If you are five years old, loitering in a syrup of sunheat, gazing at the silver-white mica-eyes in the pavement, you will all at once be besieged by a strangeness: the strangeness of understanding, for the very first time, that you are really alive, and that the world is really true; and the strangeness will divide into a river of wonderings.
Here is what I wondered then, among the mica-eyes:
I wondered what it would be like to become, for just one moment, every kind of animal there is in the world. Even, I thought, a snake.
I wondered what it would be like to know all the languages in the world.
I wondered what it would be like to be that baby under the white netting.
I wondered why, when I looked straight into the sun, I saw a pure circle.
I wondered why my shadow had a shape that was me, but nothing else; why my shadow, which was almost like a mirror, was not a mirror.
I wondered why I was thinking these things; I wondered what wondering was, and why it was spooky, and also secretly sweet, and amazingly interesting. Wondering felt akin to love—an uncanny sort of love, not like loving your mother or father or grandmother, but something curiously and thrillingly other. Something that shone up out of the mica-eyes.
Decades later, I discovered in Wordsworth’s Prelude what it was:
… those hallowed and pure motions of the sense
Which seem, in their simplicity to own
An intellectual charm;
… those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things.
And those existing things are all things, everything the mammal senses know, everything the human mind constructs (temples or equations), the unheard poetry on the hidden side of the round earth, the great thirsts everywhere, the wonderings past wonderings.
First inkling, bridging our new existence to existing things. Can one begin with mica in the pavement and learn the prophet Micah’s meaning?
THE BREAK
I WRITE THESE WORDS at least a decade after the terrifying operation that separated us. Unfortunately, no then current anaesthesia, and no then accessible surgical technique, was potent enough to suppress consciousness of the knife as it made its critical blood-slice through the area of our two warring psyches. It is the usual case in medicine that twins joined at birth are severed within the first months of life. Given the intransigence of my partner (who until this moment remains recalcitrant and continues to wish to convert me to her loathsome outlook), I had to wait many years until I could obtain her graceless and notoriously rancorous consent to our divergence.
The truth is I have not spoken to her since the day we were wheeled, side by side as usual, on the same gurney, into the operating room. Afterward it was at once observed (especially by me) that the surgery had not altered her character in any respect, and I felt triumphantly justified in having dragged her into it. I had done her no injury—she was as intractable as ever. As for myself, I was freed from her proximity and her influence. The physical break was of course the end, not the beginning, of our rupture; psychologically, I had broken with her a long time ago. I disliked her then, and though shut of her daily presence and unavoidable attachment, I dislike her even now.
Any hint or symptom of her discourages me; I have always avoided reading her. Her style is clotted, parenthetical, self-indulgent, long-winded, periphrastic, in every way excessive—hard going altogether. One day it came to me: why bother to keep up this fruitless connection? We have nothing in common, she and I.
To begin with, I am honest; she is not. Or, to spare her a moral lecture (but why should I? what has she ever spared me?), let me put it that she is a fantasist and I am not. Never mind that her own term for her condition is, not surprisingly, realism. It is precisely her “realism” that I hate. It is precisely her “facts” that I despise.
Her facts are not my facts. For instance, you will never catch me lying about my age, which is somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two. She, on the other hand, claims to be over sixty. A preposterous declaration, to be sure—but see how she gets herself up to look the part! She is all dye, putty, greasepaint. She resembles nothing so much as Gravel Gertie in the old Dick Tracy strip. There she is, done up as a white-haired, dewlapped, thick-waisted, thick-lensed hag, seriously myopic. A phenomenal fake. (Except for the nearsightedness, which, to be charitable, I don’t hold against her, being seriously myopic myself.)
Aging is certainly not her only pretense. She imagines herself to be predictable; fixed; irrecoverable. She reflects frequently—tediously—on the trajectory of her life, and supposes that its arc and direction are immutable. What she has done she has done. She believes she no longer has decades to squander. I know better than to subscribe to such fatalism. Here the radical difference in our ages (which began to prove itself out at the moment of surgery) is probably crucial. It is her understanding that she is right to accept her status. She is little known or not known at all, relegated to marginality, absent from the authoritative anthologies that dictate which writers matter.
She knows she does not matter. She argues that she has been in rooms with the famous, and felt the humiliation of her lesserness, her invisibility, her lack of writerly weight or topical cachet. In gilded chambers she has seen journalists and cultural consuls cluster around and trail after the stars; at conferences she has been shunted away by the bureaucratic valets of the stars. She is aware that she has not written enough. She is certainly not read. She sees with a perilous clarity that she will not survive even as “minor.”
I will have none of this. There was a time—a tenuous membrane still hung between us, a remnant of sentiment or nostalgia on my part—when she was fanatically driven to coerce me into a similar view of myself. The blessèd surgery, thank God, put an end to all that. My own ambition is fresh and intact. I can gaze at her fearfulness, her bloodless perfectionism and the secret crisis of confidence that dogs it, without a drop of concern. You may ask: why am I so pitiless? Don’t I know (I know to the lees) her indiscipline, her long periods of catatonic paralysis, her idleness, her sleepiness?
Again you ask: do you never pity her? Never. Hasn’t she enough self-pity for the two of us? It is not that I am any more confident or less fearful; here I am, standing at the threshold still, untried, a thousand times more diffident, tremulous, shy. My heart is vulnerable to the world’s distaste and dismissiveness. But oh, the difference between us! I have the power to scheme and to construct—a power that time has eroded in her, a power that she regards as superseded, useless. Null and void. Whatever shreds remain of her own ambitiousness embarrass her now. She is resigned to her failures. She is shamed by them. To be old and unachieved: ah.
Yes, ah! Ah! This diminution of hunger in her disgusts me; I detest it. She is a scandal of sorts, a superannuated mourner: her Promethean wounds (but perhaps they are only Procrustean?) leak on her bed when she wakes, on the pavement when she walks. She considers herself no more than an ant in an anthill. I have heard her say of the round earth, viewed on films sent back from this or that space shuttle, that Isaiah and Shakespeare are droplets molten into that tiny ball, and as given to evaporation as the pointlessly rotating ball itself. Good God, what have I to do with any of that? I would not trade places with her for all the china in Teaneck.
Look, there is so much ahead! Forms of undiminished luminescence: specifically, novels. A whole row of novels. All right, let her protest if it pleases her—when she set out, the written word was revered; reputations were rooted in literariness—poets, novelists. Stories are electronic nowadays, and turn up in pictures: the victory, technologically upgraded, of the comic book. The writer is at last delectably alone, dependent on no acclaim. It is all for the sake of the making, the finding, the doing: the Ding-an-Sich. The wild interestingness of it! I will be a novelist yet! I feel myself becoming a voluptuary of human nature, a devourer, a spewer, a seer, an ironist. A hermit-toiler. I dream of nights without sleep.
She, like so m
any of her generation, once sought work and recognition. Perhaps she labored for the sake of fame, who knows? Five or six of her contemporaries, no more, accomplished that ubiquitous desire. But here in the gyre of my eighteenth year, my goatish and unbridled twentieth, my muscular and intemperate and gluttonous prime, it is fruitfulness I am after: despite the unwantedness of it—and especially despite her—I mean to begin a life of novel-writing. What do I care? I have decades to squander.
As for her: coward, whining wizened hoary fake—I deny her, I denounce her, I let her go!
OLD HAND AS NOVICE
I REMEMBER precisely the moment I knew I wanted to write a play: it was in an out-of-the-way theater, the Promenade, on Broadway in the Seventies, somewhere in the middle of the second act of The Common Pursuit, a melancholic comedy by the British playwright Simon Gray. The play was a send-up of the passionate Cambridge cenacle attached to Scrutiny, that fabled literary periodical presided over by F. R. Leavis, an eminent critic of forty years ago; it followed the rise and fall and erotic history of its madly literary protagonists from cocky youth to sour middle age. Madly literary myself, I sat electrified in the seductive dark of the Promenade, flooded by an overpowering wish: Some day!
And I remember precisely the moment I discovered the first sinister fumes brewed up by those liars and obfuscators who dare to term themselves “revisionists,” but are more accurately named Holocaust deniers. It was the late summer of 1961. My husband and I had just rented an apartment in a building so new that the fresh plaster, not yet fully dried, was found to be congenial to a repulsive army of moisture-seeking insects rather prettily called silverfish. How to rid ourselves of this plague? Off we went to the town library, to look for a book on household infestation. The helpful volume we hit on happened to be translated, and very nicely so, from the German. It recommended a certain gas with a record of remarkable success in the extermination of vermin. An asterisk led to a slyly impassive footnote at the bottom of the page, utterly deadpan and meanly corrupt: “Zyklon B, used during the Second World War.”
How the delectable theatrical dark came to be entangled with the dark of Zyklon B, the death-camp gas, I can hardly fathom; but when, after years of feeling unready, I did finally undertake to write a play, it turned out to be tempestuously and bitterly political—nothing in the least like that dream of literary laughter the Promenade had inspired long before. Its salient theme was Holocaust denial: a trap contrived out of cunning, deceit, and wicked surprise. Yet a not inconsequential literary issue stuck from the start to the outer flanks of my play, and continued to dog it: the ill-humored question of the playwright’s credentials.
Of course there is nothing new in a writer’s crossing from one form into another; no one is startled, or aggrieved, by a novelist turned essayist, or by a poet who ventures into fiction. The radical divide is not in the writer, but in the mode, and mood, of reception. Reading is the expression of a profound social isolation. As in getting born or dying, you are obliged to do it alone; there is no other way. Theater—like religion, its earliest incarnation—is a communal rite. Study a row of faces transfixed in unison by a scene on a stage, and you will fall into a meditation on anatomical variety irradiated by a kind of dramaturgical monotheism: the infusion of a single godly force into so many pairs of luminously staring eyes.
Theater is different from fiction, yes; an untried genre for the novice playwright, a dive into strangeness: that mysterious hiatus in the dark, that secret promissory drawing of breath just before the stage lights brighten. Nevertheless a novice is not the same as an amateur. An amateur worships—is glamorized by—the trappings of an industry, including the excitements of being “inside.” Theater industry (or call it, as anthropologists nowadays like to do, theater culture), with all its expertise, protocol, hierarchy, jargon, tradition, its existential hard knocks and heartbreak, its endemic optimism and calloused cynicism, its experience with audiences, its penchant for spectacle, still cannot teach a writer the writer’s art—which is not on the stage, but in the ear and in the brain. Though a novice playwright will certainly be attentive to “technique,” to “knowhow,” real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self; a writer’s lessons are ineluctably internal. As a beginning novelist long ago, I learned to write dialogue not in a fiction workshop ruled by a sophisticated “mentor,” but by reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter over and over again. There were uncanny reverberations in those short, plain sentences, and a peculiarly suspenseful arrest of a character’s intent. The perfected work was the mentor.
Let me not arrogantly misrepresent. There is plenty for an uninitiated playwright to learn from the living air of a reading, a rehearsal, a developing performance in the theater itself; and from an actor’s cadence or lift of the eyelid; and from an impassioned talk with a seasoned playwright (and no one is more openly generous than lifelong playwrights, who are a band of mutually sympathizing cousins); and above all from a trusted and trusting director who recognizes the writer as writer. Besides, a novelist’s perspective is hardly akin to a playwright’s. Novels are free to diverge, to digress, to reflect, to accrete. Proust is a gargantuan soliloquizer. Tolstoy encompasses whole histories. George Eliot pauses for psychological essays. A novel is like the physicist’s premise of an expanding universe—horizon after horizon, firmament sailing past firmament. But a play is just the reverse: the fullness of the universe drawn down into a single succinct atom—the all-consuming compactness and density of the theorist’s black hole. Everything converges in the dot that is the stage. A novelist seeking to become a playwright will uncover new beauty—structure and concision; the lovely line of the spine and the artfully integrated turn of each vertebra.
Yet always a gauntlet is thrown down before the newcomer playwright (especially one who has arrived from the famously sequestered craft of fiction), and that is the many-fingered image of “collaboration.” I want to say quickly—against all the power and authority of theatrical magnates and magi, against the practice and conviction of all those who know more and better than an uninformed interloper like myself—that the term “collaboration,” as I have heard it used again and again, is a fake, a fib, and a sham. The truth stands clarified: no matter what the genre, a writer is necessarily an autonomous, possessed, and solitary figure generating furies. Imagination is a self-contained burning, a fire that cannot be fed from without. The idea of a “collaborative art” is an idea out of Oz—i.e., it supplies you with a phony wizard haranguing into a megaphone. No one can claim ascendancy over a writer’s language or imagination, and anyone who tries—and succeeds—is an invader, an editor, or just a run-of-the-mill boss. Writers cloutless and consequently docile will likely acquiesce—but what will come out of it is what editors and bosses always get: something edited, something obliging. An artificial voice. A dry wadi where the heart of a river might have roiled. In the name of a putative collaborative art, a novice playwright (even if an old hand as a writer) will be manipulated by the clever, patronized by the callow, humiliated by the talentless. Generations of clichés will pour down. To become master over a writer is not, as it happens, to become a master of writing.
But if the notion of a collaborative art is simply authoritarian make-believe, the experience of skills in collaboration is the rapt and gorgeous satisfaction of theater—the confluence of individual artists, each conceptually and temperamentally singular. The brainy director’s orchestral sensibility; the actors’ transformative magickings (a gesture over nothingness will build you the solidest phantom table conceivable); dramatic sculptures hewn of purest light; inklings sewn into a scene by the stitch of a tiny sound; a dress that is less a costume than a wise corroboration; a set that lands you unerringly in the very place you need to be; and the sine qua non of the producers’ endlessly patient acts of faith—all these carry their visionary plenitude. Novice playwrights—and veterans, too, I believe—will fall on their knees in gratitude.
To return to the matter of credentials. A
bird can fly over any continent you choose; it’s the having wings that counts. A writer can be at home in novel, story, essay, or play; it’s the breathing inside a blaze of words that counts. However new to theater culture, a writer remains exactly that—the only genuine authority over the words and the worlds they embody.
And if the play should vanish away without being realized in a theater before an audience (nine times out of ten, plays are snowflakes in July), the disappointed scribbler will peacefully turn back to the blessed privacy of a secluded desk—where the writer not only acts all the roles, wears all the costumes, and dreams all the scenery, but is both determined producer and tireless director, unwaveringly committed to fruition; and where there is no mistaking who is sovereign.
SEYMOUR: HOMAGE TO A BIBLIOPHILE
ANYONE WHO sets out to tell her own peculiar Seymour story takes no risks of parochialism: nothing can be more certain than that my Seymour will be your Seymour; and vice versa. There are two reasons for this confidence. The first is that I came to Seymour late, and found him in all the ripened wholeness of his absolute Self—Seymour to the full, Seymour to the dazzling brim. By the time I got to know him—less than two years, it turned out, before he left us to join Keats in Heaven—it was plain he had been this Seymour, and no other, for a long while: a man of such spirited sweetness, airiness, and diffident wit, a man of such ungrudging jauntiness and sprightly gentleness, an affectionate idealist so luminously elevated by humane imagination, that I understood at once I had fallen into an amazement.
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