by Tom Wolfe
The novel Mailer had on the market at the time A Man in Full was published was an autobiography of Jesus—yes, an autobiography of Jesus—called The Gospel According to the Son. The book Updike had just published, Bech at Bay, consisted of stories about a seventy-something writer named Bech who is irritable about the sagging status of the man of letters in America. Updike’s novel before that, like Mailer’s autobiography of Jesus, was a fantasy, Toward the End of Time, about a small town north of Boston in the year 2020 following a war between the United States and China. Irving’s last novel, A Widow for One Year (1996), had been about two neurotic writers who seemed unable to get out of a house in Bridgehampton, Long Island. As the pages wore on, I kept waiting for them to kindly make it into town, just once, even though town—I’ve been there—is only a two-block strip along a two-lane highway. At one point the two of them … leave the house! They get in a car! They’re driving through a nearby hamlet called Sagaponack, a lovely little Hamptons Rural Chic retreat—I’ve been there, too—and I’m begging them to please stop—park next to the SUVs and German sedans and have a soda at the general store there on Sagg Main—take a look, just one look, at a $125,000 show-circuit hunter pony in the pasture over there at the Topping Riding School— do something—anything—to show that you’re connected to the here and now, that you actually exist where the author claims you exist, on Long Island, U.S.A.! But they don’t listen … they just drift on, encapsulated in their neurasthenia … and disappear behind the walls of another timeless, abstract house …
So was I saying that John Irving was untalented, just the way he said I was untalented?
“Not at all,” I told Evan. “John Irving is a talented writer. Norman Mailer is a talented writer. John Updike is a talented writer. All I’m saying is that they’ve wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them,” by turning their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history. Instead of going out into the world, instead of plunging into the (to me) irresistibly lurid carnival of American life today in the here and now, instead of striding out with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., “the literary world,” or such wholly ghostly stuff as the presumed thoughts of Jesus.
But how could I say that about Mailer? asked Evan. What about The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s 1979 novel based on the Gary Gilmore case (in which a convicted murderer insisted, to the distress of antideath-penalty activists, on becoming the first American executed by the state in more than ten years)?
I wouldn’t say that about The Executioner’s Song, I told him. “That book should have taught Norman a lesson, but obviously it didn’t.”
Mailer’s career had been floundering for the better part of a decade when one day a remarkable Santa Claus named Lawrence Schiller turned up. With him he had bales of transcripts of interviews he had done with Gary Gilmore, his family, and other people involved in Gilmore’s life and internationally publicized death. He had visited Gilmore in jail many times and had witnessed his execution. Schiller was a photographer who had developed into a reporter with an unusual specialty. He amassed material for books on hot topics and then looked for writers to write them in co-ventures. Mailer took Schiller’s reportorial gold mine and wrote what turned out to be the only good novel he would ever write after his first, The Naked and the Dead, back in 1948. Schiller said later that he interviewed “close to a hundred people over a year-and-a-half period and prepared all that material … He [Mailer] never interviewed any of the people or was at any of the events.” Why Mailer hadn’t drawn the obvious conclusion and headed out into the country himself as a reporter before doing his next novel, or at least signed up with Schiller again, instead of writing the ghostly novels that were to follow, I can’t imagine.
For that matter, what on earth prompted John Irving to spend more than four years writing a 633-page novel set in India, A Son of the Circus , and publish it (in 1994) with a preface that said: “This isn’t a novel about India. I don’t know India. I was only there once, for less than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the country’s foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me”? I don’t know India. It was true—which only makes it odder. A Son of the Circus, all 633 pages of it, is not a novel about India or any other place in this world. It sank without a trace.
Since my interview with Evan Solomon, John Updike has published a new novel, Gertrude and Claudius, yet another otherworldly story, this one about what transpired in Hamlet’s family prior to the events depicted in Shakespeare’s play. It was received congenially, respectfully, collegially by … us … in the literary world … and then, dismayingly, it dropped off the radar. Us was one thing; they, the book-reading public, were quite another. They lost interest so completely, so rapidly, that The New York Times ran a story about it, also mentioning other highly “literary” writers whose current novels, likewise duly praised by us, had suffered the same fate. Since the others (Saul Bellow was one) were about the same age as Updike, the Times raised the question of whether or not it might be a generational matter, a case of older writers no longer resonating with a younger audience.
But Updike had his own unique analysis: it was the readers’ fault. Their “tastes have coarsened,” he said in an interview. “People read less, they’re less comfortable with the written word. They’re less comfortable with novels. They don’t have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It’s sad.” The airport bookstores didn’t stock anything one could characterize as literature, he said, and when one got on the airplane, people were reading not literature but the trash sold at the airport bookstores. With a Twilight of the Gods resignation, he told of how it used to be, back before readers became what they are today, i.e., coarse, dumb, and dumber. “When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher’s shelf … Someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize—winning author of high intent. You don’t feel that now. I don’t feel that we have the merger of serious and pop—it’s gone, dissolving … The kind of readers that would make it worthwhile to print a literary writer are dwindling.”
Were my eyes deceiving me? Was this man actually saying that the lack of interest in the “literary” novel in the year 2000 was the readers’ fault? He, John Updike, was a victim of a new cultural disease, Reader Failure? And he was invoking the name of John Steinbeck, who wrote in a happier time, back when Updike’s piano teacher read great writers? How could he risk even mentioning Steinbeck—unless he actually does consciously and willfully regard himself as my stooge, a straight man whose role is to feed me such lines?
The crowning triumph of Steinbeck’s career was The Grapes of Wrath, his novel of the Great Depression of the 1930s, published in 1939. He had already written a bestseller, Tortilla Flat (1935), and sold it to the movies, plus the highly praised and reasonably well-selling In Dubious Battle (1936), and was completing Of Mice and Men, which became an even bigger bestseller in 1937 and subsequently a play and a hit movie, when he accepted an assignment from the San Francisco News to write a series of newspaper articles on the Okies, who were pouring into California from the drought-stricken Southwest, seeking work on California’s sprawling agribusiness farms. Steinbeck was not interested in the money or the journalism but in amassing material for what he envisioned as a “big book,” a novel on a grander scale than the comparatively spare books he had written so far. He bought an old pie truck, as he called it, stocked it with food and blankets, and prepared to do his fieldwork, his documenting: studying the Okies, who were living in squatters’ camps and working for wages as low as 12½ cents a day. At the time, the existence of the camps was not public knowledge, much less the appalling conditions
in which the Okies lived.
Steinbeck was fascinated by the “organismal” theory of a biologist friend, William Emerson Ritter, who believed that the individual human inevitably lived, without knowing it, as part of a larger social organism, after the manner of the multiunit “superorganisms” known to marine biology, and that the whole was inevitably greater than the sum of its parts. For the same reason, no single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony. (Which is to say, Ritter was a half century ahead in what is currently one of the hottest fields in science, “sociobiology.”)
So Steinbeck headed out into the farm country in his pie truck and toured the camps day after day, documenting the entire “organismal” complex and looking for the individual “organisms” that would bring the whole alive in story form. It was at a squatters’ camp in the San Joaquin Valley that he came across a man, his wife, and their three children living in a lean-to made of willow reeds and flattened tin cans and sleeping under a piece of carpet. The wife had just given birth to a dead child, her second stillbirth in a year. Their degradation gave him the idea for the tragedy of the Joad family. He conceived of the Joads as types, as specimens, as a cluster of people representing the whole experience of the Okies, and yet Ma Joad and her rebellious son Tom come to life in the pages of The Grapes of Wrath as two of the most compelling individuals in American fiction. Without departing from the Zolaesque naturalism of his approach, Steinbeck manages by book’s end to make Tom the embodiment of the Okies’ will not only to live but to fight back. Ma Joad and Tom became the soul, in Ritter’s terminology, of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The Grapes of Wrath is a textbook American demonstration of Zola’s method of writing the novel: leaving the study, going out into the world, documenting society, linking individual psychology to its social context, giving yourself fuel enough for the maximum exercise of your power as a writer—thereby absorbing the reader totally.
And Steinbeck is the name Updike invokes to explain the failure of two novels of fantasy and a third set in that crack between the toes of contemporary life, “the literary world”?
I doubt that many people even down in that crack would dispute the proposition that the stature of the American novel has declined steadily since its palmy days, which were before the Second World War. The great period ran from the publication of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in 1900 to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. This was the age of John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, James M. Cain, John O’Hara, and William Faulkner. It was the period in which American fiction not only began to be taken seriously in Europe for the first time but also began to influence European writers. Sartre was so impressed by Dos Passos that he wrote his World War II trilogy, The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Iron in the Soul, in unabashed emulation of Dos Passos’s great trilogy, U.S.A.
What is the vein that runs from Dreiser to Steinbeck? It was Alfred Kazin, writing in 1942 in his critical literary history of the period, On Native Grounds, who first isolated “the greatest single fact about our modern American literature—our writers’ absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.”
Their “absorption in every last detail of their American world” never varied, no matter what their mood. Steinbeck may have felt angry when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Dreiser may have felt disillusioned when he wrote Sister Carrie, Sinclair Lewis seemed to have a Menckenesque sense of the absurdity of the spectacle all around him when he wrote Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and Arrowsmith, for which he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But all immersed themselves wholeheartedly in that spectacle, relished “every last detail” of it, and recognized the importance of going beyond the confines of their own personal experience to get novelistic material … Dreiser based the plot of Sister Carrie on the sexual liaisons of one of his sisters, but his work as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York provided the book’s rich fabric. Lewis went forth Zola-style (and Steinbeck-style) as a reporter (using 5 x 8 cards) to gather material not only for Babbitt and Elmer Gantry but also for Main Street, which was about the town, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, where he grew up. Like Balzac, Dickens, Zola, and Mark Twain, they mocked, attacked, laid bare the society around them, but always as members of it. They unmasked and shocked the bourgeoisie, but never from the point of view of “artists” coming from a different world. As Kazin put it, “They were participants in a common experience” who “gave the American novel over to the widest possible democracy of subject and theme” and had a “compelling interest in people, Americans, of all varieties.”
In his Nobel acceptance speech in Stockholm in 1930, Sinclair Lewis exhorted his fellow American novelists to “give America a literature worthy of her vastness.” Can anyone imagine my three stooges expressing any such sentiment? Can anyone imagine them even wondering if America is due anything at all from writers? And what’s all this about “vastness” anyway—literature as geography?
Unless they have been keeping it to themselves, my three stooges haven’t a clue as to why their “literary world” is in such a decline—or why they themselves have become so insular, effete, and irrelevant. And here we come upon the supreme irony of American literary history so far. In the twentieth century the United States outstripped Europe in every respect save one. In matters “intellectual,” as I mentioned on pages 113-30 herein, we remained sweaty little colonials forever trying to keep up with Europe and, above all, with France. In the 1830s Balzac, Stendhal, and Dickens had introduced the novel of intense everyday realism—of petits faits vrais, in Stendhal’s phrase; of “naturalism,” in Zola’s—to bring alive in story form the new condition of Europe in the wake of the French and Industrial Revolutions. This became the “modern” approach to art, so much so that in 1863 even Baudelaire, whose influence would eventually be something quite different, went into raptures (in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life”) about a painter named Constantine Guys who delighted in leaving the studio, observing the promiscuous hurly-burly of the Paris streets, the sporting fields, the wartime battlefronts, recording with meticulous care the clothing, the uniforms, the coaches, the carriages, horses, weapons, hairdos, expressions, and gestures of the moment. No longer was the timeless, classical, high-minded approach to art sufficient unto itself, said Baudelaire. To capture the beauty of modern life the artist had to know how to combine the sublime with the intensely real, with Stendhal’s petits faits vrais of the here and now.
This approach elevated literature to a plateau from which it is impossible to back down without sacrificing the medium’s full power—and losing much of its audience. But intellectual fashion was another matter. As Europe’s reigning intellectual fashion, naturalism lasted barely fifty years. The intellectual historian Arnold Hauser recounts how in 1891 a French journalist, Jules Huret, asked sixty-four prominent French writers whether or not they thought naturalism remained a vital literary tradition and, if not, what would take its place. Overwhelmingly they characterized naturalism as dead, finished, and expressed enthusiasm for the new Symbolist poetry, the work of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and, above all, Symbolism’s progenitor, Constantine Guys’s old fan, Baudelaire. It is at this point that poetry, if it is to be considered serious, becomes difficult. The serious poet begins to make his work hard to understand in order to show that he is elevating himself above the rabble, which is now known of course as the bourgeoisie. He is writing for what the French critic Catulle Mendès referred to as “a charming aristocracy,” “an elite in this age of democracy.” There was something vulgar and common about harping on “meaning.” Poetry existed to produce wafts of sensibility, Mallarméstyle. Exquisite wafts; “exquisite” became a very important word. That fashion has never weakened; it has
only grown stronger and spread throughout the West. Today all “serious” poets are hard for the reader—any reader—to understand, although some are more “accessible” than others. I love this word “accessible.” It is as if serious poets live in caves. Some you can reach in your 4 x 4 off-road SUV. Some you can get only within several hundred yards of by vehicle; the rest of the way it’s hand over hand up a hanging vine. Some you can’t reach at all; you can only admire them from a great distance. Today Edgar Allan Poe, far from being accepted for publication in any self-respecting universiy literary quarterly, would be working for Thompson Creative, the company that specializes in radio jingles. It is at this point also that the “literary world” is created, to be inhabited exclusively by us, by “literary” writers, as distinct from the writers read by ordinary readers, who, as we already know, are coarse and deaf to the exquisite music of allusion and irony.
What we are looking at here in the France of Mallarmé’s time is a fashion among self-consciously literary people, which, like a clothing fashion, exists solely to confer some special status upon the wearer. Readers were something else again. When Huret published his survey results in 1891, readers’ tastes had not changed in the slightest. Zola remained the most popular writer in France (and probably in the world), and Maupassant was second. In America in the 1890s, writers like Dreiser and Frank Norris were influenced by French naturalism, not because it was French and fashionable, but because it had such power over readers. The only sort of American novelist who was immediately influenced by French aestheticism was an émigré like Henry James. James, like Proust, Joyce, and George Meredith, turned away from this vulgar business of Dickensian characters and melodramatic plots to the point where, as Hauser puts it, his characters “seem to move in a vacuum compared with the world of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.” James didn’t even care to vie for the attentions of the coarse herd, which is to say, plain readers. He became the first great sensibility wafter in American literature.