The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvellous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place. Yet discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision. Though the population of the Library somehow replenishes itself, and “fecal necessities” are provided for, neither food nor fornication is mentioned—and in truth they are not generally seen in libraries. I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum. Literature—that European empire augmented with translations from remote kingdoms—is now the only world capable of housing and sustaining new literature. Is this too curious? Did not Eliot recommend forty years ago, in reviewing Ulysses, that new novels be retellings of old myths? Is not the greatest of modern novels, Remembrance of Things Past, about the writing of itself? Have not many books already been written from within Homer and the Bible? Did not Cervantes write from within Ariosto and Shakespeare from within Holinshed? Borges, by predilection and by program, carries these inklings toward a logical extreme: the view of books as, in sum, an alternate creation, vast, accessible, highly colored, rich in arcana, possibly sacred. Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life. Certainly the traditional novel as a transparent imitation of human circumstance has “a distracted or tired air.” Ironic and blasphemous as Borges’ hidden message may seem, the texture and method of his creations, though strictly inimitable, answer to a deep need in contemporary literary art—the need to confess the fact of artifice.

  GEORGE STEINER

  NOVEMBER 25, 1967 (WILLIAM STYRON’S CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER)

  AS BY NOW almost everyone knows, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (Random House) deals with a brief slave revolt that took place in the late summer of 1831 in Southampton County, a remote corner of southeastern Virginia. The uprising was a ragged affair, doomed from the start. It involved seventy-five Negroes and resulted in the killing of fifty-five whites; most of the insurgent slaves were hacked down or executed. The body of Nat Turner, begetter and ringleader, was taken from the gallows, its flesh was boiled into grease, and small leather keepsakes were made of the skin. In Richmond, in 1832, T. R. Gray issued a pamphlet entitled “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Several other accounts of the mutiny were written, among them William Sidney Drewry’s “The Southampton Insurrection.” Though strategically puerile, the revolt of Nat Turner sent a shock of fury and baffled alarm through the South comparable to the one occasioned a generation later by John Brown’s raid. It was the only organized rebellion, however short-lived, in the annals of American Negro slavery.

  Mr. Styron grew up not far from Southampton County and thought to make of Nat Turner the subject of his first novel. Instead, he produced Lie Down in Darkness, a marvellously dense and vehement statement of what it is like to come of age Southern and haunted. This was followed by The Long March and that much criticized but revealing tale of Europe and America in their postwar, post–Thomas Wolfe interaction—Set This House on Fire. After which Mr. Styron embarked on a long silence and the theme that had from the first been ripening in his consciousness. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a return home, a falconlike gyring toward the point of departure which is characteristic of a number of American novelists (among Hemingway’s last projects was a novel set in the Michigan of his boyhood). Is it merely fanciful to note how clear and symbolic a design lurks in Mr. Styron’s earlier titles? Nat Turner lies in a great darkness, seeks to make the long march to the local and celestial Jerusalem, and leaves houses burning in his wake. But two forces more recent than Mr. Styron’s initial impulse have acted on the book. It is difficult to listen to Nat Turner’s canny, self-baring, or impassioned tone without hearing at the same time the voice of Mr. James Baldwin. The other modifier is, of course, recent history—the coming of the storm that now blows across American life. The crisis of civil rights, the new relationships to each other and to their own individual sensibilities that this crisis has forced on both whites and Negroes (as yet, we capitalize the one but not the other) give Mr. Styron’s fable a special relevance. This is a book about a small fire last time in the light, at once revelatory and magnifying, of the great blaze now.

  The narrative is set in a flashback older than Victor Hugo’s Last Days of a Condemned Man, older even than the monitory thieves’ pamphlets of the seventeenth century. During the five days preceding his execution, Nat Turner reviews the confession he has dictated to T. R. Gray, his inquisitor, spokesman before the court, and final intimate. Gray is not seeking to rack his doomed client. He is baffled by the fact that Turner has himself killed only one white person—the flower of genteel Virginian girlhood, Margaret Whitehead—and that he feels no remorse for the general butchery: “You mean to tell me that now, after all these here months, your heart ain’t touched by the agony of an event like that?” Seeking to answer these queries, not to Mr. Gray so much as to himself, Nat lets his memory play over the past. On the verge of a mean death, he settles accounts inwardly. We eavesdrop on this long dialogue of spirit and self as we do on the actual exchanges—garrulous, pungent, broken by long silences—between the white man and the black.

  A blackness heavier than the lost African past or the drowsy, storm-brooding Virginian nights has gone into the forging of Nat Turner. It is more than the inevitable posture of bondage, with its “unspeakable bootlicking Sambo, all giggles and smirks and oily, snivelling servility.” It is more than the shock of seeing a mother acquiescent in partial rape or fellow-slaves chastised in petty or savage ways. It is an inner night accepted by both master and slave: to his owners the Negro is by God’s definition a creature “who cannot spell cat,” whom molasses and the lash keep in a condition just short of humanity. The Negro accepts this devaluation, not consciously but because the very words through which he forms his needs and croons his content are borrowed; the image he finds in his mirror has been put there by the white man. To a Negro slave, narcissism is subjection. But little Nathaniel is fortunate. Samuel Turner, his master, rejoices in his nascent powers, in his learning to read—a wonder of stealth and illumination finely rendered by Mr. Styron. Nat’s study of Scripture and reveries of eloquence are fostered. At Turner’s Mill, the child becomes “a grinning elf in a starched jumper who gazed at himself in mirrors, witlessly preoccupied with his own ability to charm.” Plans are laid for his further training and, ultimately, for his emancipation. Nat passes into the mulatto zone of the half-free, into that sweet and cruel place of special acceptance where white masters have often cajoled and unmanned their more talented colonial subjects. But the South is visited by economic blight, and Nat finds himself thrown suddenly into the pit of common hell. First with the Reverend Eppes, who, his homosexual advances thwarted, reduces Nat to a worn chattel; then with Thomas Moore, an illiterate brute of a farmer. “I had never felt a whip before, and the pain of it when it came, coiling around the side of my neck like a firesnake, blossomed throughout the hollow of my skull in an explosion of light.” By that searing light, Nat Turner lets his “exquisitely sharpened hatred for the white man” ripen to a purpose. He resolves to capture the armory in Jerusalem, the all too suitably named county seat, and transform a handful of tormented menials, cowering in a barbecue pit on Sunday afternoons and conspiring in dim, apocalyptic hatred, into the “majestic black army of the Lord!”

  Mr. Styron has set himself the obviously formidable task of representing—no, of finding a credible poetic counterpart to—the mentality of an inspired Negro slave who lived briefly and died grimly a hundred
and thirty-six years ago. “I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events,” says Mr. Styron. What he means by “events” are necessarily the feelings, surges of memory, and introspective musings of Nat Turner. Here the reality available to the novelist, the sole means whereby he can convey his re-creative authority to the reader, is that of style. In few other recent novels has idiom borne so large a weight. We believe in Nat Turner’s modes of speech, in the world of his words, or we do not believe in him at all. Mr. Styron has not attempted to offer a facsimile of the diction of a Tidewater Negro of the 1830s, though flashes of dialect and subliterate parlance do come through when minor characters speak. He has tackled the problem that always confronts the serious writer of historical fiction, be he Thackeray or Robert Graves: the working out of a credible linguistic convention, of a cadence and turn of phrase remote from yet susceptible to the undertones and pressures of the modern. It is fascinating to watch Mr. Styron at work. Several strands are visible. There is Mr. Styron’s ability, salient in everything he writes, to make violent feeling pictorial, to accumulate words toward a graphic crescendo. There is a level of formal Latinity, of Miltonic sonorities, eroded by time and provincial usage, that governed the speech of high feeling in the Old Dominion. Principally, we find a constant echo of the Authorized Version and Book of Common Prayer. Nat Turner’s conceptions, the timber of which he builds an apocalyptic world inside himself in order to ignite others with something of its visionary flame, are Biblical throughout. Job and Ezekiel possess his tongue. This is historically plausible and is, indeed, reflected in what we have of Nat Turner’s own speech. But it proves effective at a deeper level as well. It relates the novel to other moments in American consciousness and prose in which the syntax of the Jacobean Bible, compressed by Puritan intensity or loosened and made florid by political rhetoric, served to define the new world. From Cotton Mather to Faulkner and James Baldwin, Biblical speech has set a core of vision and public ornament inside the American language.

  One of the subtlest things in the book is Nat’s feverish recollection of a buggy ride through the countryside with young Margaret Whitehead. She is brimming with unrealized, teasing sensuality. Nat Turner’s nerves are tautened to near madness:

  On she prattled in her whispery voice, love-obsessed, Christ-crazed, babbling away in an echo of all the self-serving platitudes and stale insipid unfelt blather uttered by every pious capon and priestly spinster she had listened to since she was able to sit upright, misty-eyed and rapt and with her little pantalettes damp with devotion, in a pew of her brother’s church. She filled me with boredom and lust—and now, to still at least the latter emotion, once and for all, I let her constant rush of words float uncaptured through my mind, and with my eyes on the horse’s bright undulating rump, concentrated on a minor but thorny problem that was facing me at the very outset of my campaign.

  His killing of the girl at the climax of the revolt is an enactment both literal and symbolic of the crazed yearnings that assail him in the “ferny coolness” of the woods. As she leans against him, Nat Turner feels the electric passage across his cheek of Margaret’s chestnut-colored hair: “During that moment I heard her breathing and our eyes met in a wayward glint of light that seemed to last much longer than any mere glance exchanged between two strangers journeying of a summer afternoon to some drowsy dwelling far off in the country.” The whole episode recalls a nocturnal dog-cart ride, tense with unfulfilled desire and stifled sensuality, in Parade’s End. The echo of Ford Madox Ford is probably relevant. The ceremonious intensity of Ford’s style seems to have influenced both William Styron and Allen Tate. And it is precisely beside Tate’s great novel of the broken South, The Fathers, that we can most fairly set The Confessions of Nat Turner.

  The question now is this: Would a Negro recognize Nat Turner for one of his own, would he find Mr. Styron’s fiction authentic to his own experience? The literate Negro of today, one gathers, finds little save embarrassment and mauvaise foi in the masks devised for him by Faulkner. Whatever the answer, the question does not infirm the intelligence, the imaginative generosity of Mr. Styron’s novel. He has every artistic right to make of his Nat Turner less an anatomy of the Negro mind than a fiction of complex relationship, of the relationship between a present-day white man of deep Southern roots and the Negro in today’s whirlwind. The essential imaginative need in this beautiful, honest book arises from a white sensibility exploring its own social, racial future by dramatizing, necessarily in its own terms, the Negro past. It is something like this Styron may have in mind when he says that he wished “to produce a work that is less an ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms than a meditation on history.”

  Nevertheless, the question nags. Nor would a review by Mr. Baldwin give a representative reply (a great gift is like leprosy; it isolates a man or makes him a member of a special community). How many Negro “common readers,” in Virginia Woolf’s positive sense of the phrase, will this novel reach, how many will tell us of their response? What will they make of Mr. Styron’s use of a white man—the brilliantly drawn Jeremiah Cobb—as the agent of Nat’s awakening, as the goad to Nat Turner’s vision of a possible revolt? Or of Mr. Styron’s insistence, tactful and ironic as it is, on the role played by loyal Negro slaves in the crushing of Turner’s insurrection? (“I had caught sight for the first time of Negroes in great numbers with rifles and muskets at the barricaded veranda, firing back at us with as much passion and fury and even skill as their white owners and overseers who had gathered there to block our passage into Jerusalem.”) As one asks them, such questions seem to carry their own charge of relevant sadness. A few years ago, the hope of a natural dialogue between white and Negro, engaging such values as are implicit in Mr. Styron’s narrative, seemed in closer reach than it does today. Now, at moments, the intimation of a gap across which sudden violence or hysterical intimacy offers the only bridge is as vivid as it was to Nat Turner. Nat’s decision to root out of his mind forever the one white man to whom he stood in a relationship of love is all too suggestive of those spurts of harsh mockery or curtains of silence that so many Negroes now interpose between themselves and those who would be friends, allies, travellers down the same long road. “1831,” writes Mr. Styron, “was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday.” Or only tomorrow.

  BRENDAN GILL

  MARCH 8, 1969 (PHILIP ROTH’S PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT)

  PHILIP ROTH’S LATEST novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (Random House), is one of the dirtiest books ever published. It is also one of the funniest. From first to last, it is unremittingly revolting and hilarious—a single, hysterical howl of excrementitious anguish, at which, uncannily, we are invited to laugh. What is more uncanny is that we actually do laugh, that we cannot avoid laughing, it being often wrung from us against our will, if not by the shock of an obscenity we recognize then by the shock of one we don’t. Mr. Roth, in the person of his hero and counterpart, Alexander Portnoy, has expanded enormously the range of Pope’s “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Portnoy is an irresistibly eloquent, foul-mouthed showoff/wisecracker/victim/windbag. “Look, you guys, you goyim,” he seems to cry, “I’m dying, I’m as good as dead! What am I saying—as good as dead? Isn’t that wild? And you know what’s killing me? My mother’s love. My father’s love. My Jewishness. My gorgeous libido. All the great things, ripping the guts out of me. Poor Portnoy!” He holds up a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint, on his sweating face the parody of a pitchman’s ingratiating smirk. “Read all about me!” he begs. “Get the lowdown on poor A.P.’s horrible hangups! Read the filthy memoirs of a smart kid too big for his breeches!”

  A hooknosed, Brillo-haired Punchinello, Roth’s Portnoy reels in frantic high spirits about the spotlighted center ring, and from where we sit watching him in the shadows it is impossible to tell whether the liquid that gushes out of that painted, smiling clown’s muzzle is blood or ketchup, his or Heinz. Nor does he wish us to be able to
tell. He falls on his knees in the sawdust, writhing. For a moment, we fear that he may be in his death agony; a moment later, we suspect a hoax. The only thing we can be sure of is that Portnoy is having the time of his life. Never has anyone been so radiantly miserable, never has greater pleasure been squeezed from pain. Roth has taken Whitman’s austerely noble “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” and transformed it into a whining and superbly comic “I am the boy, I ache all over, I am here.” For Portnoy, still swaddled in polymorphous perversity at thirty-three, it is plain that there is no place but here; his bounds are the bounds of his mother-haunted, desire-tormented, guilt-ridden body. “I touch and sin, therefore I am.” His heart is not the only organ he wears upon his sleeve, and it is certainly not the most conspicuous, but all of Portnoy’s organs are equally precious to him and equally importunate in their need to be exhibited. Well, and no wonder; it turns out that they are the sum not only of what he is but also of what he knows. Beyond his troubled, panting, incessantly swelling and subsiding flesh lies terra incognita, inhabited by fire-eating and fire-breathing dragons that are, in fact, only other desperate people leading desperate lives. Most of these dragons are Gentiles, Portnoy’s natural foe, and he strives to keep them at bay by cravenly abasing himself before their imaginary fierceness. Pratfalling into cataracts of scatological hyperbole, he becomes the biggest Jewish joke that ever was, and so, he hopes, the most harmless of creatures.