I don’t pretend to have read all of Bill’s books. He’s hyperfertile in the manner of Dickens or Balzac, producing one of those oeuvres that will take people decades to sort out. But, as was already evident in The Rainbow Stories, the more appropriate comparison is to Melville and Whitman, writers who, in taking on sprawling new worlds of experience, had few usable literary examples to guide them and so mainly trusted themselves, their own portable instincts and intelligences. Like them, Bill creates forms as he goes. Like them, he’s full of an American disdain for authority; he undertakes vast projects; he also produces the occasional clunker. What became his signature form—relatively short passages, arranged by a logic more poetic than narrative and headed with oblique or ironic titles—mirrors his approach to topics that most writers would find too huge to imagine tackling: he atomizes himself and tosses his sensibilities to the wind.
There seems to be nothing that doesn’t interest Bill. In “The Blue Yonder,” a sublime novella in The Rainbow Stories, a character named the Other empties and catalogues the contents of a trash can in Golden Gate Park, looking for clues to the murders of San Francisco winos which he suspects the other side of his split personality is committing. His “autopsy” of the trash can fills two and a half pages:
… three partially squashed Budweiser cans, and a top-sealed Colonel Sanders receptacle for piping hot fryer chickens (now digested, evidently, for what was in there now was a honey-colored turd).—Below the turd was a blue plastic wrapper for the New York Times, a snotty kleenex with the hardened texture of peanut brittle, and a Continental Yogurt cup whose scrapings had separated and partially liquefied and attracted bean-shaped maggots …
In a funny footnote, the author attests to having personally explored a trash can on November 13, 1986, and to abbreviating the inventory “so as not to strain your patience.” Later in the novella, he attends a pathologist’s autopsy of a wino named Evangeline, and his account of this second autopsy runs to eight pages, some of the sentences clinical, some of them lyrical, all of them necessary:
How like a book the body is! We each write our life story in it, describing to perfection what was done to us, what was done by us. Evangeline’s liver was a chapter entitled: “What I Wanted.” The text was short, but not without pathos. “I wanted to feel loved and warm and happy and dizzy,” Evangeline had written. “I wanted to live in the Blue Yonder. I wanted to live in the blue sky and the sun. I wanted to be my own person. I got everything I wanted.”—The pathologist went on snipping and snipping.
After The Rainbow Stories, my favorite of Bill’s books is The Atlas. The stories in it are immensely engaged, not just in the physical risks he takes, or in his determination to inject himself into living history, but in his ceaseless quest for meaning and order in a frightening and complicated world. The Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders is essentially the figure of the Artist, as the Romantics and the Moderns conceived of it: the all-assimilating individual subjectivity. And Bill, better than any other American writer now working, is attempting to do for us this heroic work of taking on the entire world. Perhaps it’s no surprise, therefore, that the strongest note in The Atlas—the almost unbearable overtone to the whole—is the author’s loneliness. The moment in the book I can’t forget is the night in Berlin when Bill’s loneliness becomes so intense that he gives all his money to a prostitute and begs her for a kiss in return. Failing to get one, he approaches three other prostitutes in the street and asks them for a free kiss. One of them obligingly removes a wad of gum from her mouth and then spits in his face: There’s your kiss.
Given the richness of Bill’s material, it’s possible to overlook what a very fine stylist he is. A writer could go to all the places he goes and do all the things he does, and if he didn’t also write well none of it would matter. His most willful confusions of fact and imagination, his awfulest catachreses, his most blunt and vulgar factuality all regularly become inspired poetry. What’s on the page seems to have come to him as naturally as breathing. As naturally but not as easily. To write like Bill does, there also has to be a passion for the prose, a hunger for beautiful form. One of the things I loved and recognized in him was that he had that passion and he had that hunger. His books have since earned him a cult following for which he’s a kind of outlaw hero, an underground adventurer. But those of us who’ve had the pleasure of his friendship know that when he’s talking—as opposed to when he’s listening (at which he is a master)—his interests run to grammar and punctuation, to questions like “Who have you been reading?” and “What are her sentences like?”
* * *
I’m not sure why Bill and I drifted apart. It may simply be something that happens to writers when they emerge from their respective but still miscible solutions and become more crystalline versions of themselves, or it may be that our particular big-and-little-brother relationship stopped working when I found my new road. There was also the matter of my falling ever farther behind with my reading of Bill’s books, and of our no longer sharing a city. He and Janice had settled permanently in Sacramento, and even after I began spending time in Santa Cruz, just three hours away, he was often traveling in some faraway place that he’d found an editor to pay him to report on.
The one time I visited him in Sacramento, in 1995, he took me out to a shooting range and let me fire his .50-caliber Desert Eagle and his Tec-9 semi-automatic. Amid the cordite smoke was a familiar old ambiguity, a whiff of Hemingway flaunting his male prowess (poor Scott Fitzgerald) (but also: poor Hemingway!) intermingled with Bill’s boyish enthusiasm for his guns, his pride in his mastery of them, and his patient, uncondescending instruction of a peer who might otherwise never have experienced the kick of a .50-caliber weapon. I felt a little bit one-upped, and I kept getting false-footed by the flatness of his utterances, the deliberate pauses, the almost non-sequiturial way his words come out. But I was happy to be in his presence again. The many chapters of his life were written on his body in the form of a calm, Atlas-like attentiveness and charisma. After we’d fired all his weapons, we went and hung out with Janice in their big suburban-style house, whose petit-bourgeois (Bill’s own word for it) decor might have seemed incongruous to someone who knew him only through his outré writing. What I remember best from the house, aside from Bill’s huge library, is the framed world map that was hanging in an upstairs hallway. The map was covered with hundreds of pushpins marking all the places Bill had been, many of them remote or dangerous or both. I understood, because I’d had it myself, the impulse to make a map like that, to literally imprint the self on the world, as a way almost of proving that I’d lived and walked the Earth at a particular moment in its history. But looking at Bill’s map, in that suburban hallway, I felt—lonely.
Years later, when I was in Santa Cruz and my friend David Wallace had moved to Claremont, Bill called me up with another proposal. “Hey, Jon,” he said in his very flattest voice, “have you ever been to the Salton Sea? I’m working on a project down there, and I was thinking maybe you and me and Foster Wallace could get together and go camping.” The proposal seemed crazy even by Vollmann standards. The Salton Sea, a dying lake in the desert east of San Diego, is one of the foulest-smelling and least camping-friendly places in the country, and I didn’t know anyone who was less of an outdoorsman than David. But I told Bill I’d mention the idea to him. When I did, David responded with a pained silence and changed the subject. Only much later did I see that Bill’s proposal had also been brilliant, and regret that I hadn’t pressed David harder. Among other things, I’d learned that the Salton Sea is one of the country’s premier birdwatching sites, worth suffering its stench and its clouds of flies for. I wished that I could step, for a few days, into an alternate universe in which I camped there with my two gifted friends, a universe in which both of them were still alive and might start their own friendship, because by then, in the universe in which I’m writing this, David was dead and Bill and I had fallen fully out of touch.
A ROOTING INTEREST
(on Edith Wharton)
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that a fiction writer’s oeuvre is a mirror of the writer’s character. It may well be a defect of my own character that my literary tastes are so deeply intertwined with my responses, as a person, to the person of the author—that I persist in disliking the posturing young Steinbeck who wrote Tortilla Flat while loving the later Steinbeck who fought back personal and career entropy and produced East of Eden, and that I draw what amounts to a moral distinction between the two. But I suspect that sympathy, or its absence, is involved in almost every reader’s literary judgments. Without sympathy, whether for the writer or for the fictional characters, a work of fiction has a very hard time mattering.
So what to make of Edith Wharton, on her 150th birthday? There are many good reasons to wish Wharton’s work read, or read afresh, at this late literary date. You may be dismayed by the ongoing underrepresentation of women in the American canon, or by the academy’s valorization of overt formal experimentation at the expense of more naturalistic fiction. You may lament that Wharton’s work is still commonly assumed to be as dated as the hats she wore, or that several generations of high-school graduates know her chiefly through her frosty minor novel Ethan Frome. You may feel that, alongside the more familiar genealogies of American fiction (Henry James and the modernists, Mark Twain and the vernacularists, Herman Melville and the postmoderns, Zora Neale Hurston and the literature of black identity), there is a less noticed line connecting William Dean Howells to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and thence to Jay McInerney and Jane Smiley, and that Wharton is the vital link in it. You may want, as I do, to recelebrate The House of Mirth, call much-merited attention to The Custom of the Country, and re-evaluate The Age of Innocence—her three great like-titled novels. But to consider Wharton and her work is to confront the problem of sympathy.
No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did. Although she was seldom entirely free of money worries, she always lived as if she were: pouring her inherited income into houses in rich-person precincts, indulging her passion for gardens and interior decoration, touring Europe endlessly in hired yachts or chauffeured cars, hobnobbing with the powerful and the famous, despising inferior hotels. To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn’t easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage. And she wasn’t privileged like Tolstoy, with his social-reform schemes and his idealization of peasants. She was deeply conservative, opposed to socialism, unions, and woman suffrage, intellectually attracted to the unrelenting worldview of Darwinism, hostile to the rawness and noise and vulgarity of America (by 1914, she’d settled permanently in France, and she visited the United States only once after that, for twelve days), and unwilling to support her friend Teddy Roosevelt when his politics became more populist. She was the kind of lady who fired off a high-toned letter of complaint to the owner of a shop where a clerk had refused to lend her an umbrella. Her biographers, including the estimable R. W. B. Lewis, supply this signal image of the artist at work: writing in bed after breakfast and tossing the completed pages on the floor, to be sorted and typed up by her secretary.
Edith Newbold Jones did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty. The man she would have most liked to marry, her friend Walter Berry, a noted connoisseur of female beauty, wasn’t the marrying type. After two failed youthful courtships, she settled for an affable dud of modest means, Teddy Wharton. That their ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps chiefly a function of her sexual ignorance, the blame for which she laid squarely on her mother. As far as anyone knows, Wharton died having had only one other physical relationship, an affair with an evasive bisexual journalist and serial two-timer, Morton Fullerton. She by then was well into her forties, and the beginner-like idealism and blatancy of her ardor—detailed in a secret diary and in letters preserved by Fullerton—are at once poignant and somewhat embarrassing, as they seem later to have been to Wharton herself.
Her father, a benign but recessive figure, died when she was twenty, after suffering from the financial stresses of providing a luxurious lifestyle for his wife. Wharton, all her life, had only bad things to say about her mother; she also became estranged from both her brothers. She had relatively few friendships with women and none with female writers of her caliber—more strikes against her, in terms of sympathy—but she forged close and lasting friendships with an extraordinary number of successful men, including Henry James, Bernard Berenson, and André Gide. Many were gay or otherwise confirmed in bachelorhood. In the instances where her male friends were married, Wharton seems mostly to have treated the wives with indifference or outright jealousy.
The fine quip of one of Wharton’s contemporary reviewers—that she wrote like a masculine Henry James—could also be applied to her social pursuits: she wanted to be with the men and to talk about the things men talked about. The half-affectionate, half-terrified nicknames that James and his circle gave her—the Eagle, the Angel of Devastation—are of a piece with their reports on her. She wasn’t charming or easy to be with, but she was immensely energetic, always curious, always interesting, always formidable. She was a doer, an explorer, a bestower, a thinker. When, in her forties, she finally battled free of the deadness of her marriage and became a best-selling author, Teddy responded by spiraling into mental illness and embezzling a good part of her inheritance. She was distraught about this, as anyone would have been, but not so distraught that she didn’t force Teddy to pay up; three years later, with firm resolve, she divorced him. Lacking good looks and the feminine charms that might have accompanied them, she eventually became, in every sense but one, the man of her house.
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton’s privileges might well seem more forgivable if she’d also looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of the unfair capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself. At the center of each of her three finest novels is a female character of exceptional beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the problem of sympathy.
The reader of The House of Mirth (1905) is introduced to its heroine, Lily Bart, through the gaze of an admiring man, Lawrence Selden, who runs into her by chance at Grand Central station. Selden immediately wonders what Lily is doing there, and he reflects that “it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.” To Selden, it’s inconceivable that a woman in possession of as much beauty as Lily would not be forever calculating how to use it. And Selden is right about this—Lily, strapped financially, is constantly forced to draw upon her one sure resource—but he is no less wrong. Lily’s predicament is that she is never quite able to square those far-reaching intentions with her momentary desires and her tentative moral sensibilities.
On the surface, there would seem to be no reason for a reader to sympathize with Lily. The social height that she’s bent on securing is one that she herself acknowledges is dull and sterile, she’s profoundly self-involved and incapable of true charity, she pridefully contrasts other women’s looks with her own, she has no intellectual life to speak of, she’s put off from pursuing her one kindred spirit (Selden) by the modesty of his income, and she’s in no danger of ever starving. She is, basically, the worst sort of party girl, and Wharton, in much the same way that she didn’t even try to be soft or charming in her personal life, eschews the standard novelistic tricks for warming or softening Lily’s image—the book is devoid of pet-the-dog moments. So why is it so hard to stop reading Lily’s story?
One big reason is that she doesn’t have “enough” money. The particulars of her shortfall may not be sympathetic—she needs to dress well and gamble at bridge tables in order to catch a man who can enable her to
dress well and gamble for the rest of her life—but one of the mysterious strengths of the novel as an art form, from Balzac forward, is how readily readers connect with the financial anxieties of fictional characters. When Lily, by taking a long romantic walk with Selden, is ruining her chance to marry the extremely wealthy but comically boring and prudish Percy Gryce, with whom she would have had the bleakest of relationships, you may find yourself wanting to shout at her, “You idiot! Don’t do it! Get back to the house and seal the deal with Gryce!” Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after, and Wharton, throughout the book, applies the principle with characteristic relentlessness, tightening the financial screws on Lily as if the author were in league with nature at its most unforgiving.
What finally undoes Lily, though, isn’t the unforgiving world but her own bad decisions, her failures to foresee the seemingly obvious social consequences of her actions. Her propensity for error is a second engine of sympathy. We all know how it feels to be making a mistake, and the deliciousness of watching other people make one—particularly the mistake of marrying the wrong person—is a core appeal of narratives from Oedipus to Middlemarch. Wharton compounds the deliciousness in The House of Mirth by creating an eminently marriageable heroine whose mistake is to be too afraid of making the mistake of marrying wrong. Again and again, at the crucial moment, Lily blows up her opportunities to trade her beauty for financial security, or at least for a chance at happiness.
I don’t know of another novel more preoccupied with female beauty than The House of Mirth. That Wharton, who was fluent in German, chose to saddle her lily-like heroine with a beard—in German, Bart—points toward the gender inversions that the author engaged in to make her difficult life livable and her private life story writable, as well as toward other forms of inversion, such as giving Lily the looks that she didn’t have and denying her the money that she did have. The novel can be read as a sustained effort by Wharton to imagine beauty from the inside and achieve sympathy for it, or, conversely, as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the party girl she couldn’t be. Beauty in novels tends to cut two ways. On the one hand, we’re aware of how often it deforms the moral character of people who possess it; on the other hand, it represents a kind of natural capital, like a tree’s perfect fruit, that we’re instinctively averse to seeing wasted. Ticking along through the novel, as inexorable as the decline in Lily’s funds, is the clock on her youthful good looks. The clock starts running on the very first page—“under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing”—and it continues to heighten the urgency of Lily’s plight, inviting us to share in it emotionally. But only at the book’s very end, when Lily finds herself holding another woman’s baby and experiencing a host of unfamiliar emotions, does a more powerful sort of urgency crash into view. The financial potential of her youth is revealed to have been an artificial value, in contrast to its authentic value in the natural scheme of human reproduction. What has been simply a series of private misfortunes for Lily suddenly becomes something larger: the tragedy of a New York City social world whose priorities are so divorced from nature that they kill the Darwinianly “fit” woman who ought, by natural right, to thrive. The reader is driven to search for an explanation of the tragedy in Lily’s appallingly deforming social upbringing—the kind of upbringing that Wharton herself felt deformed by—and to pity her for it, as, per Aristotle, a tragic protagonist must be pitied.
The End of the End of the Earth Page 9