[Tribute spoken at a memorial service for Lillian Hellman, July 3, 1984, in the town of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard.]
Irwin Shaw
Back in the 1940s, if you were an aspiring young writer—or even if you merely cared for literature—you passionately read short stories. You read novels and poetry, too, but the short story was the proving ground for your own talent, and you experienced this most demanding of literary forms in a very personal way. You read the stories of the masters with that mixture of critical alertness and abandoned devotion that is the mark of the hopeful apprentice. Of the many masters of that form whose work was part of my self-imposed curriculum, there was no one who stirred me to more open and defenseless admiration than Irwin Shaw. The passage of time, however, has eroded Shaw's reputation. His stories, appearing regularly in The New Yorker, were models of the form, possessing all the elements I yearned to emulate: irony, a beautifully attuned ear for the demotic speech of mid-century America, humor, controlled rage at the world's injustices, and a casually elegant lyricism which pervaded each tale and stamped it as the work of Irwin Shaw and no one else. Hemingway had this magnetic appeal for a somewhat earlier generation of readers, and J. D. Salinger would exert the same magic a bit later. One of the higher tributes one can pay to a writer is when, as in certain remembered glimpses of a passionate love affair, the reader can recall the place and time of the act of reading. I was in the Duke University library reading room when I read, in a collection of Shaw stories, that seductive gem of a tale, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and felt the little chill that attends the experience of almost perfectly realized inspiration.
A few months later I was in Marine boot camp when a New Yorker somehow came my way and I read “Walking Wounded.” It was a story of military life and sexual frustration, both of which weighed on me heavily at the time, and I responded vibrantly to the author's mordant depiction of the erotic tensions in Cairo (where Shaw had been stationed), and the toplofty behavior of the American women there, all of which reinforced my belief that no one spoke more eloquently about the outrages suffered by men at war than Irwin Shaw. During the postwar years, when I returned to Duke to complete my studies, I had read nearly everything in prose that Shaw had written—which is to say several collections of his stories and the novel The Young Lions. There were other stories that I thought just as marvelous as those I'd read earlier—“Sailor Off the Bremen,” “Act of Faith,” and that incomparably poignant study—so deep in the American grain—of failed ambition, “The Eighty-Yard Run.” I considered myself something of an expert on Shaw, so much so, in fact, that when I briefly harbored the notion of becoming a graduate student in English I thought it might be a fine idea to write a thesis on his work. I was inordinately sensitive to Shaw's writing and felt very protective toward him, becoming mildly disappointed when his work was not quite up to snuff but never failing to recognize that what he wrote—even slightly second-class Shaw—was written by an outstanding artist. Shaw's war novel, The Young Lions, was one of those mild disappointments which might have been less so had it not emerged in the shadow of The Naked and the Dead, a work which had overwhelmed me. So sweeping and passionate had Mailer's novel seemed to me that The Young Lions suffered somewhat by comparison. I was bothered by an element of contrivance, especially in the character of Noah Ackerman, whose victimization in the Army at the hands of anti-Semites—echoing a theme which had worked well in Shaw's stories—bore the ponderous stamp of Message. Still, I thought the book a tremendous achievement, and it helped consolidate the hero worship I had for Irwin Shaw.
A year or so after this, having come to New York to give a try at chipping out a niche in the pantheon where Shaw was solidly lodged, I was sitting one night with some literary pals in a restaurant we all went to in those days. This was the Blue Mill Tavern on Commerce Street, not far from the seven-dollar-a-week cell I inhabited on West Eleventh Street. The Blue Mill was smoky, crowded, and cheap, with plain but admirable cuisine. The place specialized in steaks, and $1.25 bought a portion of sirloin of the same high quality that is sold today at the Palm or Christ Cella for twenty times the price. That night my heart nearly stopped when I saw through the murk a big burly man with powerful shoulders edging his way toward a table where not one but two girls waited, fresh-faced and with adoring eyes. I was certain this was Irwin Shaw. I had been seeing Irwin from time to time on the streets of the city ever since I had arrived. Almost any heavyset, athletic young man with dark hair and radiantly good-looking Jewish features was someone I suspected of being Shaw. That night my suspicion grew into conviction simply because—I later realized—I wanted the person to be Shaw, and I said as much to my companions. In doing so, of course, I was made to appear foolish, for the big guy was not my idol at all, I could soon tell, and I retracted my claim with flustered embarrassment. I could not have known then that Shaw was already a high-roller and bon vivant of great magnitude and would have found the Blue Mill a most unlikely place to dine, not because he lacked the common touch but because it was far off the beaten track between places like “21” and Le Pavillon, which had become his accustomed haunts.
Several more years passed. I had written my first novel, which for a first novel had been quite successful, and had settled upon Paris as a temporary home before proceeding on my European Wanderjahre. It was in that war-tired but resurgent and beautiful city, where American money and American energy were helping give birth to literary projects like The Paris Review—with which I had become marginally associated—that I finally met Irwin Shaw. He was climbing out of, appropriately, an American car—a gleaming green Ford convertible. Paris was still swarming largely with bicycles and motorbikes and pre-war Citroëns, and Irwin's Ford looked enormous and impressive. So too was Irwin—a rugged hulk of a man in the prime of his late youth, thirty-eight or thereabouts, with one of the most immediately appealing and warm-hearted presences I had ever known or imagined. Consider what the young first novelist's natural reaction would be if, upon meeting the writer of one's fantasies, he is told after no more than a few minutes—as Irwin told me: “You really wrote one hell of a book; man, you really took off!” (His exact words, graven upon the memory.) The young first novelist coughed, or grunted, or murmured something incoherent; I was quite choked up, stupefied by the praise, the spontaneous generosity. It was the hallmark, I would come to understand, of Shaw's personality—a genuine indwelling sweetness that made it virtually impossible to dislike the man who so steadfastly possessed such a quality, even when after becoming his friend, as I did, the first sad and troublesome doubts about his writing grew into feelings I never thought I could entertain: more than slight disappointment, and then often active dislike. Dislike! In those days that word attached to any of the Shaw canon would have been inconceivable.
If we are honest with ourselves we will all admit to having been happily seduced, at least once in our lives, and probably twice, by the lurid glamour of Hollywood, and it was through Irwin that my seduction began. Paris was thronged by people from the movie business and Irwin knew them all—big-time directors like John Huston and moguls like Sam Goldwyn, stars such as Gene Kelly and Ingrid Bergman and Evelyn Keyes, and all sorts of other peripheral figures of legendary glitter: Robert Capa the daredevil photographer, the wonderfully droll screenwriter Harry Kurnitz, gorgeous French models like Bettina. It was through Irwin that I met a lifelong friend, Art Buchwald. To a boy from the Virginia Tidewater it was pig heaven, a tableau from Life magazine come alive, and I ate it up.
I first understood wine to be something other than dago red, a nearspiritual experience, when at a party Irwin invited me to—given by Darryl Zanuck in an incredibly chic restaurant called Chez Joseph, all brocade and damask and fawning waiters—I drank a pre-war Château Margaux, sharing in the miracle with a beautiful French starlet whose hot venez-ici eyes had gazed down at me from dozens of Paris billboards. What impressed me the most about Irwin's connection with this heady scene was his ease with it, his blas
é attitude, a sense that even though he was involved in this world, which had begun to remunerate him so well for the scripts he was writing, he could really take it or leave it. It seemed not to be a milieu whose celebrated corruptions were for him a temptation, and I admired him even more than ever for his grand air of detachment, of being slightly above it all. One night, I witnessed this sang-froid at a screening on the Champs-Élysées of an awful movie called Hans Christian Andersen, unredeemable despite its wonderful star, Danny Kaye. Old Sam Goldwyn, the producer of the film and our host (and who had proclaimed it his greatest effort), sat in the darkness whispering his delight while in the seat behind him, and next to me, Irwin fell sound asleep. Not only that, he began to snore, which made me queasy lest it disturb the old man's rapture. Yet in the end it affirmed more than ever Shaw'sdisdain for Hollywood. Like Faulkner he appeared to me a man who could feed at that banquet but duck out from it at will, feeling no need to join the party.
The next year, when I was in Rome, Irwin was there also, tooling around with his lively wife, Marian, in that huge barge of a green Ford. Once more I felt the full impact of his spacious generosity. I was about to get married and while I had arranged for the ceremony to be held in Michelangelo's splendid Campidoglio, I had made no plans for the postnuptial festivities. Irwin immediately took care of all this, arranging a huge party at his apartment in Parioli, constantly fussing over my bride and me with loving attention and making hilariously bawdy toasts as the blowout drew to a close. That spring and early summer Rose and I saw a lot of the Shaws, taking long drives to places like Ostia and Anzio, where we often dined—dangerously, as we would later learn—on raw oysters and mussels, and drank cold Frascati wine. We talked about travel in Europe, sports, politics, books. Irwin had read prodigiously, and continued his reading; I was always impressed by the breadth of his literary tastes—his love for the Romantic poets and the Victorian novelists, the European modernists—Mann and Proust, Camus and Koestler and Joyce. He was almost unqualifiedly magnanimous about those of his contemporaries whom he respected, the only real exception being Hemingway, for whom he bore a long-standing grudge dating back to wartime London. This antagonism had to do with the woman they had shared, Mary Welsh, whom Hemingway later married, but they would have loathed each other anyway, like rival buck deer. The machismo for which Hemingway was so famous was by no means absent from Shaw; one writer I knew who played tennis with Irwin described him as a “hyper-competitive pain in the ass.” But I admired Shaw's exemplary kindheartedness concerning his literary colleagues, especially the promising younger ones, to whom he could be actually tender. He had certainly been that to me; in many ways the writer whom I had admired from such an impossible distance had not only become my literary older brother but for a while at least—such was my emotional commitment—a surrogate brother for the one I never had.
—
When he died in 1984 at the age of seventy-one near his home of exile for many years—Klosters, Switzerland—Shaw was not included on most lists of illustrious American writers. Despite a large and continuous output of novels and stories, which kept him plugging valiantly away right through the painful illnesses of his last days, his work had long before been dismissed as, at best, journeyman entertainment of slightly sub-middlebrow blandness, slick and proficient, but devoid of any of the merits that would elevate his words to the realm of literature. He was regularly roasted by the critics; probably no serious writer of his time received so many go-arounds of hearty walloping as Irwin Shaw. He had been snubbed by the awarders of prizes, and for him the doors of the prestigious literary academies and societies had been firmly shut. It was said that he had exchanged the rich heritage of his humble Jewish origins in Brooklyn and a once proudly eloquent social consciousness for a world of glitzy glamour.
Probably the worst insults he received were from critics who made unflattering, and unfair, comparisons to writers who were unblushing hacks. Shaw wrote with integrity, but the sad truth about his later career is that much of the criticism leveled against him was well founded: those who were devoted to Shaw's early writing, and those devoted to the boisterously generous and captivating man, had occasion to rue the decline of his work after its grand beginnings. Lumping him in with the potboiler kings was, however, a canard. None of them were ever capable of a novel with the power and magnitude of The Young Lions. Nor did any of them possess a shred of the passion and musical grace that informed Shaw's early stories, which belong in the durable canon of American short fiction, along with the tales of Welty, Cheever, and Salinger.
In his fine study of Shaw's life, Irwin Shaw: A Biography, Michael Shnayerson has set down a vivid account of the writer's often turbulent career, taking a hard-nosed view of the easy seductions that led him into too many commercial back alleys, yet never failing to honor Shaw's immense personal charm and his substantial literary achievement. Few biographies have so well portrayed a writer torn between heeding the siren song of art and the more tempting moans of the various bitch goddesses. The tension produced by this dichotomy in Irwin Shaw helps give Shnayerson's book great dramatic impact.
In one of his letters, Joseph Conrad wrote of the frustration and hardship of writing and the chanciness of a writer's fate, observing that even the most ambitious and hopeful artist must live with the knowledge that the permanence of his work is a matter of doubt. Shaw's later work somehow reflects a lack of hardship; it suffers from an absence of real pain. It is too bad that this work appears meretricious, and that the resurgent fame which fell upon him toward the last was the result of a television miniseries based on one of his less compelling books. One must respect, however, the courage that held him to his writer's calling until he could write no more; this would inspire one's admiration even if he had not given us those stories that sprang, elegant and tender, from the splendid dawn of his career and which seemed destined, as surely as do those of any writer of his time, for the permanence they deserve. These too are traces of one's self that are worth leaving behind.
[Vanity Fair, August 1989. See the Editor's Note for information about the blended text published here.]
Jimmy in the House
James Baldwin was the grandson of a slave. I was the grandson of a slave owner. We were virtually the same age and both bemused by our close link to slavery, since most Americans of our vintage—if connected at all to the Old South—have had to trace that connection back several generations. But Jimmy had vivid images of slave times, passed down from his grandfather to his father, a Harlem preacher of fanatical bent who left a terrifying imprint on his son's life. Jimmy once told me that he often thought the degradation of his grandfather's life was the animating force behind his father's apocalyptic, often incoherent rage.
By contrast my impression of slavery was quaint and rather benign; in the late 1930s, at the bedside of my grandmother, who was then close to ninety, I heard tales of the two little slave girls she had owned. Not much older than the girls themselves at the outset of the Civil War, she knitted stockings for them, tried to take care of them through the privations of the conflict, and, at the war's end, was as wrenched with sorrow as they were by the enforced leave-taking. When I told this classic story to Jimmy he didn't flinch. We both were writing about the tangled relations of blacks and whites in America, and because he was wise Jimmy understood the necessity of dealing with the preposterous paradoxes that had dwelled at the heart of the racial tragedy—the unrequited loves as well as the murderous furies. The dichotomy amounted to an obsession in much of his work; it was certainly a part of my own, and I think our common preoccupation helped make us good friends.
Jimmy moved into my studio in Connecticut in the late fall of 1960 and stayed there more or less continuously until the beginning of the following summer. A mutual friend had asked my wife and me to give Jimmy a place to stay, and since he was having financial problems it seemed a splendid idea. Baldwin was not very well known then—except perhaps in literary circles, where his first novel, Go Tel
l It on the Mountain, was gradually gaining momentum—and he divided his time between writing in the cottage and trips out to the nearby lecture circuit, where he made some money for himself and where, with his ferocious oratory, he began to scare his predominately well-to-do, well-meaning audiences out of their pants.
Without being in the slightest comforted as a Southerner, or let off the hook, I understood through him that black people regarded all Americans as irredeemably racist, the most sinful of them being not the Georgia redneck (who was in part the victim of his heritage) but any citizen whatever whose de jure equality was a façade for de facto enmity and injustice.
Jimmy was writing his novel Another Country and making notes for the essay The Fire Next Time. I was consolidating material, gathered over more than a decade, for a novel I was planning to write on the slave revolutionary Nat Turner. It was a frightfully cold winter, a good time for the Southern writer, who had never known a black man on intimate terms, and the Harlem-born writer, who had known few Southerners (black or white), to learn something about each other. I was by far the greater beneficiary. Struggling still to loosen myself from the prejudices and suspicions that a Southern upbringing engenders, I still possessed a residual skepticism: could a Negro really own a mind as subtle, as richly informed, as broadly inquiring and embracing as that of a white man?
My God, what appalling arrogance and vanity! Night after night Jimmy and I talked, drinking whiskey through the hours until the chill dawn, and I understood that I was in the company of as marvelous an intelligence as I was ever likely to encounter. His voice, lilting and silky, became husky as he chain-smoked Marlboros. He was spellbinding, and he told me more about the frustrations and anguish of being a black man in America than I had known until then, or perhaps wanted to know. He told me exactly what it was like to be denied service, to be spat at, to be called “nigger” and “boy.”
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 51