Higher Gossip

by John Updike

  Ernest Hemingway, 1899–1961

  Foreword to Coffee with Hemingway, by Kirk Curnutt (2007).

  IN THE NEAR HALF-CENTURY since Hemingway’s shocking suicide by shotgun in 1961, his fame—and did any American writer of the twentieth century enjoy more fame than he?—has attracted denigration, from critics and academics who react, perhaps, more to the man’s image than to his works. He whose hero, in A Farewell to Arms, is a deserter from World War I, and whose portrait of civil war, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, unsparingly reports the atrocities on both sides, is accused of being a lover of violence. His boyhood as a Midwestern doctor’s son and his war wounds in Italy at the age of eighteen impressed him with the reality of violence, and his fiction and non-fiction (see Death in the Afternoon and the introduction to his anthology Men at War) sought to describe this reality, including the hunter’s blood lust; but a fascination is not an endorsement. He is accused of slighting his female characters, yet they—Brett and Catherine and Maria—dominate the canvases of their respective novels, and remain more poignantly, sympathetically, and heroically in the mind than their male lovers do.

  Hemingway’s apparently simple style, easily parodied, is dismissed as semi-literate when in fact it was a refined and thoughtful product of modernism in its prime; he took English prose and, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, made it new. The example of modern painting, above all the scrupulous Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, inspired him; newspaper work honed his powers of distillation; wide reading kept his standards elevated. To be sure, he liked a fiesta, and drank too much, but he reported to his writing stand, with freshly sharpened pencils, each dawn; his writing forms a shimmering paean to our physical existence, to landscape and weather and healthy senses. His stoic hedonism became, in the ruin of conventional pieties left by World War I, a creed for his generation, a laconic lifestyle reflected in popular films, other people’s writings, and even common speech.

  His first book, published in 1923 in Paris, was titled Three Stories and Ten Poems: his short stories, which he effectively stopped producing after collecting them in 1938, are like poems in their concision, polish, and enigmatic abruptness. A sense of life’s tragic brevity always lies beneath the surfaces of his taut dialogues and evocations of nature. Only the first two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), sustain throughout their length the exquisite economy and freshness of the short stories, though the novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) approached their high quality and helped win the author the Nobel Prize in 1954. In his later years, in shaky physical and mental health, he published almost nothing but wrote steadily, accumulating masses of manuscripts that were mined for a number of posthumous publications, of which the most valuable is a fond memoir of his Paris years, A Moveable Feast (1964).

  The man was a bearish celebrity when literature still bred celebrities; his work remains a touchstone of artistic ardor and luminously clean prose.

  Kurt Vonnegut, 1922–2007

  Read at the dinner meeting of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, November 6, 2007.

  KURT VONNEGUT, JR., was born on Armistice Day, 1922, the third of three children of a distinguished German-American family long established in Indianapolis. It was once my pleasure and privilege to be with Kurt in Indianapolis, and it was wonderful to see how he expanded on that home turf: his smile widened, his gestures widened, and his soft, slow, rueful, considerate manner of speech became even more profoundly Midwestern. His family was locally eminent: Kurt, Sr., and his father were architects; Kurt’s mother came from a well-to-do line of brewers, the Liebers, creators of Lieber Gold Medal Lager; and Kurt’s older brother, Bernard, was a physicist specializing in clouds and thunderstorms. Kurt, Jr., went east to college, to Cornell, and achieved academic probation before being enlisted, at the age of nineteen, to the army.

  The army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and to the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering, but in 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and soon saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge—in his words, “the largest single defeat of American arms (the Confederacy included) in history.” His unit was nearly destroyed, and after several days of wandering behind enemy lines he was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp near Dresden, and assigned, with other prisoners, to make vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. The workplace was a slaughterhouse; when, on February 13, 1945, sirens went off, their guards led the prisoners to a meat locker two stories down. That saved their lives; overhead, British and American warplanes carpet-bombed the city, creating a firestorm. He wrote twenty-five years later, in Slaughterhouse-Five, “It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes.” The prisoners were set to work gathering up dead bodies, which he elsewhere described as “seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long—ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will.”

  He returned from the war to an active and eventually triumphant life. He married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago. They had three children. In Chicago, Kurt worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau and studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. His thesis, “Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales,” was unanimously rejected by the faculty. In 1947 he moved to Schenectady, New York, taking a job in public relations for General Electric. Three years later he sold a short story to Collier’s and moved his family to Cape Cod, writing fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post, and, to add to his income, teaching emotionally disturbed children, doing advertising work, and selling Saab automobiles. When, in 1958, Kurt’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other—she of cancer and he in a train accident—the Vonneguts adopted three of their four boys. Around 1970 he and Jane separated and he moved to New York; in 1979 he married the photographer Jill Krementz, with whom he adopted a daughter, Lily. By this time his novels had made him rich and famous.

  Vonnegut was unusual, if not unique, among post-war American writers in having had a primarily scientific education and in acquiring, in the long lead-up to his popular success, experience of the worlds of business and industry. In his first novel, Player Piano, an upstate factory and its minions are evoked; in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the ups and downs of a Midwestern fortune are traced. Vonnegut was interested in how such things function, and his lawyers and optometrists and housewives may be employed for satiric ends but never with condescension; his fantasies are braced by a respectful practical side. Many males of his writing generation—Mailer, Heller, Salinger, to name three—shared an experience of World War II’s combat, but Vonnegut’s close witness to the firebombing of Dresden and its charred aftermath was, even in those violent times, extraordinary, and it haunted his work in the form of apocalyptic holocausts—in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Indianapolis is imagined consumed by fire; in Cat’s Cradle, the world ends when all water turns to ice; in Slapstick, fluctuations in the force of gravity pull down structures all over the globe, and a deserted Manhattan has become Skyscraper National Park.

  When, in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut faced his Dresden experience directly, he characteristically garlanded it with an antic science-fiction tale of how our hero, Billy Pilgrim, shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola, was abducted by space aliens shaped like plumber’s helpers with a green eye in the palm of their hand-shaped heads. These Tralfamadorians put Billy in a Tralfamadorian zoo to demonstrate, with another abductee, the gorgeous porn star Montana Wildhack, human mating procedures. With such inventions Vonnegut lightened his hard-won perception that the universe was basically atrocious, a vast sea of cruelty and indifference.

  His pessimism is more
astringent in early novels like The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night, before he perfected his mature, aggressively casual style. It seemed to me that Kurt did not always get enough credit for his artistry—for his free flow of invention, for the surreal beauty of his imagery, for the propelling rhythm of his short paragraphs and laconic sentences, a colloquial American style justly ranked with Mark Twain’s. His phenomenal success with college students, who were grateful for books about large matters that were easy to read and frequently hilarious, annoyed some critics. His personal charm and persuasiveness as a speaker, toastmaster, and political protester deflected attention, for others, from his vital presence on the page. He was a tall, loose-jointed man, with a splendid head of dark curly hair. He wrote, as I remember, hunched over at a low table, tapping out his space-spanning tales on a small portable. He proceeded deliberately, revising as he went. He smoked cigarettes as if they were good for him, and in one of the last conversations we had, in this very room as it happens, he told me that a recent X-ray had shown his lungs to be as pure as a child’s—he was considering offering himself to the tobacco industry as an advertisement. His manner was as gracious and gentle as his books were honest and wry. Everyone who knew Kurt, I think it safe to say, misses him. Indeed, it might be said that the planet misses him.

  L. E. Sissman, 1928–1976

  Obituary in The New Yorker, April 6, 1976.

  ED SISSMAN died last month in Boston, after eleven years of resisting, and rising above, Hodgkin’s disease. During those years he wrote copiously, wittily, lovingly of the world he was on the verge of leaving; this magazine published fifty-one of his poems—some of them among the longest we have ever printed—and forty-five book reviews by him. By profession an advertising man, he harbored behind his courtly and faintly owlish manner a poet of the brightest plumage, one whose stream of fancy and verve of phrase could only be termed luxuriant. His reviews and essays showed wide reading, a crisp fund of unexpected information, an avidity for the mundane, an even temper, and a truly benevolent nature. He liked smart cars, the suburban life, English novels, old-fashioned meters. He would not want to be remembered as a poet of dying; he had no use for dying—except, perhaps, for the heightened sharpness of vision his “invisible new veil / Of finity” gave him. Though the decade of his illness and the decade of his artistic efflorescence coincided, the coincidence seems more accidental than not. He had long felt impelled to write poetry, and his songs of life—of past adventures remembered, of present scenery apprehended—show no sense of emergency, even when the scenery is a hospital wall. His career and, during his visits to this office, his carriage appeared unhurried. He was forty-eight when he died. One said goodbye to Ed wondering each time if it would be the last time. It marks the quality of the man that this shadow became something pleasant: an extra resonance in the parting smile, a warmth in the handshake. He helped us all, in his work and in his courage, to bear our own mortality.

  Raymond Carver, 1938–1988

  Read at the dinner meeting of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, November 3, 1988.

  SOME HARD TIMES are part of every writer’s equipment, but Raymond Carver had more than his share. He was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, and grew up in Yakima, in the center of the state of Washington. His father filed saws in a sawmill; his mother sometimes worked as a waitress and salesclerk; the family, which included a younger brother, moved from one two-bedroom house to another. The father, Clevie Raymond Carver, had a drinking problem, and would die at the age of fifty-three. When young Junior, as Ray was called, wrote a story about his favorite activity, fishing, and asked his mother to type it up, she went out and rented a typewriter and the two of them amateurishly typed it up and sent it to the circulation department of an outdoor-sports magazine in Boulder. It came back, but Ray’s stubborn career as a writer had begun. To his stringent blue-collar beginnings he added the handicap of an early marriage; he was nineteen and his bride sixteen and pregnant. By the time she was eighteen, they had two children. As Carver put it in his interview with The Paris Review, “What shall I say at this point? We didn’t have any youth. We found ourselves in roles we didn’t know how to play. But we did the best we could. Better than that, I want to think.” Both these young parents managed, finally, to get college degrees; while acquiring the credits, they worked at such jobs as waitress, night janitor, door-to-door saleswoman, farm worker, and delivery boy, mostly in the state of California. In 1963, Carver saw a story and a poem of his published, when he was an undergraduate at Humboldt State University, in California. Thirteen years were to go by before his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, appeared in 1976. To find the space and peace to write, he at times had to resort to sitting in the family car. After over a decade of struggle, in his words, “We were still in a state of penury, we had one bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house, and new creditors on our backs.… I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit.… I made a wasteland out of everything I touched. But I might add that towards the end of the drinking there wasn’t much left anyway.” He gave up drinking in 1977, and in the same year he and his first wife separated. Ten good years followed, years of recognition, of measured but steady productivity, of a new marital relationship, of teaching positions, grants, and honors, including a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the Academy-Institute. Then hard luck struck again, in the form of lung cancer, and after one last gallant year of fighting the disease he was dead, at the age of fifty.

  And yet, out of this near wreck of a life, Raymond Carver produced stories of exquisite directness, polish, and calm that sit in the mind like perfect porcelain teacups. The clay from which this porcelain comes is American life of a most modest sort, life lived near the poverty line, often in an advanced state of domestic deshabille, among cultural signifiers of an unrelenting bleakness. It is lived out of the range of news, beneath the threshold of any aspiration higher than day-to-day survival, where a good time is an uneasy evening in another couple’s living room, a quizzical conversation in a bar, or a moment of instantly regretful sex. The stories are usually in the first person, and the narrator is usually but not always male, and he almost invariably is one of a couple, if not married then very much aware of his vanished half. There is a stoic woundedness in these voices that engages our nervous systems; in his early stories especially, Carver presents domestic life as curiously packed and sinister, as somehow dangerous, as if its meagre scuffed décors were about to tip into darkness. An inexpressible native sorrow wants to well up; the characters suddenly find themselves kneeling and unable to rise, raking the lawn and unable to stop, awake and unable to go to sleep. The later stories recapitulate in less jagged rhythms, at a distanced perspective The New Yorker’s pages could accommodate, the aboriginal mystery; in the marvellous “Whoever Was Using This Bed,” the hero and his consort, having been awakened at three in the morning, discover an illuminating strangeness by sitting together at the foot of the bed: “We’re sitting on the part of the bed where we keep our feet when we sleep. It looks like whoever was using this bed left in a hurry. I know I won’t ever look at this bed again without remembering it like this. We’re into something now, but I don’t know what, exactly.”

  Of Carver’s stories it must be said that they are beautiful. Not since Hemingway, perhaps, has anyone built so lovingly in stacks of plain sentences; Carver was a poet as well as a prose writer, and though the poems could do, perhaps, with a bit less plainness, those frequent stories of his that omit quotation marks look, on the page, like poems. Like Hemingway, he listened to laconic American speech and fished for the tragic consciousness, the ominousness, beneath the gliding skin of plain utterance; in prefacing his collected stories Ray Carver spoke of “trying to learn my craft as a writer, how to be as subtle as a river current.” His best stories do move like rivers, as gently and inexorably, with a certain
sheen that almost blinds. In our daily misery as he had experienced it he felt something lyrical, and to extract it he revised tirelessly and put himself to school with all the traditional masters of short fiction. His titles—challengingly curt like “Fat,” “Feathers,” “Vitamins,” “Careful,” “Sacks,” “Boxes,” or “Gazebo” or else musically vernacular, as in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off,” “Where I’m Calling From,” and “Nobody Said Anything”—bespeak a consciously literary wit. In person he was ursine, amiable, quietly spoken, and yet impressively precise—a Westerner who weighed his words. His body of work is relatively small, but it displays the loftiest qualities: honesty of vision, integrity of workmanship, and a warm and humane desire to celebrate, to bring the news, as he himself expressed it, from one world to another, in a style that reveals “the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.”