notthe behavior that was gone," Sammler thinks at one point. "What was gone was the old words the terms ...

beaten into flat nonsense." But Bellow wishes to affirm the substance for which the old words had stood: truth, honor, compassion, virtuous

impulse: "About essentials, almost nothing could be said. Still, signs could be made, should be made, must be made." "

Peterson, at the conclusion of Barthelme' s A Shower of Gold," reaffirms the Renaissance ideal of human nobility, but the language in which he does so is partly parodic and self-parodic: "My mother was a royal virgin." Peterson said, "and my father a shower of gold. My chUdhood was pastoral and energetic and rich In experiences which developed my character.

As a young man I was noble In reason, infinite In faculty, In form express and admirable, and

in apprehension

" ...

Peterson wenton and on and although he was, in a sense. lying, in a

sense he was not.

Compare this with the conclusion to Mr. Sammler's Planet, where the affirmation is not qualified by irony. Of his friend Gruner, whose death he has just witnessed, Sammler thinks: "He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet-through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding-he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As aU know.

For that is the truth ofit-that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

There is, it is true, some irony in the fact that Sammler himself, as he

realizes, has failed to live up to his standards due to his limited

compassion for the frailty that surrounds him. But the content of the standards themselves is not compromised by this fact. Bellow acknowledges and to some extent embraces Barthelme's skepticism about man's ability to know truth, but he attacks the perverse tendency of such skepticism to become an excuse for self-pity and self-indulgent despair. And for Bellow, affirmation survives "the confusion and degraded clowning" of contemporary life which is included so richly in the texture and detail ofthe novel, whereas for Barthelme it does not.

These recent works by Bellow and Barthelme, then, in many ways

exemplifying the antithetical poles in the contemporary literary debate between tradition and innovation in the novel, look at the plight of 332

"advanced" consciousness from distinctly different perspectives. And

yet their views of the plight itself. one might say their definitions of it. have much in common. Both writers perceive that it is not only the traditional moral and artistic languages that have forfeited their power, but the counter-languages of modernist adversary culture as well. Both expose the hollowness into which the cult of the Creative Genius has

degenerated.

To what extent these attitudes represent a repudiation of the tradition

of literary modernism itself-as distinct from the popular vulgarization ofthis tradition-it is not easy to determine. It would be a mistake, I

think, to assume that because postmodern comedy satirizes certain aspects of modernism, it represents a sharp and complete break with all

aspects of the modernist tradition. While breaking with the anti-intellectualism of modernist alienation, this comedy continues and extends the modernist intellectual critique of modern society. One of

the recurrent themes of literary modernism is the trivializing effect of

bourgeois countinghouse morality, which, by elevating commercial self-interest into the main goal of existence, destroys the possibility of aristocratic heroism and high-minded renunciation, of disinterested­ ness and spiritual transcendence. Modernist literature expressed what Baudelaire described as "that need, which is too rare in the modem generation, to combat and destroy triviality." Baudelaire was

speaking specifically of the cult of Dandyism. with its "haughty, patrician attitude, aggressive even in its coldness," which, he says prophetically, "appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited." But the reaction against the triviality of bourgeois egotism has survived both the disappearance of aristocratic traditions and the transformation of bourgeois values. The bourgeois egotism of commercial venality and vulgar utilitarianism -what Marx called "the icy waters of egotistical calculation"-has been diluted by the bourgeois egotism of banal psychological self­ absorption and self-pity, in quest of an "interesting" personality and ostentatiously self-righteous about its emancipation. This new posture is no less at odds than the old one with the heroic, renunciatory conception of life. If bourgeois society tends to alienate its intellectuals and others by its triviality, the contemporary form of this society seems 333

even to trivialize the

feelings of alienation it generates. In dramatizing this situation, postmodern satire departs in form, but not in spirit, from the modernist critique of mass society."

The fiction writer's problem is to find a form that adequately repre­ sents the diffuse, intransigent material of contemporary experience without surrendering critical perspective to it-to acknowledge the pressure of reality without being overwhelmed by it. Since critical perspective depends on historical sense, on seeing the present somehow as

part of a coherent historical process, this task demands a difficult

fusion of the sense of contemporaneity with the sense of the past that

gives contemporaneity distinct definition. To quote Irving Howe once more, "A novelist unaware of the changes in our experience to which the theory of mass society points, is a novelist unable to deal successfully with recent American life; while one who focused only upon those changes would be unable to give his work an adequate sense of historical depth and social detail. "

While discussion of a mere handful of works is insufficient to establish anything, the examples of postmodem satire discussed above

represent at least a beginning move toward the recovery of this standpoint---simultaneously "inside" contemporary society yet

critically detached from it-that permits fiction to make telling interpretations of everyday life. Similarly, this satire begins to restore that state of balance between unchecked fabulation and objective social realism without which fiction, in Alter's phrase, must "go slack," degenerating into a trivial indulgence in the infinity of imaginative possibilities. (Theorists like Northrop Frye and others who make such indulgence the defming quality of literature make no serious demands on it.) What makes this recovery possible is the assimilation in this satire of a theoretical picture of modem historical and social reality which, though far from comprehensive, is considerably more coherent than any picture that was available only a few decades ago, and far more plausible than any ofthe willed mythologies on which so many writers have been forced to depend.

The degeneration of public language into cliche as a conseq uence of modem propaganda and mass communications has had far-ranging consequences for modem literature. The immediate consequences 334

of

this situation-in which literature finds itself virtually deprived of

uncontaminated language-have been negative: literature either

depends excessively on private myth or else, turning violently against myth, becomes anti-literature, turning against itself as a kind of

punishment for its continued use of an exhausted and discredited language. Postmodern satire illustrates an apparent escape from this dead end by converting the deterioration of language into the basis of its social criticism and its reconstructed typology of individual character. In such satire, the corruption oflanguage is not merely an occasion for further novelistic introversion, but a social fact as well as a motif of personal behavior. In Bellow's reality-instructors, intellectual

hustlers, and would-be world-historical individuals and in Barthelme's seekers for existential fulfillment, love, and the charms of an

interesting personality, and his acrobats of self-confessedly banal anguish-in such characters fiction reestablishes a connection with recognizably central patterns of individual and social experience, Notes 1. Two important critical discussions of the realist aspect of modern fiction are Erich Auerbach's concluding remarks in Mimesis: The Representation ofReality in Western Literature and Edmund Wilson's analysis ofthe fusion of symbolism and naturalism in Ulysses, in Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930.

2. Auerbach writes as follows in Mimesis: As recently as the nineteenth century, and even at the beginning of the twentieth, so much clearly formulable and recognized community of thought and feeling remained in [Europe 1 that a writer engaged in representing reality had reliable criteria at hand by which to organize it. At least, within the range of contemporary movements, he could

discern specific trends; he could delimit opposing attitudes and ways of life with a certain

degree of clarity. To be sure, this had long since begun to grow increasingly difficult.

Flaubert (to confine ourselves to realistic writers) already suffered from the lack of valid foundations for his work; and the subsequent increasing predilection for ruthlessly subjectivistic perspectives is another symptom 3. In A dvertisemen tsfor Myself, Mailer writes that "it is not only the 'dead weight of the institutions of the past' but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities which might be exciting for our individual growth." Of course. But if our "nervous circuits" had not internalized the past. "new possibilities" would be meaningless.

4. That modernist writers were peculiarly thrown back on their private resources, forced by the disappearance of shared beliefs to invent personal mythologies, etc., is a commonplace of modern criticism, and, like other such commonplaces, useful only if not taken with complete literalness. I n The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode points out that no form of symbolism can be absolutely private without being unintelligible. Yeats's supposedly "private" symbols, Kermode says, "mean something in the system, but for the uninstructed reader they continue to mean something in terms of a broader system of cultural and linguistic conventions-the shared information codes upon which literature,like any other method of communication, ...

depends."

5. Worth mentioning in this connection is W. B. Scott's 1948 parody, "Chicago Letter,"

335

since reprinted in Parodies: An Anthologyfrom Chaucer to Beerbohm+-and After, ed. Dwight Macdonald. A devastating comment on the jargon and posturing of intellectual alienation, the

piece opens as follows: "Agony, a sense of plight; a sense of agony. plight-such. one soon perceives. are the attributes of the Chicago of our time." The sense of plight. it soon develops. is not confined to the correspondent's intellectual friends, but pervades the whole of this "joyless metropolis": Other facts suggest the city's agony. A fortnight after my arrival I read in the Cicero Quarterly (which last week ceased publication) ofthe dissolution ofthe Goose Island Sartre Club. whose president. with ironic ambivalence. rather than commit suicide had taken ajob as check-out boy in a supermarket. Early today. as I started to compose this letter. Jeremy Irk phoned to tell me that the Rogers Park Cercle Rimbaud is down to nine members. eight of whom do not speak to each other 6. As Harold Rosenberg writes. "Social and/or aesthetic far-outness is a public-relations technique aimed at the presumed indignation of a stable middle class that ceased to exist four decades ago" (symposium on "Art. Culture, and Conservatism." Partisan Review. XXXIX. 3 of an [Summer 1972), p. 444). Robert Brustein, in the same journal. adds. "The image embattled group of minority artists trying to survive in the face of a philistine public and a reactionary critical establishment is simply unrecognizable in the seventies: it belongs to the twenties" (p. 412). ....

...

Earlier. Richard Chase. in "The Fate of the Avant-Garde" <Partisan Review, XXIV, 3

[Summer 1957». had speculated that "the new suburban. totally-populated. bureaucratized. and other-directed America is already rendering historically obsolete" the social criticism of the avant-garde, which "applies only to the older Calvinist, production-oriented. inner-directed America. In the new America there may be no need for the avant-garde spirit-or for culture." For other expositions ofthis thesis, see Hilton Kramer, The Age of the ...

A vant-Garde (1973). especially the title essay. and Charles Newman. "The Uses and Abuses of Death: A Little Rumble Through the Remnants of Literary Culture," TriQuarterly 26

(Winter 1973).

7. This is not to assert that ideas are necessarily invalidated once they are co-opted by society-a notion which merely reverses the kind of thinking which approves of an idea when it is fashionable. If one says that modernist ideas are discredited once they become popular. then one must accept the absurd consequence that one's opposition to these ideas, if it became popular. would also be discredited, and also someone else's opposition. ad infinitum. Ideas must be judged on the merits of their content, not on their relation to fashion or on the misuses made of them. However, in the present case, where the very terms in which an idea is

formulated presuppose some social resistance to the idea, the co-optation of the idea actually belies its content.

8. Certain astute critics began to sense this air of unreality, and also to anticipate the transformations of bourgeois culture. as early as the mid-nineteenth century. In 1845.

Baudelaire observed that "there are no more bourgeois. now that the bourgeois himself uses this insulting epithet-a fact that shows his willingness to become art-minded, and listen to what the columnists have to say." Baudelaire added that "there are so many bourgeois

amongst artists themselves that it behooves us to suppress a word that describes no particular vice of any social class, since it can be applied equally to those who ask for nothing better than to deserve it no longer. and to others who have never suspected that they deserved it." This

phenomenon. the weakening ofthe connection between bourgeois ideology and bourgeois class status. was noted in 1925 by the German Dadaist, George Grosz, in the following remarkable statement: Formal revolution lost its shock effect a long time ago. The modern citizen digests everything; only the money chests are vulnerable. Today's young merchant is not like his counterpart in Gustav Freytag's times: ice-cold. aloof. he hangs the most radical things in Rash and unhesitating acceptance so as not to be "born yesterday" is his apartment the password. Automobiles-the newest, most sporty model. Nothing said about professional mission. obligations of wealth: cool. objective to the point of dullness. skeptical. without illusions, avaricious. he understands only his merchandise. for everything else-including the fields of philosophy. ethics, art-for all culture. there are specialists who determine the fashion. which is then accepted at face value. Even the formal revolutionaries and "wanderers into the void" do fairly well. for underneath they same

....

336

are related to those

gentlemen. and have. despite all their apparent discrepancies.

the

same. indifferent. arrogant view of life.

9. And Richard Gilman to the says that Snow White's "structure adheres closely itself into an �ovements and pressures of our new reality, but at the same time it shapes tndependent object, not to be for extraliterary purposes and not to be accounted for

exploited by extra-aesthetic principles." Gilman adds that "Fiction, Barthelme assumes, can no longer be (if it ever wholly was) the expression or interpretation or simulacrum of life and its values of any kind nor the vehicle of surrogate emotions or aspirations nor in fact of experience except an aesthetic one" (The Confusio" of Realms, 1969). Just how a work can "adhere closely" to reality without being an expression or interpretation of life and its values Gilman does not explain. Though presented as a revolutionary departure, Gilman's statement here ...

rehearses the formulas which have been the official modern esthetic since, at least, the advent ofthe New Criticism.

10. Compare this with Barthelme's treatment, in the story "Daumier," of psychological

"explanations": My plan for self-transplants was not formulated without the benefit of some amount of research. I turned over the literature, which is immense, the following volumes sticking in the mind as having been particularly-valuable: "The Self: An Introduction" by Meyers, "Self-Abuse" by Samuels, "The Armed Self" by Crawlie, Burt's "The Concept of Self," Self-Congratulation" by Mc Fee, Fingarette' s "Self-Deception," "Self-Defense for Women and Young Girls" by Birch, Winterman's "Self-Doubt," "The Effaced Self" by Lilly, "Self-Hatred in Vermin" by Skinner, LeBett's "Selfishness," Gordon's "Self-Love," "The Many-Colored Self" by Winsor and Newton, Paramananda's "Self-Mastery ," "The Misplaced Self" by Richards, "Nastiness" by Bertini, "The Self Prepares" by Teller, Flaxman's "The Self as Pretext," Hickel's "Self-Propelled Vehicles," Serenson's "Self-Slaughter," "Self and Society in MingThought,"

by DeBary, "The Sordid Self" by Clute, and "Techniques of Self- Validation"

by Wright. These works underscored what I already knew, that the self is a dirty great villain, an interrupter of sleep, a deviller of awakeness, an intersubjective atrocity, a ..

mouth, a maw

....

(Sadness)

11. But perhaps he would have. Actually, Lewis' Babbitt is himself in some ways closer to

the recent "therapeutic" social type than to the traditional hard-nosed businessman. He suffers from vague discontents, senses his authority with his children is slipping, and gives himself over to infatuation with quasi-artistic women such as the widow Tanis Judique.

12. Though it may be dismissed as "elitist." this form of satire, it should be noted, has for some time been a theme in

popular culture itself. and one ofthat culture's healthier

tendencies. In a M ike Nichols-Elaine May routine recorded in the late fifties titled "Bach to Bach," a young man and woman, having just been to bed together evidently for the first time. listen to a recording of a Bach symphony and have the following conversation: He: I remember I used to have to sneak in my room to hear it when 1 was a kid. You know. my family was your usual. you know. dull. bourgeois family. of course. and there was

really very little for me middle class. ordinary. and.

She: I guess my story is the same. My family was there was no relating. There was proximity, but no relating. ....

...

He: Oh, no-there can't be. The pressures are just incredible.

Later, the woman says. "When I read Thus SpakeZarathustra, a whole world opened to me."

And soon.

Many of Woody Allen's published parodies, collected in Getting Even, play on the suggestion that anguished, paralyzed intellectual complexity has invaded everyday. routine existence. This is done by juxtaposing humdrum activities. eating, business investment, concern over laundry. etc., against the formulas of existential Dread. Thus some aphorisms from "My Philosophy": "If only Dionysus were alive! Where would he eat?" "Not only is there on weekends." And in the same vein. this from "The Allen no God, but try getting a plumber Notebooks" (New Yorker, Nov. 5, 1973): "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?

In that case I definitely overpaid for my carpet." The same type of comedy frequently enters into Allen's nightclub and film performances, a fact of some significance since this comedy familiarity presupposes the average would have been regarded as esoteric.

audience'S.

337

with a range of allusions that a few years ago

Co n tri b u to rs ROBERT ALTER is Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley. His essay in this issue is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Con­ scious Genre. FREDERIC TUTEN's first novel was The Adventures

ofMao on the Long March. "Letter from Mao to Malraux" is an ex­ cerpt from his second novel, The Adventures ofMao in the Third World. He is Assistant Professor of English at the City College of New York. DAVID KRANES has been playwright-in-residence at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and has had several plays produced in New York. He presently lives in Salt Lake City. MICHAEL ANANIA 's

story is the title chapter from his book about Communism, the Bomb, and other 1950's matters. DANIEL HALPERN edits Antaeus and teaches at the New School. His second book of poetry, Street Fire, will be published this spring. His ongoing projects include translations

from Berber poetry and an anthology of American poets under forty.

ROBERT ONOPA 's poetry has appeared in a number of little

magazines. The author of an article in Tri Quarterly 26, he teaches at the University of Hawaii. MORRIS DICKSTEIN is the author of Keats and His Poetry. He is using a Guggenheim Fellowship this year to work on a book about the 1960' s before returning to teach at Queens

College. Author of seven novels and seven volumes of short stories, JAMES PURDY says: "My work is an exploration of the American soul conveyed in a style based on the rhythms and accents of American

speech." The piece published here is an excerpt from his latest novel, The House of the Solitary Maggot (Doubleday, 1974). GERALD

GRAFF is on leave from Northwestern University where he teaches

literary criticism. His work has appeared in a number of journals and

magazines including The New Yorker. He is the author of Poetic State­ ment and Critical Dogma. Temporarily at Syracuse but more lastingly at MIT, RICHARD KOFFLER has published translations from the I tali an in a number of journals. He edited The Rarer Action with Alan

Cheuse. CESARE PAVESE died in Turin in 1950. One of Italy's most

important modern writers, he wrote poetry and fiction as well as the diary excerpted in this issue. FRANK McCONNELL teaches English at Northwestern University. He has published a book on Wordsworth,

has completed a second book on film, and is using a Guggenheim

Fellowship this year to work on a third book growing out of his essay in this issue. M. D. ELEVITCH, "a long-time little magazine doctor," will publish recent work in several anthologies to appear this year, in­

cluding Statements: New Fiction and New Departures in Fiction.

ARTHUR A. COHEN has published two novels, The Carpentered

Years, and most recently, In the Days ofSimon Stern. He is also the author of a number of books on contemporary Judaism. PAUL BOWLES lives in Tangiers. He is the author of several novels, an auto­

biography, Without Stopping, as well as a number of translations from the Moghrebi, including The Lemon, with Mohammed Mrabet.

ALAN SILLITOE 's most recent book is Men, Women and Children.

EDWARD SAID is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His forthcoming book is Beginnings: Inten­

tion and Method. He has also written on Middle Eastern and Arabic

Literature. WILLIAM E. BIDERBOST was graduated from the Uni­

versity of Illinois in 1967. After working several years as Art Director /

Designer for Chicago advertising agencies, he turned to free-lance illustration and design. He also spent a year at Columbia College in

Chicago teaching poster design and fantasy drawing. His work has ap­ peared in national magazines and has been awarded Certificates of Merit and Excellence from Communication Arts Magazine, Chicago 4,

The Copy Club of New York, and The American Institute of Graphic Arts. Mr. Biderbost is currently working on a playground design for

blind children and a series First Picture Books/or Boys and Girls. He is a collector

ofpre-l940 children's books, games, wood-jointed cartoon

dolls and Art-Deco kitsch.

Excerpt from The House oj the Solitary Maggot copyright © 1974, James Purdy. Reprinted by permission of the author and Doubleday, Inc

.

•

'The Crystal World: Excerpts from Cesare Pavese's The Job ojLiving" copyright © 1975, Richard Koffler. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Einaudi, Italian publishers of the diary; and to Walker & Company, N. Y., publishers of the English translation. The diary is available in its entirety from Walker & Company.

Erratum: The editors wish to apologize for an error in the contributors' notes for 31. Jean M. James is female, not male. Her credit line should read: "She

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TriQuarterly is pleased to announce the first

in a series of limited edition posters signed and numbered by contemporary artists.

Number 1 in the series is by William Biderbost whose collage/illustrations are featured in TriQuarterIy 33. The Poster was silk screened under the supervision of the artist in five colors on Strathmore in an edition of 275. �·lriQ_ua_rt.r!I_.

OngoingAIII<ricanl'ocriofl

To order send check or money order to

TriQuarterly 10 1 University Hall Northwestern University Evanston, lllinois W201 As this is a limited edition orders will be honored in order of

receipt.

William Biderbost 25" x36" $20.00 Silk screened in five colors on Strathmore.

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