My Generation

by William Styron

  [Paris Review, Spring 1996.]

  Peter Matthiessen

  When I first met Peter Matthiessen I was in my mid-twenties, feeling rather nervous and unhappy and very much out of my element on my initial visit to Paris. I had published a first novel to considerable acclaim in New York, but small word of the book's existence, and nothing of its success, had reached France during that balmy and beautiful spring of 1952, and I suppose I was a little disappointed that Peter did not display the deference I thought fitting to the situation. Thus at first glance I thought Peter a trifle cold, when in reality his perfectly decent manners were really all one should have expected in view of the fact that I was merely another of the dozens of visiting American firemen who, at the behest of well-meaning friends back in the States, came knocking at the Matthiessen door that year. Peter and his wife, Patsy, lived in a modest but lovely apartment on a Utrillo-like backstreet in Montparnasse; spacious, airy, its one big room filled with light, the Matthiessen pad (the word was just coming into use about then) became the hangout for many of the mob of Americans who had hurried to Paris to partake of its perennial delights, to drink in the pleasures of a city beginning to surge with energy after the miseries of the recent war. “U.S. Go Home” was painted by the Communists on every wall—it was possibly the most ignored injunction in recent history. For the Americans happily established there, Paris was home, and no place was more homelike than the Matthiessen establishment on the rue Perceval. To this day I recollect with awe the sense of an almost constant open house, in which it was possible at practically any time to obtain music and food and drink (Peter was unfailingly generous with what seemed to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of Scotch) or, if need be, a spot to sleep off a hangover and—of course always—conversation. George Plimpton and Harold Humes were among the many visitors, and much of the conversation had to do with a literary magazine which the three friends were then in the process of bringing into hesitant life and which now, seemingly deathless, is known as The Paris Review. I am rather proud of the fact that the interview with me, done by Peter and George Plimpton, was the first of the celebrated Paris Review series (although not the first published)—first undoubtedly because at the time I was the only published novelist any of us knew.

  We also talked a great deal about books and writing. We were swept up in the very midst of a postwar literary fever. Peter had not yet written a book (his fledgling effort, the affecting story “Sadie,” had been published in The Atlantic) but he was, after all, barely twenty-five; he had time to burn and I remember telling him so, from the senior and authoritative vantage point of a writer who was two years older. So it is not to belittle Peter's capacity for work—and he is one of the most industrious writers alive—to say that much of our time during that spring and summer was spent at play. My French was rudimentary, while both Peter and Patsy had an excellent command of the language, and this helped bring me in contact with French people I might not have met; my linguistic ability slowly improved. That same savoir-faire of Peter's enabled me (a gastronomic idiot) to become acquainted with the native cuisine, and one of the remembered joys of that long-ago season, when a solitary dollar could buy considerable French joy, is our single-minded cultivation of the restaurants of Montparnasse and Saint-Germaindes-Prés. We had become good friends and I saw a lot of Peter during the following year in Europe—in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where Peter and Patsy rented a house for the summer; in Rome, where to my enormous and happy surprise Peter turned up with a group of Paris Review cronies at my wedding the next spring; and finally during a splendid sojourn at Ravello, on the Amalfi Drive, where for several weeks Peter and Patsy (along with their newborn son, Lucas) shared a house with Rose and me and played tennis and interminable word games, talked for long hours about writers and writing, and swam in the then pellucid and unpolluted Mediterranean.

  In 1954, when we all moved back to America, Peter set up housekeeping on Long Island and began to write seriously (though spending much of his time in good weather plying a trade as commercial fisherman), while Rose and I began to plant domestic roots in the hills of western Connecticut. During this period we kept close contact, visiting back and forth with considerable regularity, and it was at that time that I read Peter's first novel, Race Rock, in manuscript, beginning a tradition that has lasted to this day; amiably critical of each other's output, Peter and I have read (I think it is safe to say) nearly every word of each other's work—at least of a major nature—and I like to think that the habit has been mutually beneficial. Later I read Partisans and Raditzer with the same careful eye that I had Race Rock; as talented and sensitive as each appeared to be, the statement of a writer at the outset of his career, they were, I felt, merely forerunners of something more ambitious, more complex and substantial—and I was right. When At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published in 1965 there was revealed in stunning outline the fully realized work of a novelist writing at white heat and at the peak of his powers; a dense, rich, musical book, filled with tragic and comic resonances, it is fiction of genuine stature, with a staying power that makes it as remarkable to read now as when it first appeared.

  But before At Play was published Peter had to begin that wandering yet consecrated phase of his career which has taken him to every corner of the globe, and which, reflected in a remarkable series of chronicles, has placed him at the forefront of the naturalists of his time. I saw Peter off in 1959 on the first of these trips—bidding him a boozy bon voyage athwart the Brooklyn docks, on a freighter that was to carry him up to the remotest reaches of the Amazon. Seemingly unperturbed, his spectacles planted with scholarly precision on his long angular face, he might have been going no farther than Staten Island, so composed did he seem, rather than to uttermost jungle fastnesses where God knows what beasts and dark happenings would imperil his hide. Weeks later I received a jaunty postcard from a distant and unheard-of Peruvian outpost, and I marveled at the sang-froid and the self-sufficiency but also at the quiet excitement the few words conveyed; in later years I would receive other droll, understated communiqués from Alaska, New Guinea, and the blackest part of Africa.

  From what sprang this amazing obsession to plant one's feet upon the most exotic quarters of the earth, to traverse festering swamps and to scale the aching heights of implausible mountains? The wanderlust and feeling for adventure that is in many men, I suppose, but mercifully Peter has been more than a mere adventurer: he is a poet and a scientist, and the mingling of these two personae has given us such carefully observed, unsentimental, yet lyrically echoing works as The Cloud Forest, Under the Mountain Wall, The Tree Where Man Was Born, and The Snow Leopard. In the books themselves the reader will find at least part of the answer to the reason for Peter's quest. In these books, with their infusion of the ecological and the anthropological, with their unshrinking vision of man in mysterious and uneasy interplay with nature—books at once descriptive and analytical, scrupulous and vivid in detail, sometimes amusing, often meditative and mystical—Peter Matthiessen has created a unique body of work. It is the work of a man in ecstatic contemplation of our beautiful and inexplicable planet. To this body of natural history, add a novel like At Play in the Fields of the Lord and that brooding, briny, stormswept tone poem, Far Tortuga, and we behold a writer of phenomenal scope and versatility.

  [Introduction to Peter Matthiessen, A Bibliography: 1951–1979, compiled by D. Nichols; Canoga Park, Calif.: Orirana Press, 1979.]

  Bennett Cerf

  Bennett might have appreciated the fact that several years ago two of his Random House writers, Philip Roth and myself, walked along a beach in East Hampton loftily pigeonholing people into three categories: the well poisoners, the lawn mowers (these are most of the people), and the life-enhancers. Needless to say, Bennett belonged to that rare and precious species called the life-enhancers, of which humankind has so much need. Being a life-enhancer, he invigorated and replenished the world he lived in, leaving the people with whom he came in touch exhilarated by
his presence. The vital force in Bennett was so powerful, so seemingly indomitable, that he appeared virtually deathless, and perhaps that is one of the reasons that his passing causes us this dismay we feel. I recall one night some years ago flying on a plane with Bennett through a dark, lovely, star-crowded sky over Pennsylvania. The clear light of the cities below seemed to merge with the glittering stars, creating a wonderful radiant effect that touched us both deeply. Suddenly Bennett turned to me and said something which in another man might seem odd or even slightly bizarre but which in Bennett expressed his own quintessence. “Ah, Bill,” he exclaimed, “I love being alive so much!” Perhaps this explains why he was both so rare and so valuable. Loving life with that unquenchable love of his, he imparted the very spirit of life to others—that buoyant, generous, inimitably vivacious spirit that became apparent the instant he entered a room and that no one who knew him will ever forget. He adored jokes, of course, and I think he might have appreciated it had I tried to make one up for this occasion. At the moment my own sense of loss is too keen, although I am consoled by the thought that there will come a time when memory will permit us all to reexperience, without grief, the warmth and the good cheer that were bestowed upon us by this immeasurably loving, life-enhancing man.

  [Speech delivered at a memorial service, St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, August 1971.]

  Bob Loomis

  I met Bob in 1946—the year after the invention of the printing press. I'd gone back to Duke University after being in the Marines, and Bob had come to Duke after service in the Army Air Force, and he looked about sixteen years old. We met in a tobacco-fragrant part of West Durham, in a sort of seedy salon presided over by an editor of the Duke Press named Ashbel Brice.

  Brice called me Junior, and he called Bob—a year or so younger than me—Junior Junior. Brice introduced Bob and me to our first glorious dry martinis and also, bless him, to Joyce and Faulkner and Yeats. Bob's and my friendship was cemented by our passion for books and writing, which at that age is such a touchingly committed, exquisitely focused matter, like religion. We were also united, in that painfully repressed era, by our unrequited longing for girls. I recall walking on the Duke campus with Bob and glimpsing an especially gorgeous coed sauntering by. I said wryly, “Well, Bob, you can't have everything.” To which he replied, in despair, “You can't have anything!”

  When he married, I was his best man. I've never seen anyone in such ghastly throes of prenuptial nervousness. To allay his anguish, I walked him up Fifth Avenue to the Central Park Zoo, where I tried to distract him by showing him the lions and tigers. We were late getting back to St. Patrick's. His bride, Gloria, was frantic. “Where have you been?” she shouted. Bob replied, accurately in fact: “To a cathouse.”

  With the exception of my first novel, Bob has been the overseer of all the thousands of words I've written for publication at Random House. What a splendid overseer he has been. Bob's reputation has of course preceded him, and people have often asked me what it is that has made him such a great editor. I can't explain the source of his genius—the why of it—but I can briefly describe the mysterious and baffling process whereby his amazing intuition has taken hold and gone to the heart of a problem.

  I've learned to dread the tiny, nearly invisible pencil marks Bob will make in the margins of a manuscript. I dread and welcome them. I dread them because, as we go over the text together, they are almost invariably ego-damaging, uncannily catching me out in some little nasty self-indulgence I thought I could get away with. But with Bob you can't get by with these moments of laziness or failure of clarity or self-flattering turgidity; he pounces like a cobra, shakes the wretched phrase or sentence into good sense or meaning, and soon all is well. How sweet-mannered and gentle Bob is—but how ruthless, how uncompromising. That's why the better part of me has learned to welcome those faint little pencil marks: They signal perception and wisdom.

  But there is something beyond this devastating technical brilliance that has made Bob Loomis so important to me. It goes beyond the pleasure I take in seeing his happy life with his second wife, Hilary, and his son, Miles. It has to do with the faith and loyalty and the friendship of—I can scarcely believe it, saying these words—half a century. Had it been mere editorial wizardry, that would have been wonderful, but, even so, scarcely enough. What has sustained me for so many years as a writer is the knowledge that possibly the oldest friend I have is always there and, without necessarily speaking the words, patiently urging me on, helping me in spirit to continue striving to be the artist I hope to be.

  [At Random, no. 17, Spring/Summer 1997.]

  Philip Rahv

  I first met Philip in the mid-1950s at a dinner party in rural Connecticut, only a few years after my first novel had been published. Mine was a book which, for a first novel, had received considerable acclaim in the popular press; although in terms of what I conceived to be the New York literary establishment—most notably Partisan Review—my Southern gothic tragedy may as well have been printed on water. That evening, therefore, I felt myself dining, if not precisely among the enemy, then with a species of intellectual so high-powered and demanding that I could not help but feel intimidated, and a little resentful. I had of course read much of Philip's admirable and brilliant criticism, which made it all the more painful to feel something of a nonentity in his presence. And what a presence it was! There Philip sat across the table, heavy-lidded, glowering, talking in nearly unfathomable polysyllables—not so unfathomable, however, that I might fail to understand that he was cutting some poor incompetent wretch of a writer to shreds. But how devastating and deserved was that demolition job, how pitiless was his judgment upon that star-crossed nincompoop so misguided as to ever have taken pen in hand! I think I shivered a little, and after dinner sidled away. Later, though, when goodbyes were being said, I was dumbstruck when Philip approached me and took my hand, saying in that voice which was such a strange amalgam of fog and frog, “Hope to see you again. I liked your book.” And then, as if to endorse this stunning statement, he added with a negligent flap of his arm, “It was a good book.” When he was gone, the enormous astonishment lingered, along with an unabashed and immodest satisfaction. Even then, before I knew him, I was powerfully aware that you had passed a crucial muster if, in the eyes of Philip Rahv, you had written “a good book.”

  In retrospect, I can understand that my initial discomfort in Philip's presence had to do in part with a mistaken prejudice. At a time when the urban Jewish sensibility was coming to the forefront of American literature, and the writing of Southerners was no longer the dominant mode, I shared some of the resentment of my fellow WASPs over what we construed as the self-conscious chauvinism often displayed by the literary establishment. Thus, in an awful momentary lapse, I had confused Philip with somebody like Leslie Fiedler. Certainly, I should have known better—should have known that among the things that characterized Philip's approach to literature were his utter lack of parochialism, his refusal to be bamboozled by trends or fashionable currents, and, most importantly, his ability to appreciate a work in terms of difficult and complex values which he had laid down for himself and which had nothing to do with anything so meretricious as race or region or competing vogues. If one knew this—as I had after college and postcollege years during which Partisan Review was required reading—then to have earned the respect of Philip Rahv was exhilarating. I shudder to think what it must have been to experience Philip's disfavor.

  Some years later I got to know Philip very well. Strangers often found it hard to understand how one could become a good friend of this brusque, scowling, saturnine, sometimes impolite man with his crotchets and fixations, his occasional savage outbursts and all the other idiosyncrasies he shared with Dr. Johnson. But I found it easy to be Philip's friend. For one thing, I was able almost constantly to relish his rage, which was a well-earned rage inasmuch as he was an erudite person—learned in the broadest sense of the word, with a far-ranging knowledge that transcend
ed the strictly literary—and thus was supremely competent to sniff out fools. I discovered it to be a cleansing rage, this low, guttural roar directed at the frauds and poseurs of literature. He had, besides, an unerring eye for the opportunists in his own critical profession, where he vented his contempt in equal measure on the “trendy”—a word he virtually coined—and those who were merely windy and inadequate, the pretentious academics who might have had a simple-minded taste for novels but lacked utterly the acquaintance with politics, philosophy, and history which was essential to the critical faculty and a civilized perception of things. If any critic had the right to be magisterial, it was Philip Rahv.