Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  Walker Percy:

  Grim News from the Moviegoer

  One good thing about the end of the world is that you don’t have to take it seriously. That doesn’t mean the prospect won’t drive you mad, keep you drunk and chasing women in between prayers, explode you with hives and morning terror and turn you into a prophet and redeemer as it did with Tom More. But if you’re Walker Percy, who created More as the hero of his new novel, Love in the Ruins (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), then you know people tend to accept a story about end times only if it’s as absurd as the prospect itself: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, or Dr. Strangelove, the Stanley Kubrick film. Love in the Ruins resembles both these, but has something beyond them: a fully realized central character living in a fully realized, fantastic, dying country. Vines are cracking the pavement. Nothing works. The auto age passed, since no one wanted to be a repairman. Whites and blacks (Bantus) are armed and ready. Hippies occupy the swamp near Paradise Estates, where the white middle class lives in luxurious anxiety. The GOP is now The Knothead Party. A league of Northern black city-states may secede. Catholics are split in three: the American Catholic Church, whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; the Dutch schismatics, who believe in relevance but not God; and the Roman remnant, a scattered flock. Tom More, Catholic descendant of Sir Thomas More, is a physician-inventor, a bourbon-sipping humanist whose wife ran off with a pair of wispy mystics (“the first American to be cuckolded by two English fruits”). He has invented a Lapsometer, which he describes as a “stethoscope of the spirit,” a scientific feat he compares to Newton’s and Einstein’s. The device diagnoses spiritual ills and, with some help from a diabolical visitor, also treats them. It is the eve of America’s racial wars, in Louisiana. Perry Como is seventy, still going strong on TV. Tom More stands ready to press his invention into the service of peace, but … well, things fall apart.

  Percy says he has tried to include something to offend everybody in his story of America’s final grunt: black revolutionaries, white bigots, sex researchers, behaviorists, priests, senior citizens, Rotarians, romantics, flag-wavers, golfers, Rod McKuenites, closet queens, philosophers and other contributors to The End. Tom More, poor, mad genius, is no more stable than anybody else, but his self-appraisals give him unquestionable stature: “I believe in God and the whole business, but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth and my fellowman hardly at all. Generally, I do as I please.”

  Tom More is obviously a man worth knowing. What I feel for him approaches my reaction to Saul Bellow’s Henderson (of Henderson the Rain King), but while More is neither as garrulous nor as alienated as Henderson, he’s equally thoughtful, equally caught up in the weirdness. I read Henderson like an instruction book on psychic survival, underlining those great spasms of received wisdom from All Bellowness. Percy doesn’t throttle me that way, but I move sympathetically with More through his messianic flights, his survival tortures, his sexual athletics. More has three women and remembers his wife, but sex, even in the batty sex-research clinic, is conducted on the page with restraint. It is Percy’s style to suggest, not wallow. The result is a vast entertainment. I know when More will triumph, when he’ll fail, but plot surprises aren’t important here. It’s the quality of his reaction that matters: “… until lately, nearly everyone tried and succeeded in being happy but me. My unhappiness is not the fault of Paradise. I was unlucky. My daughter died, my wife ran off with a heathen Englishman, and I fell prey to bouts of depression and morning terror, to say nothing of abstract furies and desultory lusts for strangers.”

  Percy, fifty-five, is a very civilized man. I hope I don’t insult him by saying this now that he has painted civilization as a bag of demented snakes. We had breakfast together at the Plaza, where he stays when he leaves his reclusive life in Louisiana and comes to New York. The association of the hotel with Scott Fitzgerald is attractive to him, but he has another reason: “The first time my wife and I checked in, we rode up in the elevator with Cary Grant.” You’ll recall Percy’s first novel was The Moviegoer. He doesn’t go to movies much anymore, won’t even let this new novel be filmed. “Movies being what they are,” he said, attacking his firmly poached eggs, “I don’t think it can be done.”

  Odd talk from Percy? Well perhaps. But he seems like a vigorously anomalous man. Sitting amid this breakfast elegance and morning sunshine, smiling under his receding white hair, he was a sturdy, treelike father figure, a Norman Rockwell country doc, a font of drawled, folksy wisdom (“The thing that drives Americans crazy is when they become happy”). He even said he likes businessmen, that the savvy ones are the best critics of his novels; and which American writer has stood on that platform lately? Gentleness, kindness, self-effacement are words that Percy-at-Plaza-morning brought to mind. But anyone who writes as randy a prose as he, who is capable of imagining Tom More, has also got to be, somewhere in his head, a bourbon-lickin’, good-time honeyman himself. He admits to anomalous origins in a clan of Mississippi planter-politician-writers, notably William Alexander Percy (Lanterns on the Levee), his adoptive father. The family career base was the law, and “I knew damn well I didn’t want that.” He turned reluctantly to medicine, got his M.D. at Columbia in 1941 and interned doing autopsies on derelicts dead of TB. He caught the bug himself, ending that career. His response: “I was the happiest guy ever got TB.” Recovering at Saranac, he took up with philosophy, published papers in Thought Quarterly and elsewhere. But he wanted more readers and turned to the novel, influenced by Camus and Sartre, who had incorporated philosophy into their fiction. “I saw myself as not leaving the scientific tradition, for the novel can say things science can’t. Science can’t utter a single word on what it’s like to be an individual in a certain time and place, and what it’s like to die.”

  When The Moviegoer won a National Book Award in 1962, a cult grew around Percy. It spread with his second novel, The Last Gentleman, and now Love in the Ruins will intensify the fever. Percy sees the new work as a Christian novel that “by vicarious use of catastrophe” may make himself and his reader “come to themselves,” and prevent The End. But I doubt he’ll be any more successful with that aim than Tom More was with his Lapsometer. Percy is no prophet, and even if he were, prophecy wouldn’t swivel the tempers of any Bantus or Rotarians. But he may be the only doctor-philosopher-honeyman extant, and that is significant, for it has taught him how to reach the musical-erotic area of our brains (his phrase). It’s eschatological stuff, all right, but it comes on like love, or fear, like a survival lesson, and turns into a Picasso painting: an American “Guernica” with a woman done in by a shish kebab skewer, a colonel emasculated on the golf course by a sniper. Tom More’s psychic defeats in battle have immobilized him on the balcony of a deserted Howard Johnson motel. We drag up a chair beside him, twist open the bourbon, put a Bessie Smith record on the phonograph, our pistols at the ready to keep wandering crazies at bay, and wait for things to improve. The music stops, and then through a crack in a half-open door down the balcony there comes an inviting rustle of silk. We smile. Tom, you old son of a gun, you’ve thought of everything.

  1971

  Saul Bellow:

  Intellectual Activity: A Form of Resistance

  If He Doesn’t Have a True Word to Say, He Keeps His Mouth Shut

  Intellectual Activity: A Form of Resistance

  Author Saul Bellow sat amid the rumples of his dark gray suit, sipped a gimlet, and stared across the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. This was the cocktail hour at the end of a busy day, but he was still working, watching a man bend to a woman at a nearby table and greet her with a kiss.

  “Watching people kiss,” he said, “I always try to decide what their relationship is, whether they’re man and wife or having an affair or what. It’s a great game.”

  The results of a lifetime of close observation of the human species have just tumbled out of Saul Bellow in a torrent of achievement: Herzog, his sixth novel and eas
ily the most widely praised work of American fiction in many years; and The Last Analysis, a play that recently had a short run at the Belasco Theater here after opening to mixed reviews.

  The play was a departure for the author, his first excursion into the theater. But it is Herzog that has most intensified critics’ efforts to enthrone Mr. Bellow as king of American literature, on the throne vacated by Faulkner and Hemingway.

  Saul Bellow is not a reluctant king, but he doesn’t take the kingmakers too seriously: “America is a great power. It needs cultural furniture and I’m an article of cultural furniture. I can’t pretend I wasn’t an ambitious young man when I came to New York in 1939 [he was born in Canada, now lives in Chicago], and I pretty much got what I wanted, which probably serves me right. But this is just a flutter, good for my ego and good for business.”

  Herzog represents Mr. Bellow’s second brush with fame (the first was in 1953, when The Adventures of Augie March was published), and most critics have called it the author’s most mature creation. Like most of Mr. Bellow’s literary figures, protagonist Moses Herzog is engaged in trying to comprehend the vague social and personal forces that plague him. Mr. Bellow says the novel deals with “the person who has lost his direction,” and adds that Herzog “finally sees through self-justification and realizes the need for keeping his mouth shut.

  “If I were a psychologist,” the author says, “I would have written that there is a human instinct for self-justification. Complaining is one of the great secular arts and always has been. People break from a clinch and go off to different sides of the ring, each making his case, calling in the neighbors, crying out to heaven—he was right or she was right. There is a profound human need to be right.”

  But Herzog and Bellow both frown on too much self-concern: “There are two billion people on the face of the earth,” Mr. Bellow says, “and most of them probably suffer more than you do. Why should anyone pay attention to your suffering? Why should any man feel he has the right to claim the attention of any other man for this purpose?” And so it is, at novel’s end, with Herzog.

  In his triumph over himself and his troubles, Herzog represents what Mr. Bellow calls “a break with victim literature,” with the novels in which man is a victim of his environment and his own weaknesses. “But any man who thinks is not a victim,” Mr. Bellow insists. “Intellectual activity is not passive, as it is sometimes thought to be. It’s a form of resistance. If Madame Bovary, for example, had realized that nobody around her had the power to hurt her, she wouldn’t have committed suicide.”

  This resistance is a key concept in The Last Analysis, the farcical story of an old-time comedian named Bummidge (played on Broadway by Sam Levene) who becomes involved in ideas and theories after undergoing psychoanalysis, and begins acting out the principal crises of his life with whoever shows up.

  Mr. Bellow views the play as a satire on people who become fanatical about “a system of metaphors,” such as the Freudian system of analysis, and relates it in intent to his farcical novel Henderson the Rain King. Henderson, outcast from his soul, bedeviled by a want he can neither satisfy nor understand, takes a wild trip to a fantastic Africa to set things right.

  “People must either decide to live in submission to the ideas and abstractions which act upon them from outside with such revolutionary force,” says Mr. Bellow, “or to take hold and try to free themselves by understanding these abstractions.”

  Bummidge tried this in The Last Analysis, but some critics saw the play as too farcical, too diffuse in intent, and it lasted only twenty-eight performances. Mr. Bellow, nonetheless, found it an education for a literary man to deal with theatrical professionals. A sample difficulty, he said over a second gimlet, was getting to talk to director Joseph Anthony (Rhinoceros, The Best Man) about new dialogue when the director was busy with a lighting problem. Mr. Bellow considers lighting problems “superfluous,” and was more interested in making meaningful script changes—eliminating dialogue that had gone dead as new dialogue was added. Often the director (for whose expertise Mr. Bellow still professes great admiration) resisted, not wanting to upset the actors.

  That gave Mr. Bellow a thought. “Actors,” he said, “either have to grasp things intuitively or they don’t grasp them at all. They fall back on the way they’ve done things for years on Broadway, and it’s hopeless.”

  Mr. Bellow views his theatrical education philosophically, for little of his ascent to the top of the literary world has been easy. A learned man, he had to discover a way to write prose that didn’t stop dead from erudition on page 3. He began with two highly controlled works, The Dangling Man and The Victim, and then came the idea to write Augie March.

  “I was walking along a street in Paris,” he recalls, “watching water running along the curb. They were washing the streets, and with the water flowing very rapidly I began thinking about a kid I had known in Chicago back in 1925 who had been a playmate. This was on Augusta Street, which was probably the origin of the name Augie. And I began to think about his family and his life and what might have happened to him in all this time. I had a great deal of childish affection for him, and with thoughts of him came the sort of language he would have used—‘Gee, I’ve got a real peppy scheme.’

  “Chicago was full of people who were highly original without knowing it; people who used the public library and talked freely about everything and loved this kind of oratory.”

  Language flowed through Augie March like that Paris street water. Says Mr. Bellow: “I discovered rhetoric.” The flood came, he said, “at the end of a depressive cycle in a burst of manic energy.”

  The burst wasn’t unusual. When writing, he says, “I get wildly excited. I’m in a state where I can’t eat, can’t sleep, or think about other things. If I do think of something else it only leads back to what I’m writing. I’m up in the nighttime with insomnia, but not dull insomnia. It’s exciting. In three years with Herzog I only slept well when the book was going badly.”

  He is less than tolerant of much of what he finds in modern fiction, writers who are “very bookish, who get their attitudes from literature. There isn’t a contemporary writer I know of offhand who has a curiosity about what civilization is, I mean independent of literary sources.”

  He rewrote Herzog from fifteen to twenty times (“I’ve lost track”), a rewrite meaning that he reached something like page 250, decided he had gone wrong, and started over at page 1. He explains: “I don’t like superfluous things in what I read and I don’t think they should be in what a man writes. Wherever I found I was indulging myself, I just stopped and started a new draft to get at what was essential.”

  1964

  If He Doesn’t Have a True Word to Say, He Keeps His Mouth Shut

  I’d first met Saul Bellow, the American Nobel Prize laureate, in San Juan in 1960, when he was a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico and in the middle of writing Herzog. He’d had valuable things to say about what I was then writing and had also made some observations that stayed with me: that character was the single most important element in determining a writer’s worth; that a writer shouldn’t be parsimonious with his work but “prodigal, like nature,” which uses billions of sperm when only one is needed for creating life.

  Also, and most memorably, he said that “most American writers don’t really know much about American society, for they’re used to viewing it from the point of view of the innocent or the underdog. And the sources of real power in American society will never be revealed to innocents or underdogs.”

  Now here he came with a new book, his ninth novel, The Dean’s December, anatomizing power and the lack of it: urban decay in a major American city. And so an interview was proposed. I hadn’t kept up with all his moves and wrote him at the University of Chicago, where he’s been a member of the Committee on Social Thought since 1964. The letter came back marked ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. I posted another through his publisher and news of his unknownness reached him in Vermont, where he
and his wife, Alexandra, a professor of mathematics, have been spending summers. “I’m not what you’d think of as a drifter,” he wrote in reply. “But I do drift in a real (i.e., barely conscious) sense—a sort of desert rat with a Smith-Corona instead of a prospector’s mule. Not even the Committee on Social Thought fully remembers me. Just as well.” He said that he was just finishing the book, “something of a cherry bomb, or a small grenade, I like to think,” and that he’d be glad to talk.

  And so to southern Vermont; and here, out of an old rented farmhouse, came Saul Bellow, summer squire, in baggy pants and blue-and-white jogging shoes in which he does not jog. How old was he now? “Sixty-six,” he said, “but showing signs of decay.” His hair is sparse and white, his face lined, but he’s trim for a man of these numerals: if he doesn’t jog in his jogging shoes, he does stand on his head in them.

  “I haven’t gone to seed,” he said. “But seed is nibbling at my feet. You know it’s on you when you’ve been sitting in a certain position for fifteen minutes and you can’t straighten up when you arise. I stopped playing racquetball because I couldn’t stay with the young people on the court anymore. There’s something humiliating about that. Also women started to ask me for a game.”

  We ate lunch prepared by Alexandra, then moved to the living room, where his Smith-Corona sat atop a tidy desk, and we settled into facing sofas in front of the fireplace. He began the interview by talking about the new novel.

  “I wrote it in a year and a half,” he said, “and had no idea it was coming. One of these things that came over me. My wife’s mother was dying in Bucharest, and I went with her to give her some support, which in that place one badly needs. The old mother died while we were there. I had been thinking of writing a book about Chicago, and as always when I go abroad I brooded about the hometown.