Whether or not a novel “holds up” over time means less to me than whether or not it holds on—if you can open any page and hear a voice coming through like a hypnosis countdown, initiating a one-on-one spell. When I think about the novels from the seventies, it isn’t the big kahunas that project staying power in my crabby affections, bashing best sellers such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose prodigious set pieces were like the gargantuan meals in La Grande Bouffe, a grandiose glut with scatty arias of word-spew and a sprawling cast of characters with wacky, Dr. Strangelovian names (Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe, Lucifer Amp, Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz); Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which constructs a too-unwieldy, top-heavy, and monument-minded edifice for the tragic unraveling of the poet of so much/too much promise undone by insanity, Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (who would become the subject of James Atlas’s moving biography); E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a brilliant nickelodeon of a coup at the time, historical personages and fictional characters painted a bright enamel and set in pageant motion, but now something of a novelty item; William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, a pretentiously sham Arthur Miller soap-opera exercise in moral breast-beating set in the Holocaust for maximum high-minded, grandstanding sensationalism; John Irving’s World According to Garp, that Rube Goldberg Grand Guignol contraption of castration, self-mutilation, brain damage, and radical gender reassignment that the literary establishment found life-ratifyingly uproarious (“We not only laugh at the world according to Garp, but we also accept it and love it,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times); even Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, a half-great book that has the pared purity of a Japanese prose master such as Kawabata or Tanizaki in its mosaic account of the life of Gary Gilmore, but flabs up in the second half when it shifts to the media circus erected around Gilmore’s execution and includes a heap of special pleading for Mailer’s collaborator on the project, Lawrence Schiller.
No, the seventies novels that mean the most to me are the ones that expressed, distilled, and bottled a mood, mood being the most mysterious element in art, something beyond design and technique, the dark matter that permeates the grainy tilt of Robert Frank photographs, where roadside America seems viewed through skull sockets; the bleak winter of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the rancid sunlight of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; the sonic dislocation and embracing estrangement of David Bowie’s Low; the God-abandoned destitution of some of the best Twilight Zone episodes.
James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime has that for me, an erotic novel unsurpassed at recapturing that godly, awakening sense of two young bodies in bed being a new world unto itself, sealed behind shuttered windows that silence and hide the long white afternoons. “Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.” Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, quoted above, crackles with caustic comedy steeped in a witches’ brew of coffee grounds, shed hair on the sofa, and grease spots of mediocrity, with a fine selection of impotence on tap (sexual, literary, you name it) and at least one wisecrack on every other page that will unstitch your scalp and brighten your doomy day, bitter apostrophes about the life of a poet in all its avenues to disappointment: “The real poet was obsessed with his poems, his life, an egoist, selfish, boorish, rude, crazy. A great, romantic thing, into the breach, kill me tomorrow let me live tonight! and so on. Long hair and flowing lips, falling on the thorns of life, tortured to death in stifling university jobs, the Great Soul Writhing Underneath. Swift, intense, and destructive affairs with female undergraduates, too many vodka martinis, Fuck the Dean! Fuck the Chairman! … Anything. Everything.” A frustration-driven novel, always glancing over its shoulder at the next nuisance to darken the doorway, with a mock lyricism that becomes the real impassioned thing by the end, as if it can’t help itself. Imaginative Qualities is the only metafictional novel I can read without feeling as if I’m moving furniture up flights of stairs, the only one most animated by animal human vitality instead of marching through a cerebral encyclopedia. Why Sorrentino orphaned this snaggled line of attack in so many of his later naturalistic-mode novels (which dug their naturalistic knuckles into the brow until the reader cried, “Uncle”) is one of those questions that, had it been posed to him, would have probably been met with a “gruff retort,” like provoking Nabokov by asking about all the damned doppelgängers in his emerald fiction. Be grateful for what we’re given, and don’t muddle criticism with backseat driving.
Same with Don DeLillo. In recent years DeLillo must ask himself the cosmic question, “Why go on?,” his later novels greeted with a fish-face without a trace of affection for everything he’s done before, beating him up with his own achievements (Libra, Underworld) instead. His Great Jones Street of 1973 doesn’t have the cybernetic density and conspiratorial mesh of his corporate-gnostic-algorithmic probes into power, chance, and paranoia, but its hungover mood evokes the exhaustion and pissed-away promises of the post-sixties, a psychological dehydration requiring a sequestering with none of the skin tingle of A Sport and a Pastime’s incognito air. I know, sounds like fun, and the novel’s charcoal prose can read like a coroner’s report: “I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” And yet its sense of time and place (I love that the novel is named for and set in an actual street with no mythic overtones until DeLillo endowed them) hooks me each time out: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge.” How such passages recall rooms and views from my own past, as if my Horatio Street and St. Marks apartments had merged into one. I sometimes wonder if Great Jones Street might not be more highly esteemed if DeLillo hadn’t dubbed his rock-star narrator Bucky Wunderlick, a Pynchonesque moniker that’s hard to take seriously for a mystique-ridden Jim Morrison–like lizard king in self-exile. I can’t see the name Bucky without thinking of Captain America’s kid sidekick, one of the residua of having grown up religiously consuming Marvel Comics.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I found true fruition in book reviewing and taken up literary criticism as my sole vocation, setting aside childish things. I bet I’d be real bitter now. Staring out the screen door like Tommy Lee Jones in a bad mood, having long been farmed out by whatever magazine employed me and wishing I had drunk more so that I could write a sobriety memoir. Writing as deskbound craft, profession, and calling already comes pre-outfitted with so many diaphanous veils of solitariness that word-delight alone—the pleasure of all the billiard balls clicking and emptying into the pockets—doesn’t compensate for an audience that doesn’t answer no matter how nicely you call. I never felt this way writing about television for the Voice, even though television watching was considered then (less so now) a sedentary, light-bleached act of inanition that The New Yorker’s former TV critic Michael Arlen once compared to masturbation, which would presumably make writing about television like masturbating with both hands, no one’s idea of heroism. There was always a sense of a larger audience out there, a fandom of fellow anchorites who watched The Rockford Files (James Garner as the perfect low-overhead, corner-cutting L.A. investigator for a recessionary time—a Lew Archer who can’t step out of his trailer home without some cheap hood harassing his sideburns); Kojak (with the lollipop-sucking baldie detective who looked like a Ban Roll-on deodorant whose show even Lionel Trilling confessed to watching); Tom Snyder’s late-night Tomorrow show, where the host’s cigarette smoke ribboned the moody tension on the set, so different from the decompression chambers of studios today; the local Stanley Siegel talk show on WABC, where the Me Decade host bared his neuroses and had a regular segment on Friday mornings when he discussed the week in review with his actual psychotherapist (Siegel’s national
moment landing when a discombobulated Truman Capote appeared as guest and slurred, “We all know a fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room,” and a “Southern fag” is “meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met,” as a prelude to venomizing Princess Lee Radziwill, with whom he had had a planet-fissuring falling-out); SCTV, the comedy ensemble whose satirical genius flickers intermittently today in the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, absent the sketch revue; and Uncle Floyd, the New Jersey kiddie-show host with a puppet sidekick whose magicianship with minimalist stagecraft made him the Ernie Kovacs of the punk-decade mutant brigade (when the Ramones were guests on the program, they felt right at decrepit home). Writing about certain shows week after week (to the point where a few Voice editors got fed up with my recurring favorites) was like writing about your friends, the latest chapter of what they were up to. When I flick back at the book reviews I did in the seventies, I sometimes wince at the nasty incisions I inflicted on writers when I crossed the line between cutup and cutthroat (I won’t quote examples—no need to re-inflict wounds). But what really retrospectively bugs me was when I got prescriptive, telling writers what they should have done, where their true gifts lie, the road they should take to get onto I-95 to reach Delaware by dawn. I recoil when I see reviewers doing it today, acting like talent management agents for some literary Almighty.
TV defied such dispensing morning-after pills to those involved. It was a collaborative push following its own set of tracks, and nothing a critic said was likely to lodge and peck inside its creators’ brains for years after, building a nest. Even the sharpest dig didn’t have the palpable impact of being spat at by a stranger in the street, to use one of Sheed’s analogies for how a novelist feels having his latest work speared in print. In the seventies, before HBO, Showtime, AMC, and the networks built supertanker series with multichambered Godfather novelistic character bibles (The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, The Wire, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), television was more antihierarchical, prestige-resistant, and alien to putzy pretension. It didn’t have any of the auteurist mystique and pantheon aura of film criticism, and to this day no collection of TV criticism swings the clout of Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies and Deeper into Movies, James Agee’s Agee on Film, Andrew Sarris’s American Cinema, Manny Farber’s Negative Space, or the roundups of Otis Ferguson’s reviews for the New Republic. This was freeing for me, this acceptance of transience. It kept me balanced and responsive, not having a canon to lean on. I remember getting a report from a friend about a conversation he had with one of the Voice’s top theater critics who nosed up at the sound of my name as if it might trigger his hay fever. “Wolcott can be funny,” he conceded, “but it’s easy being funny about television. It’s not a medium that makes many demands.” “How dare he call me facile!” I fumed with the pretend ire I so enjoyed in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels when this was related to me. I would have gotten more upset if it weren’t for the fact that he had a point about TV requiring less deep-sea drilling and rock quarrying than theater-opera-dance reviewing. I couldn’t pretend I was propping up any of the pillars of Western Civ when I descanted on The Ropers, the spin-off series from Three’s Company that co-starred Audra Lindley in a succession of misguided muumuus and Norman Fell, whose lips were caulked with a chalky white substance, no one quite knew why: a sitcom that I always mention when I feel my friend Elvis Mitchell could use a laugh. But being facile is harder than it looks, no one survives long as a chuckle bunny in print, and it wasn’t all party tricks. I had to ladder up to a higher diving board to do justice to Paul Winfield’s magnificent Martin Luther King in King, Dennis Potter’s breakthrough lip-sync musical Pennies from Heaven, and the epochal miniseries Holocaust, because that was part of the job, being able to work at different altitudes.
My model was the Australian multi-talent Clive James (poet, novelist, literary critic, celebrity profiler, TV host), whose television column for the London Observer was as hilarious and high-wire an act as Kenneth Tynan’s theater reviews had been in the sixties for the same paper. I stole from James as if copping his dance moves, mimicking his mimicry of anchormen and bogus dialogue, and later flew with him up to meet Pauline at her house in the Berkshires, an airsick excursion he described in “Postcard from New York” for the Observer: “We flew through a storm all the way. Lighting his cigarette one-handed, the pilot did a no-sweat Buzz Sawyer routine while his co-pilot made a great show of understanding the map. The aircraft behaved like a pair of underpants in a washing machine.” As the plane came in for a landing, we looked out the window and saw the hills adjacent the strip full of summer-dressed people gawking upward. “What are they doing out there on the grass?” I asked, to which Clive replied, “Waiting to see us crash.” Once we arrived at Pauline’s, we chased away the jitters and relaxed before going out to dinner, Pauline and Clive standing and sipping wine while I sat on the couch, drinking cola. Somewhere between sips, Clive reflectively remarked, “I feel old enough to be his father.” “I’m old enough to be his grandmother,” answered Pauline. “Pa! Grandma!” I cried, throwing open my arms as if discovering my long-lost kin.
If it was the funnier columns that readers enjoyed and remembered, it may have been because, with identity politics coming more to the fore, many of my fellow Voicers considered a light touch suspect, and some of the paper’s political correctos—whose numbers would increase in the decade to come as the Voice in its new digs on lower Broadway would become an ideological honeycomb of minority caucuses competing for staff representation and column space—were grunting out copy as if handcuffed to a rowing machine.
Then again, as the irritable tone of the theater critic implies, maybe I was just getting on everybody’s nerves. I can see now why others might have found me abrasive, overfull of myself, acting as if expecting a star on my dressing room door any day soon. The TV column was increasingly popular at the Voice, and popularity translated into higher visibility, and higher visibility translated into the Esquire column, the call from the New York Review, feature assignments from The New Yorker that were never published or completed (including one where I spent a sunstroke week in New Mexico on the set of Sam Peckinpah’s delay-plagued Convoy, where he called me a pussy in front of the crew, which I was told not to take personally, I was but the latest in an infinite line), and similar offers that no one at the paper was being treated to, with the exception of Ellen Willis, who by the late seventies had phased out of The New Yorker and New York Review, and the Press Clips columnist, Alexander Cockburn. The Voice’s brightest journalistic star, Cockburn could get away with it better in the office because along with his stylistic brilliance he was English and sexy, whooshing in and out of the building on a jet stream of daredevilish charisma. I didn’t have that going for me then, and it isn’t something you pick up later along the highway of life. I probably came across as bumptious, though I didn’t conduct a survey. If I no longer hunched my shoulders like Norman Mailer ready to plow through the defensive line to tackle the bitch goddess of success, I was dropping Pauline Kael’s name and her latest asides with mad abandon, and not just to annoy the Andrew Sarris faction in the office whose bat ears picked up everything and transmitted it uptown to His Tetchiness himself. That’s how things were done in the days before tweeting and texting sped up the hamster wheels of competitive tattle.
The irony was that I was seeing less of Pauline for most of that particular year. Nineteen seventy-nine was when she took an unprecedented leave of absence from The New Yorker to make the trans-coastal hop from film critic to film producer at the behest of Warren Beatty, seducer of all he surveyed. She would be given an office at Paramount as a producer on Beatty’s next project, Love & Money, based on a script by James Toback. It has been argued in at least one stewpot biography of Beatty (Peter Biskind’s Star) that luring Pauline out to the coast was a Machiavellian ploy by the ageless superboy to teach her a humility lesson, let her know what it was truly like in the major leagues, and cut her d
own to size, render her inoperative. This is motivational conjecture raised to the plane of advanced calculus. A true Machiavellian knows what he wants and plots the angles in advance to achieve his aims, and Beatty was too indecisive to be a true Machiavellian, his ideas and choices subject to constant, worrying revision and his conversation (as interviews reveal) a golden cloud of coy, cagey, hazy, noncommittal indirection. And one would have to assume that Beatty simply enjoyed buying a new toy to break to explain the personal hostility needed to set such a trap into motion. It was Pauline who championed Bonnie and Clyde and was the first critic to treat Beatty seriously as an artist, who hailed the Beverly Hills sex farce Shampoo as a Mozartean bed-hopper (“The central performance that makes it all work is Beatty’s. [The hairdresser], who wears his hair blower like a Colt .45, isn’t an easy role; I don’t know anyone else who could have played it”), and if she thought that the remake of Heaven Can Wait emasculated Beatty’s talents (he “moves through it looking fleecy and dazed”), well, she was hardly alone. And she would be working on Love & Money with friends, not just Beatty and Toback, but Dick Albarino, who pitched in with Pauline on the polishing of Toback’s script. I saw various versions of the script, which became progressively sharper, funnier, and structurally firmer, and what happened to that screenplay I do not know. I do know that at some point Beatty evanesced out of the project and with his withdrawal went the money interest. What was conceived as a big-budget jeweled elephant starring Beatty, Laurence Olivier as his father (or was it grandfather?), Laura Antonelli as the love interest (Isabelle Adjani was also discussed), and a lavish backdrop ended up a much runtier film that looked as if it were shot just off the turnpike with Ray Sharkey pipsqueaking as the hero, the aged director King Vidor in the Olivier role (who died months after the film’s release), and, in the role of the imported white chocolate, the gorgeous Ornella Muti, whom Pauline and I so appreciated in her slinky catsuit as the vixen in Flash Gordon, which we caught in a theater in Times Square where the rodents outnumbered the customers. Love & Money played a brief engagement when it was released after some delay in 1982, already something everybody involved wanted to put behind them. Friendships were severed over this film, certainly Pauline’s and Albarino’s was. She successfully lobbied at Paramount for David Lynch to direct The Elephant Man, but that seems to have been small consolation for what others have since told me were indeed miserable months out there for Pauline, a mortifying letdown. Though I don’t believe the rumor, repeated in Biskind’s book, “that she would go over to director Richard Brooks’s office, complain that she had been put out to pasture, and weep.” The weeping sounds so unlike her, and Brooks was not a director with whom she would have been on confiding terms, and vice versa, not after her panning of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Like so many of the anti-Pauline anecdotes in Star from studs now in their sinking suns, this strikes me as sexist payback.
Lucking Out Page 28