Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  Going into writing for the social-climbing glory was never the goal, and not just because I didn’t have any long-range goals, never picturing myself in the white mink palace of penthouse nooky and celebrities with all-cap names that gave the critic Seymour Krim such gnashed teeth. I was making my name almost solely as a critic, where restrictions apply. Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod. It’s impossible to imagine George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt from All About Eve as anything other than a fully formed adult, issued from a printing press. To those literary cubs who fancied having a cigarette dangling from their mouths like Albert Camus or Jack Kerouac, or sharing a club table with Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz to anteater a line of coke from here to the Vegas strip, or getting a Chinatown tattoo alongside Mary Gaitskill, or watching Jonathan Franzen adjust his eyewear (and who today would be happy just to get through breakfast without feeling as if everything’s turned to gravel), to them, critics are the snipers in the trees that the director Sam Peckinpah heard whenever the palm leaves rustled. To creatives, the Critic is the undermining inner voice maliciously put on the intercom to tell the whole world (or at least the tiny portion of it that still cares), You’re no good, you were never any good; your mother and I tried to warn you this novel was a mistake, but, no, you wouldn’t listen, Mister-Insists-He-Has-Something-to-Say. Failed artists consider critics failed artists like themselves, but worse, because unlike them they took the easy way out by not even trying to succeed, critics not having the guts to climb into that Teddy Roosevelt arena that everyone likes to invoke as the crucible of character, or risk the snows of Kilimanjaro. Even prestige authors who flex their fingers at performing criticism as if filling in at the piano on Monday nights feign disdain of it as a secondary activity, siphoning off the creative juices necessary to keep genius fertile and gurgling. For some reason, the elegant retort “If doing criticism didn’t cost Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and John Updike any candlepower, what makes you think you’re too good for it, buster?” never seems to stick.

  Journalistic critics such as myself were, are, and forever will be routinely disparaged as parasites, sore losers, serial slashers, Texas tower snipers, and eunuchs at the orgy (what orgy? where is this orgy we seem to have missed?), which would hurt our feelings, if we brutes had any. The journeyman critics who are both perceptive and funny—genuinely funny, not jokey, their wit flipping off their wrists like a sneaky curveball—can escape the accusations of jealousy hurled across the notions counter and earn the affection accorded durable entertainers. But there’s a catch—there’s always a catch, for everything. Like Woody Allen’s comedians, such elegant wiseacres can often feel as if they’ve been denied a seat at the adults’ table, unless it’s the Algonquin Round Table that’s their ideal, where they would have been right at home, passing the soup to Dorothy Parker. They can even start to talk about their reviewing as if it were a minor knack at which they got nimbly adept, like card tricks or shooting pool. But it was these Parcheesi champions with whom I felt the most kinship in the seventies and beyond, the ones unafraid to crack jokes that had a hickory snap to them, such as, yes, John Leonard. Though I didn’t share his enthusiasm for that bevy of neurasthenic seismographs—among them, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion, and Renata Adler—he escorted round the cotillion whenever one of them had a new book out. He and I had a vaudeville moment in the seventies when I was entering the auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards just as he was exiting and he halted, did a classic double take, and asked, “What are you doing here?” as if the purpose of the organization were to keep people like me out. Then he clapped a friendly hand on my shoulder as if to say, It’s okay, you can go in.

  Other serious comedians: the marauding balletomane and literary critic Marvin Mudrick (who, told by a young woman at the Hudson Review, where he was a regular contributor, “You’re the funniest writer I have ever read,” beamed and said, “I could live the rest of my life on that compliment. I don’t care whether it’s true; I love it. That’s what I want to be”); Alfred Chester, whose review of John Rechy’s City of Night provided the template for every hatchet job Dale Peck would undertake decades later; and Wilfrid Sheed, a novelist of asperity (his Max Jamison of 1970 is the definitive poison-pen etching of a critic and the vale of vanities he inhabits—“He was in love with the way his mind worked, and he was sick of the way his mind worked. The first thing that struck you about it, wasn’t it, was the blinding clarity, like a Spanish town at high noon. No shade anywhere. Yet not altogether lacking in subtlety”), primarily known as a critic who could spin dimes with every sentence. His defoliation of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It was something to cherish, something I would sometimes lift from the milk-crate shelf and read in rainy moods like selections from Robert Browning:

  This is the first impression of Making It: that of a burlesque queen solemnly striding up and down to the strains of “Temptation,” and nothing coming off. Hour after pitiless hour …

  … Ambiguity is totally alien to Podhoretz’s book, which has but one gear and one track and rolls down it like a Daily News van …

  … The names come tumbling out like clowns from a circus car. Mary and Dwight and Philip—but then he gets stuck. A gentleman doesn’t rat on his friends. He simply uses them to pad his index …

  … An anatomy of Making It should not bog down on the first navel it comes to. Why have we been brought here, anyway? Anyone who has paddled about in these literary wading pools knows at the very least that George Plimpton looks over your head and Podhoretz looks under your armpit and that Macdonald looks you periodically right in the eye. (Our bad luck that the armpit man wrote the book.)

  In the foreword to the expanded edition of The Morning After, where the Making It review was collected, Sheed recounts a party hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. where he was “accosted by a man I didn’t recognize anymore who said, or rather sneered, ‘I guess there’s a statute of limitations, you son-of-a-bitch,’ and turned on his heel.” It was, of course, Armpit Man making the heel turn. Sheed: “Welcome to the world of Norman Podhoretz, where there obviously is no statute of limitations, even after thirty years, and where enemies are forever. In fact, Podhoretz had written a book around then called Ex-Friends in which ancient feuds still sound as fresh as this morning’s razor cuts.” Reviewing Ex-Friends for the Nation, John Leonard turned Podhoretz’s travail into an unhappily ever after fairy tale: “It’s an old story, and even my own, so let’s be brief. Once upon a time you were a Wunderkind, and now, oh so suddenly, you’re an old fart.” A hard fact of life, which is why it’s best not to linger on what awaits at the last depot and relish the memory of when we were young farts, and free.

  I made enemies with my reviews but seldom ran into their gun-slit stares because my invitations to book parties were equally seldom, my one near altercation occurring when an innocent at a magazine fete asked someone whose book I had reviewed months earlier, “Do you know Jim Wolcott?” to which he snapped, “Yeah, I know the son of a bitch,” and revved off, which in the brusque seventies barely even registered as bad manners. In his shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted to say hi either, and if we ran into each other today, I’m sure we would amiably ignore each other, having amassed so many better enemies in the interim. I developed a reputation for being “a smart-ass” in print, but a smart-ass at least has some bounce to it, and my interest in literature was never liturgical. It was enthusiasm or forget it. Literature with a capital L, like a marble foot planted atop the reader’s head, didn’t interest me. I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe. As Kael wrote in “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best; it’s an inhuman position, and I don’t b
elieve them.” I did believe them, having seen how high they could raise the Communion wafer. Especially in lit-crit, there were those who could be believed when they professed undying fidelity to only the highest and the best, not only Sontag (for whom “seriousness” was the purring word she most liked to pet, telling an interviewer, “Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness”), but The New Yorker’s supreme polymath and European curator George Steiner, and William H. Gass, who wrote in his essay “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World,” “It is the principal function of popular culture—though hardly its avowed purpose—to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men’s minds full, small, and careful.” Which is one weird slant on the slaughterhouse of history (those small, careful minds that waged the Crusades, set Montezuma in motion, and so forth), as if literature has its own pacifying lies to tell, a finer class of platitudes.

  I was once sitting with Pauline in the last row of a literary panel discussion downtown starring Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates, who were trading honeydew compliments back and forth as if they expected Eudora Welty to show up with a wide-brimmed hat and a watering can. Ozick would compliment Oates on the dynamic fecundity of her bullet-train imagination and how it cowed her, confessing that she could only proceed to the next sentence in her own fiction after she had chipped and beveled the previous sentence to perfection, to which Oates would deftly respond, And that’s what I so admire and envy about your writing, Cynthia, the exquisite crystalline luminosity of each beautifully chosen, carefully arranged phrase and metaphor … Back and forth it fluttered, Ozick in her girlish voice (so incongruous with her tank-turret head) and Oates doing her shrinking-violet act, until Pauline side-whispered, “Can you believe this shit?” We had a movie later to go to uptown, and as Ozick and Oates appeared on the verge of singing a duet, I asked what time our screening started. Pauline said, “It can’t start soon enough,” and out we hastened, into the welcoming arms of liberty. (Though when Ozick’s “Shawl” appeared in The New Yorker, Pauline was on the phone like a literary town crier to everyone she knew, urging it on them, alerting them to its greatness.)

  It was on such occasions that you felt literary fiction didn’t need any additional enemies, its own advocates and exemplars were doing such a swell job draining its blood banks. Nevertheless, literary quarterlies and critics with the long chins of undertakers found no dearth of suspects responsible for the slow, desert-crawling Death of the Novel, done in like an Agatha Christie victim by multiple assailants, each taking a stab at the distinguished old crone, a mixture of the usual suspects and new culprits: rock music with its invasive rush of pure pop for now people; the summer movie blockbuster, beginning with Jaws in 1975, its shark fin converting the American imagination into a drive-in screen; the academicization of literature by professors full of French cheese (a favorite theme of Gore Vidal’s, whose essay “American Plastic” joined Roland Barthes and John Barth in unholy wedlock); the aversion of fiction writers to risk bunions and discourtesy at their tender expense to do Dickensian-Balzacian reporting of institutions, status-spheres, and the hidden gear-works of class (an argument strung like Christmas tree lights by Tom Wolfe in his introduction to the anthology The New Journalism); the inadequacy of fiction to keep up with the acceleration and jump-cut transitions of our minds, the Godzilla rampages of breakout of America’s once-repressed derangements, something Seymour Krim pegged back in 1967: “If living itself often seems more and more like a nonstop LSD trip … what fertile new truths can most fiction writers tell us about a reality that has far outraced them at their own game? How can they compete with the absurd and startling authorship of each new hour?” This was the clamorous challenge that the narrator of Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things was mockingly determined to confront with a meat-hook in each hand: “My next book will be a novel, for you, tracing the fortunes of a typical American family, from the years of Depression up through the Swinging Sixties. It will be written in Abracadabra, have a number of brutally candid sex scenes, and the hero will be an alienated Jew who likes to Suck Off Christian movie stars and Fuck black girls in the Ass. Confronting Contemporary America in a Big Way. There will be no plot and I will exhaust everybody in sight by listing, at every opportunity, the contents of anyone’s pockets and wallets and handbags.”

  Two years later, in 1973, a novel following Sorrentino’s recipe for bathtub gin was published that truly confronted America in a big way, poking it in the face with a stubby penis, its very title a high-stakes provocation: American Mischief. Written by Alan Lelchuk, American Mischief was a campus novel turned reeducation camp whose inmates were well-known New York intellectuals: “ ‘A.’ has a ‘boyish’ unruly forelock and a propensity for going down on nubile seamen; ‘E.’ is a professor at Columbia, an Arnold and Forster specialist, who as a phase of his re-education is forced to watch fellatio being performed on Lelchuk’s narrator (by a girl, thank God!),” Marvin Mudrick recapped in his review. A. was clearly meant to flag the multidisciplinary social thinker Paul Goodman, and E. could be none other than the patron saint of moral seriousness and T. S. Eliot tea-cozy decorum, Lionel Trilling, the author of full-length studies of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster. Norman Mailer appeared in American Mischief under his real name, assassinated with a bullet up his ass, perhaps intended as a bit of literary back atcha for the transgressive buggery of the German maid in Mailer’s American Dream. But the real-life Mailer wasn’t amused or appreciative of such a one-gun salute, vowing, “By the time this is over, Lelchuk, you ain’t going to be nothin’ but a hank of hair and some fillings.” (It was always a treat when Mailer talked Southern sheriff, as if he had been taking Broderick Crawford lessons on the sly.) This sideshow stoked anticipation for the novel, like a scuffle at the prefight weigh-in before a major rumble. Excerpted in Theodore Solotaroff’s New American Review, the most exciting literary publication of the late sixties and the seventies, its back issues as indispensable to comprehending the political and cultural storm systems of the time as any retrospective overview, American Mischief had the makings of a Big Mac of a succès de scandale, its picaresque effrontery something that the literary establishment was keen to embrace now that Roth’s Portnoy had snapped the paper chains of propriety and everyone wanted to be with-it. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and indeed was a succès de scandale. I glanced at American Mischief years later, and it already seemed an overwrought period piece, overfueled by the same urgency that juiced even our most eagle-eyebrowed confabulators (Philip Roth in Our Gang and The Great American Novel, Robert Coover with The Public Burning) to overswing wildly for the fences and twist themselves into Twizzler sticks in their efforts to do vigilante justice to the grotesque, hyperthyroid surrealism of the news in the age of Nixon.

  I wasn’t a size queen when it came to fiction, either as reader or as reviewer, though I wasn’t as averse to heavy lifting as the devilishly suave Anatole Broyard, one of the Times’s daily reviewers, comically notorious among his critical brethren for his penchant for choosing the slimmest volume from the galley pile for his accomplished caresses and tango moves. Aroused by Books his 1974 collection was called, and as review collections go, it holds up much better than most precisely because its author doesn’t apologize for prizing the pleasure principle over moral instruction, spiritual enlightenment, and intellectual muscle-building. Reviewing Alfred Kazin’s Bright Book of Life, that cavalcade of American literature’s Easter Island heads from Faulkner to Bellow and beyond, Broyard writes, “Mr. Kazin is what I would call an ideophile. He’s in love with ideas, but though he generously shares that love with us, I know that I feel a certain lack … [I]t’s all just a bit too platonic. Mr. Kazin seems to think about fiction more than he feel
s it.” And Broyard was definitely more of a fingers-flexing feeler (which is to take nothing away from how keen, elegant, and mobile his spidery mind was), as was Alfred Chester, who wrote in a review of John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, “Despite the currency of the phrase, we really don’t want writers to say anything because, as soon as they do, we get bored. What we do want is for them to feel something, and to make us feel something.” Then Chester broke into peroration: “Teach us, O Artists, not to settle for guilts and anxieties, for twitches and embarrassments! Teach us, O Artists, to feel again! Because emotions are the only thing that artists have to say—and emotion can make us gigantic and tragic. (Ideas never can; they can only follow, like dogs. Ideas, however pertinent, however great, tend to remove us from reality; feelings always bring us back again. Ideas never explain experience; feelings are experience.)”