by Gore Vidal
Well, one knows about Eichmann, and of course Martin Bormann is a minor industry among bad journalists; so presumably there are other “important” SS officers growing old in Paraguay. But do they, as Mr. Forsyth assures us, have an organization called Odessa whose aim is “fivefold”? Firstfold is “to rehabilitate former SS men into the professions of the Federal Republic” second, “to infiltrate at least the lower echelons of political party activity” third, to provide “legal defense” for any SS killer hauled before a court and in every way possible to stultify the course of justice in West Germany; fourth, to promote the fortunes of former SS members (this seems to be a repeat of the first of the fivefolds); and, five, “to propagandize the German people to the viewpoint that the SS killers were in fact none other than ordinary patriotic soldiers.”
This is food for thought. Yet why has one never heard of Odessa? Mr. Forsyth anticipates that question: “changing its name several times” (highly important for a completely secret society), “the Odessa has sought to deny its own existence as an organization, with the result that many Germans are inclined to say that Odessa does not exist. The short answer is: it exists….” We are then assured that the tale he is about to tell represents one of their failures. Obviously fun and games; presumably, there is no such thing as the Odessa but in the interest of making a thriller look like a document (today’s fashion in novels) the author is mingling true with “false facts,” as Thomas Jefferson would say.
Now for the story. But, no, after the Dedication and the Author’s Note and the Foreword there comes a Publisher’s Note. Apparently many of the characters in the book are “real people” but “the publishers do not wish to elucidate further because it is in this ability to perplex the reader as to how much is true and how much false that much of the grip of the story lies.” The publishers, Viking, write suspiciously like Mr. Forsyth. “Nevertheless, the publishers feel the reader may be interested or assisted to know that the story of former SS Captain Eduard Roschmann, the commandant of the concentration camp at Riga from 1941 to 1944, from his birth in Graz, Austria, in 1908, to his present exile in South America, is completely factual and drawn from SS and West German records.” So let us bear this Publisher’s Note in mind as we contemplate the story Mr. Forsyth tells.
After the fall of Hitler, Roschmann was harbored at “the enormous Franciscan Monastery in Rome in Via Sicilia.” There is no such establishment according to my spies in the order. “Bishop Alois Hudal, the German Bishop in Rome” (Mr. Forsyth seems to think that this is some sort of post) “spirited thousands [of SS] to safety.” “The SS men traveled on Red Cross travel documents, issued through the intervention of the Vatican.” After a period in Egypt, Roschmann returns to Germany in 1955 under a pseudonym. Thanks to Odessa, he becomes the head of an important firm. He conducts secret research “aimed at devising a teleguidance system for those rockets [he] is now working on in West Germany. His code name is Vulkan.”
Why is Roschmann at work on the rockets? Because Odessa and its evil scientists “have proposed to President Nasser” (whose predecessor Mr. Forsyth thinks was named Naguil), and he “accepted with alacrity, that these warheads on the Kahiras and Zafiras be of a different type. Some will contain concentrated cultures of bubonic plague, and the others will explode high above the ground, showering the entire territory of Israel with irradiated cobalt-sixty. Within hours they will all be dying of the pest or of gamma-ray sickness.”
This is splendid Fu Manchu nonsense (infecting the Israelis with bubonic plague would of course start a world epidemic killing the Egyptians, too, while spreading radioactive cobalt in the air would probably kill off a large percentage of the world’s population, as any story conference at Universal would quickly conclude). Next Mr. Forsyth presents us with the classic thriller cliché: only one man holds this operation together. Roschmann. Destroy him and Israel is saved.
The plot of course is foiled by a West German newspaperman and its details need not concern us: it is the sort of storytelling that propels the hero from one person to the next person, asking questions. As a stylist, Mr. Forsyth is addicted to the freight-car sentence: “This time his destination was Bonn, the small and boring town on the river’s edge that Konrad Adenauer had chosen as the capital of the Federal Republic, because he came from it.” (Adenauer came from Cologne but Mr. Forsyth is not one to be deterred by small details: after all, he is under the impression that it was Martin Bormann “on whom the mantle of the Führer had fallen after 1945.”) What is important is that Mr. Forsyth and Viking Press want us to believe that the Vatican knowingly saved thousands of SS men after 1945, that six of the ten high-ranking Hamburg police officers in 1964 were former SS men, that President Nasser authorized a clandestine SS organization to provide him with the means to attack Israel with bubonic plague, and that when this plot failed, the Argentine government presumably offered asylum to Captain Roschmann. Caveat emptor.
The boldness of author and publisher commands…well, awe and alarm. Is it possible now to write a novel in which Franklin Roosevelt secretly finances the German American Bund because he had been made mad by infantile paralysis? Can one write a novel in which Brezhnev is arranging with the American army defectors in Canada to poison Lake Michigan (assuming this is not a redundancy)? Viking would probably say, yes, why not? And for good measure, to ensure success, exploit the prejudices, if possible, of American Jewish readers, never letting them forget that the guilt of the Germans (“dreaming only in the dark hours of the ancient gods of strength and lust and power”) for having produced Hitler is now as eternal in the works of bad writers and greedy publishers as is the guilt of the Jews for the death of Jesus in the minds of altogether too many simple Christians. Exploitation of either of these myths strikes me as an absolute evil and not permissible even in the cheapest of fiction brought out by the most opportunist of publishers.
The number one best-seller is called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is a greeting card bound like a book with a number of photographs of seagulls in flight. The brief text celebrates the desire for excellence of a seagull who does not want simply to fly in order to eat but to fly beautifully for its own sake. He is much disliked for this by his peers; in fact, he is ostracized. Later he is translated to higher and higher spheres where he can spend eternity practicing new flight techniques. It is touching that this little story should be so very popular because it is actually celebrating art for art’s sake as well as the virtues of nonconformity; and so, paradoxically, it gives pleasure to the artless and to the conforming, to the drones who dream of honey-making in their unchanging hive.
Unlike the other best-sellers this work is not so much a reflection of the age of movies as it is a tribute to Charles Darwin and his high priestess, the incomparable creatrix of The Fountainhead (starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal), Ayn Rand.
There is not much point in generalizing further about these best-sellers. The authors prefer fact or its appearance to actual invention. This suggests that contemporary historians are not doing their job if to Wouk and Solzhenitsyn falls the task of telling today’s reader about two world wars and to Forsyth and Trevanian current tales of the cold war. As Christianity and Judaism sink into decadence, religioso fictions still exert a certain appeal. It will surprise certain politicians to learn that sex is of no great interest to best-selling authors. Only Semi-Tough tries to be sexy, and fails. Too much deodorant.
Reading these ten books one after the other was like being trapped in the “Late Late Show,” staggering from one half-remembered movie scene to another, all the while beginning to suspect with a certain horror that the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table will be honored and remembered for his many credits on numerous profitable pix long after Isherwood (adapted “The Gambler,” with Gregory Peck), Faulkner (adapted The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart), Huxley (adapted Pride and Prejudice, with Greer Garson), Vidal (adapted Suddenly, Last Summer, with Elizabeth Taylor) take their humble places below the salt, as it were, for
none of us regarded with sufficient seriousness the greatest art form of all time. By preferring perversely to write books that reflected not the movies we had seen but life itself, not as observed by that sterile machine the camera but as it is netted by a beautiful if diminishing and polluted language, we were, all in all, kind of dumb. Like Sam, one should’ve played it again.
The New York Review of Books
May 17 and May 31, 1973
FRENCH LETTERS: THEORIES OF THE NEW NOVEL
To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of “fact.” But then, Americans have never been enthusiastic readers. According to Dr. Gallup, only five percent of our population can be regarded as habitual readers. This five percent is probably a constant minority from generation to generation, despite the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century there were as many bookstores in the United States as there are today. It is true that novels in paperback often reach a very large audience. But that public is hardly serious, if one is to believe a recent New York Times symposium on paperback publishing. Apparently novels sell not according to who wrote them but according to how they are presented, which means that Boys and Girls Together will outsell Pale Fire, something it did not do in hard cover. Except for a handful of entertainers like the late Ian Fleming, the mass audience knows nothing of authors. They buy titles, and most of those titles are not of novels but of nonfiction: books about the Kennedys, doctors, and vivid murders are preferred to the work of anyone’s imagination no matter how agreeably debased.
In this, if nothing else, the large public resembles the clerks, one of whom, Norman Podhoretz, observed nine years ago that “A feeling of dissatisfaction and impatience, irritation and boredom with contemporary serious fiction is very widespread,” and he made the point that the magazine article is preferred to the novel because the article is useful, specific, relevant—something that most novels are not. This liking for fact may explain why some of our best-known novelists are read with attention only when they comment on literary or social matters. In the highest intellectual circles, a new novel by James Baldwin or William Gass or Norman Mailer—to name at random three celebrated novelists—is apt to be regarded with a certain embarrassment, hostage to a fortune often too crudely gained, and bearing little relation to its author’s distinguished commentaries.
An even odder situation exists in the academy. At a time when the works of living writers are used promiscuously as classroom texts, the students themselves do little voluntary reading. “I hate to read,” said a Harvard senior to a New York Times reporter, “and I never buy any paperbacks.” The undergraduates’ dislike of reading novels is partly due to the laborious way in which novels are taught: the slow killing of the work through a close textual analysis. Between the work and the reader comes the explication, and the explicator is prone to regard the object of analysis as being somehow inferior to the analysis itself.
In fact, according to Saul Bellow, “Critics and professors have declared themselves the true heirs and successors of the modern classic authors.” And so, in order to maintain their usurped dignity, they are given “to redescribing everything downward, blackening the present age and denying creative scope to their contemporaries.” Although Mr. Bellow overstates the case, the fact remains that the novel as currently practiced does not appeal to the intellectuals any more than it does to the large public, and it may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age which Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed post-Gutenberg. Whether or not the Professor’s engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today’s student often experiences difficulty in reading and writing. Linear type’s warm glow, so comforting to Gutenberg man, makes his successors uncomfortably hot. Needless to say, that bright minority which continues the literary culture exists as always, but it is no secret that even they prefer watching movies to reading novels. John Barth ought to interest them more than Antonioni, but he doesn’t.
For the serious novelist, however, the loss of the audience should not be disturbing. “I write,” declared one of them serenely. “Let the reader learn to read.” And contrary to Whitman, great audiences are not necessary for the creation of a high literature. The last fifty years have been a particularly good time for poetry in English, but even that public which can read intelligently knows very little of what has been done. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more. Unhappily, the novelist, by the very nature of his coarse art, is greedy and immodest; unless he is read by everyone, he cannot delight, instruct, reform, destroy a world he wants, at the least, to be different for his having lived in it. Writers as various as Dickens and Joyce, as George Eliot and Proust, have suffered from this madness. It is the nature of the beast. But now the beast is caged, confined by old forms that have ceased to attract. And so the question is: can those forms be changed, and the beast set free?
Since the Second World War, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, among others, have attempted to change not only the form of the novel but the relationship between book and reader, and though their experiments are taken most seriously on the Continent, they are still too little known and thought about in those countries the late General de Gaulle believed to be largely populated by Anglo-Saxons. Among American commentators, only Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, published in 1966, has made a sustained effort to understand what the French are doing, and her occasional essays on their work are well worth reading, not only as reflections of an interesting and interested mind but also because she shares with the New Novelists (as they loosely describe themselves) a desire for the novel to become “what it is not in England and America, with rare and unrelated exceptions: a form of art which people with serious and sophisticated [sic] taste in the other arts can take seriously.” Certainly Miss Sontag finds nothing adventurous or serious in “the work of the American writers most admired today: for example, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William Styron, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud.” They are “essentially unconcerned with the problems of the novel as an art form. Their main concern is with their ‘subjects.’” And because of this, she finds them “essentially unserious and unambitious.” By this criterion, to be serious and ambitious in the novel, the writer must create works of prose comparable to those experiments in painting which have brought us to Pop and Op art and in music to the strategic silences of John Cage. Whether or not these experiments succeed or fail is irrelevant. It is enough, if the artist is serious, to attempt new forms; certainly he must not repeat old ones.
The two chief theorists of the New Novel are Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. As novelists, their works do not much resemble one another or, for that matter, conform to each other’s strictures. But it is as theorists not as novelists that they shall concern us here. Of the two, Alain Robbe-Grillet has done the most to explain what he thinks the New Novel is and is not, in Snapshots and For a New Novel, translated by Richard Howard (1965). To begin with, he believes that any attempt at controlling the world by assigning it a meaning (the accepted task of the traditional novelist) is no longer possible. At best, meaning was
an illusory simplification; and far from becoming clearer and clearer because of it, the world has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world’s reality resides, our task is now to create a literature which takes that presence into account.
He then attacks the idea of psychological “depth” as a myth. From the Comtesse de La Fayette to Gide, the novelist’s ro
le was to burrow “deeper and deeper to reach some ever more intimate strata.” Since then, however, “something” has been “changing totally, definitively in our relations with the universe.” Though he does not define that ominous “something,” its principal effect is that “we no longer consider the world as our own, our private property, designed according to our needs and readily domesticated.” Consequently:
the novel of characters belongs entirely to the past; it describes a period: and that which marked the apogee of the individual. Perhaps this is not an advance, but it is evident that the present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world’s destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families.
Nathalie Sarraute is also concerned with the idea of man the administrative number in Tropisms and in The Age of Suspicion, translated by Maria Jolas (1964). She quotes Claude-Edmonde Magny: “Modern man, overwhelmed by mechanical civilization, is reduced to the triple determinism of hunger, sexuality and social status: Freud, Marx and Pavlov.” (Surely in the wrong order.) She, too, rejects the idea of human depth: “The deep uncovered by Proust’s analyses had already proved to be nothing but a surface.”
Like Robbe-Grillet, she sees the modern novel as an evolution from Dostoevsky-Flaubert to Proust-Kafka; and each agrees (in essays written by her in 1947 and by him in 1958) that one of its principal touchstones is Camus’s The Stranger, a work which she feels “came at the appointed time,” when the old psychological novel was bankrupt because, paradoxically, psychology itself, having gone deeper than ever before, “inspired doubts as to the ultimate value of all methods of research.” Homo absurdus, therefore, was Noah’s dove, the messenger of deliverance. Camus’s stranger is shown entirely from the inside, “all sentiment or thought whatsoever appears to have been completely abolished.” He has been created without psychology or memory; he exists in a perpetual present. Robbe-Grillet goes even further in his analysis: