In 1944, as a Marine recruit, I was shanghaied into the “clap shack,” the venereal-disease ward of the Naval Hospital at Parris Island, South Carolina. There at the age of eighteen, only barely removed from virginhood, I was led to believe that blood tests revealed I had a probably fatal case of syphilis—in those pre-penicillin days as dread a disease as cancer—and was forced to languish, suicidal, for forty days and forty nights amid the charnel-house atmosphere of draining buboes, gonorrhea, prostate massages, daily short-arm inspections, locomotor ataxia, and the howls of poor sinners in the clutch of terminal paresis, until at last, with no more ceremony than if I were being turned out of veterinary clinic, I was told I could go back to boot camp: I would not die after all, it was all a mistake, those blood tests had turned up a false reaction to an old case of trench mouth. I could have wept with relief and hatred. Such experiences have given our generation, I believe, both the means and the spirit to bridge the generation gap.
Literary sweepstakes are a bore, especially when this is a matter of comparing generations, and the situation is not enhanced in this case by Fitzgerald's boast, with its implication that the men of his era produced achievements in prose writing that would cause those who followed after to feel like sacred epigones. The stature of Faulkner alone would have been enough to cow any young writer, all the more if he were Southern; as Flannery O'Connor remarked so wonderfully: “No one wants to get caught on the tracks when the Dixie Special comes through.” Yet it has been a rich time for writing, I think, richer than may be imagined. Certainly, whether or not as a group we shall receive posterity's sweet kiss—whether our names will date as sadly as Cyril Hume and Edward Hope Coffey—no gathering ever comprised a clutch of talents so remarkably various: Mailer, Baldwin, Jones, Capote, Salinger, the incomparably infuriating Gore Vidal, John Barth, Terry Southern, Heller (where's that second book, Joe?), Walker Percy, Peter Matthiessen—who would survive as the finest writer on nature since John Burroughs even if he never found due recognition for his badly underestimated fiction—William Gaddis, Richard Yates, Evan Connell, George Mandel, Herbert Gold, Jack Kerouac, Vance Bourjaily, John Clellon Holmes, Calder Willingham, Alan Harrington, John Phillips, William Gass, and, honorifically, George Ames Plimpton.
To this roll must be added, incidentally, the name of Richard Howard, the city of Cleveland's gift to France and the most elegant translator from the French tongue writing in English.*1
Catalogs like the foregoing are at best an amusement, surely a trifle silly, so I won't make another quite as extensive, but a list of the poets of this generation would sparkle brightly, from Simpson to Merwin, James Dickey to Anthony Hecht, Snodgrass to Allen Ginsberg.*2 There are, obviously, quite a few others of equivalent stature. As John Hollander, himself a fine poet, has written about their best poems: “[They] stand as some sort of testament to the continuing spiritual revolution to which poetry in English has been committed for more than a century-and-a-half, and to the ancillary struggle to redeem poetry itself, as the product of imaginative creation, from the sickness with which Literature as a realm is too often infected.”1
So all in all a pretty good show, I would say, for a crowd that started out with the blind staggers—with the disease of McCarthy and the drug of Eisenhower—one that some ineffably fatuous critic long ago dismissed with the tag, “the Silent Generation.” And let us brood for a moment on our predecessors. Despite the buoyancy in which Fitzgerald commences his reflections on his own brothers in art, there is something dispirited, tired, elegiac about that little memoir. There is an odor of the grave about it. Faced with the sure prospect of a cataclysmic war and—who knows?—a premonition of his own imminent death, perhaps this fading tone, this pervasive mood of farewell was inevitable. Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wilder, all his peers—Fitzgerald had truly been born into noble company. But the best, the greatest work of all these men was long behind them, including Faulkner, who was the only one of them capable of a sustained level of quality until the very end. It is perhaps this knowledge, an instinctive sense of decline, that causes a mood of sadness to overlay this essay of Fitzgerald, who knew no better than the rest of us why whole groups of talents will burst into thrilling efflorescence, and then as mysteriously fade away. Writing now at roughly the same age as Fitzgerald, I can say that I feel no such a falling off, no similar sense of loss about my own generation. Revolution rends the air, the world around us shivers with the brave racket of men seeking their destiny, with the invigorating noise of history in collision with itself. This generation, once so laggardly, now confronts a scene astir with great events, such a wild dynamo of dementedly marvelous transactions that merely to be able to live through them should be cause for jubilation. Mes amis, aux barricades! I would not be astonished if our truly most precious flowering lay in the time to come. As for myself—reflecting on the way in which we all started out—I have never felt so young.
[Esquire, October 1968. Published together with essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Frank Conroy on their respective literary generations.]
* * *
*1 Howard (b. 1929), American poet, critic, and translator of Baudelaire, Barthes, Foucault, Gide, Robbe-Grillet, and other French authors.—J.W.
*2 Chronologically, Richard Wilbur should be included here, but he started publishing very young, and might be considered an influence on, rather than a member of, this generation.—W.S. (1968)
Robert Penn Warren
I have been lucky to have known Red Warren well for quite a few years and to have been privy to certain personal matters known only between good friends. I am therefore aware of an interesting fact about Red's early life that is not generally understood by less favored mortals. This is that as a boy in his teens Red's simple but very red-blooded American ambition was to become an officer in the United States Navy. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the truth, not an idle fiction. Indeed, it was more than an ambition; it was a goal very close of attainment, for Red had obtained his appointment and was all but packed up and ready to leave the bluegrass of Kentucky for Annapolis when he suffered an injury to his eye which made it impossible for him ever to become a midshipman. There is irony in this, for it always has seemed to me that Red at least looks like a sailor. If you will glance at him now, you will see it: that seamed and craggy face which has gazed, like Melville's, into the briny abyss, that weather-wise expression and salty presence which have made him physically the very model of a sea dog; and as a consequence I have often become thoroughly bemused when speculating on Red's career if he had gone off to the Naval Academy. I would like to consider this prospect for a moment.
First, let no one underestimate the military mind; at the highest levels of command great brilliance is required, and for this reason Red would have been what is known as a “rising star” from the very beginning. Thus I visualize the scenario—if I may use that awful word—like this. Number one in his class at Annapolis, Red becomes the first naval Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where his record is also spectacular. He takes his degree in Oriental history, writing a thesis which is a revisionist examination of Genghis Khan, largely laudatory in tone. Later in my fantasy I see Red at the end of World War II, much decorated, at the age of forty the youngest captain in the seagoing navy, attending the Naval War College at Newport, writing learned dissertations on the nuclear capabilities of the Soviet fleet. His recommendation is: Let's press the button, very softly, before the Russians do. During the Korean War, a rear admiral now, he wins his fourth Navy Cross, is made commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, is on the cover of Time magazine, has a tempestuous though necessarily discreet affair with Ava Gardner. Through the dull and arid years between Korea and Vietnam, Red Warren plays golf with Eisenhower, rereads Thucydides and Clausewitz, hobnobs with Henry Luce, Barry Goldwater, and Mendel Rivers, and is appointed Chief of Naval Operations under Lyndon Johnson.
I don't know why my fantasy brightens and becomes happy at this point. Maybe it's because I see Red Warren miraculous
ly turn a major corner in his life, undergoing—as it were—a sea change. He becomes a dove! After all, a great Marine general, ex-Commandant David Shoup, did this: why not Red in my fantasy? Now as he reverses himself, the same grand historical imagination which in his alter ego produced All the King’s Men, World Enough and Time, and Brother to Dragons is suddenly seized with the folly and tragedy of our involvement in Southeast Asia, so that on one dark night in 1966 there is a confrontation, many hours long, between the admiral from Kentucky—now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and the Texas president, two Southerners eyeball to eyeball; and in this passionate colloquy it is the Kentuckian who finally gains the upper hand with his forceful, humanitarian argument—founded upon the ineluctable lessons of history of which he is master—that this war can only lead to futility, disaster, and national degradation. I even see the droplets of sweat on Lyndon Johnson's forehead as, after a grave long pause, he gives in, saying, “God damn yore soft-hearted hide, Admiral Warren, you've convinced me!” And immediately I see him getting on the telephone to McNamara: “Bob, git those advisers out of Vietnam! We're going to nip this here dirty little war in the bud!”
But this kind of wish-fulfillment becomes almost unendurable, and so in my mind's eye I bring Red's naval career to a merciful close, seeing him as grim and cruel reason dictates he most likely would be today—not basking in well-deserved homage at the Lotos Club but retired to the Pacific seaside at Coronado, cultivating prize asparagus or roses, writing letters to the San Diego Tribune about stray dogs, queers, and the Commie menace, and sending monthly donations to Rabbi Korff.
So by that fateful accident years ago America lost a master mariner but gained a major novelist and poet, a superb essayist, a literary critic of great breadth and subtle discrimination, a teacher of eloquence, a sly and hilarious storyteller, and altogether one of the best human beings to break bread with, or join with in spirituous companionship, or just simply be around in this desperate or any other time….
I would like to conclude with a couple of brief reminiscences having to do with Red Warren which in each case are oddly connected with—of all things for two good ole Southern boys—winter snow. The first of these events occurred a long time ago in New York City during the famous blizzard of late December 1947 (which many of you here doubtless still remember), when I—a young and aspiring and penniless writer up from the Virginia Tidewater living in a basement on upper Lexington Avenue—first read All the King’s Men. I think it is absolute and unimpeachable testimony to a book's impact on us that we are able to associate it so keenly with the time and the surroundings and the circumstances in which we read it. Only a very great work can produce this memory; it is like love, or recollections of momentous loving. There is what psychologists call a gestalt, an unforgettability of interwoven emotions with which the work will ever in recollection be connected with the environment. Somehow the excitement of reading All the King’s Men is always linked in my mind with the howling blizzard outside and the snow piling up in a solid white impacted mass outside my basement window. The book itself was a revelation and gave me a shock to brain and spine like a freshet of icy water. I had of course read many novels before, including many of the greatest, but this powerful and complex story embedded in prose of such fire and masterful imagery—this, I thought with growing wonder, this was what a novel was all about, this was it, the bright book of life, what writing was supposed to be. When finally the blizzard stopped and the snow lay heaped on the city streets, silent as death, I finished All the King’s Men as in a trance, knowing once and for all that I, too, however falteringly and incompletely, must try to work such magic. I began my first novel before that snow had melted; it is a book called Lie Down in Darkness, and in tone and style, as any fool can see, it is profoundly indebted to the work which so ravished my heart and mind during that long snowfall.
Many years and many snowfalls later I was walking with Red Warren one late afternoon on, of all absurd things, snowshoes through the white silence of a forest in Vermont—a rather clumsily comical trek which, had you told the young man on Lexington Avenue he would be making it in the future, would have caused him both awe and incredulity. Red and I were by this time fast and firm friends, bonded in a friendship long past the need of forced conversation, and as we puffed along in Indian file across the mountainous snowdrifts, each of us plunged in his own private meditation, it creepily occurred to me that we were far away from home, far away from the road, still miles away from anything or anybody—and that, worst of all, it was almost night. I had a moment of terrible panic as I thought that Red and I, having unwittingly strayed in our outlandish footgear off the beaten track, would find ourselves engulfed by darkness in this freezing wilderness, utterly lost, two nonsmokers with not a match between us, or a knife to cut shelter—only our foolhardy, vulnerable selves, floundering in the Yankee snows. After the initial panic slid away and I had succumbed to a stoic reckoning, a resignation in face of the inevitable, it occurred to me that if I had to die there was nobody on earth, aside from perhaps Raquel Welch, that I'd rather freeze to death with than Robert Penn Warren: this noble gentleman from Guthrie, Kentucky, whose humane good sense and lyric passion had so enriched us all through these many novels and poems and essays and plays, and whose celebration of the mystery and beauty and, yes, even the inexplicable anguish of life had been one of those priceless bulwarks against death in a time of too much dying. Just then I heard Red casually say, “Well, here's the road.” And I was a little ashamed of my panic, but not of those thoughts, which also had included my heartfelt thanks to God that Red Warren never became an admiral.
[Speech delivered at the Lotos Club, New York City, April 1975.]
Lillian’s Bosom
I'm Bill Styron, an old friend of Lillian's, like many of us here. She once told me that this would be the day that I yearned for more than anything in my life—speaking words over her remains—and she cackled in glee. “Ha, ha,” she said, and I cackled back. She said, “If you don't say utterly admiring and beautiful things about me, I'm going to cut you out of my will.” I said there was no possible way that I could refrain from saying a few critical things, and she said, “Well, you're cut out already.”
That was the way it went with us. I think we had more fights per man-and-woman contact than probably anyone alive. We were fighting all the time, and we loved each other a great deal for sure, because the vibrations were there. But our fights were never really, oddly enough, over abstract things like politics or philosophy or social dilemmas; they were always over such things such as whether a Smithfield ham should be served hot or cold, or whether I had put too much salt in the black-eyed peas.
This anger that spilled out from the lady, almost a reservoir of anger, was really not directed at me or her other friends or even the black-eyed peas, but was directed at all the hateful things that she saw as menaces to the world. When she hated me and the ham, she was hating a pig like Roy Cohn. I think this is what motivated her; when one understood that the measure of her anger was really not personal but cosmic, then one was able to deal with her.
I was privileged, I think the word is, to take Lillian out—to be the last person to take her out to dinner. I did so a few days ago here in Chilmark at La Grange. It was quite an ordeal. We sat down (I had to get her into a chair), just the two of us, and she groped for the various things she had to grope for because, as you know, she was blind and quite radically crippled. Then we had conversation. We carved up a few mutually detested writers and one or two mediocre politicians and an elderly deceased novelist whom she specifically detested, and we got into this sort of thing; and we then started talking about her age.
I didn't tell her the snoop from The New York Times had called me up asking if I knew her age. I said the only biographical data I had at hand was that she was probably seventy-nine. And she said, “I don't know whether the twentieth of June was my seventy-fourth or my seventy-third.” She had been doing this all of her life, n
ot as a vanity—though that was fine too—but as a demonstration of the way that she was hanging on to life.
I realized as I was sitting there that she was painfully uncomfortable. She said that she was cursed by God with having from birth a skinny ass. So I had to go and put things under her constantly, which was fine. She said this bolstered her skepticism about the existence of God. So I told her something that she had always responded to: that the curse was made up for with an ample and seductive bosom. She smiled at that. Through all of this, she was gasping for breath and was suffering. It hit me that this woman was physically in agony. There was something enormously wrenching about being seated alone with this fragment of a human being, suffering so much, gasping for breath. Yet I had a glimpse of her almost as if she was a young girl again, in New Orleans with a beau and having a wonderful time.
As these memories came flooding back, I remember that gorgeous cackle of laughter which always erupted at moments when we were together, with other people or alone. It was usually a cackle of laughter which followed some harpooning of a fraud or a ninth-rater. It was filled with hatred, but hatred and anger which finally evolved into what I think she, like all of us, was searching for—some sort of transcendental idea, which is love. As we went out, I was in awe of this woman. I have no final reflection except that perhaps she was in the end a lover, a mother, a sister, and a friend—and in a strange way a lover of us all.
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