Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  The creative imagination, then, has a double interface: on the output side, with some kind of responsive audience, and on the input side, with reality itself. If either connection breaks down, the electricity ceases to flow. Both sides of the creative event demand trust: on the output side, we must hope an audience is there, or will be there. On the input, we must sit down in the expectation that the material will speak through us, that certain unforeseeable happinesses of pattern and realization will emerge out of blankness as we write.

  We began with Melville. His audience, in that England-oriented, romance-minded America of a hundred forty years ago, was wandering away, but something was frazzling as well in his relation with his raw material. Melville was interested—turned on, we might say—by the sea, and by male interchange, and toward the end of his long-silent life wrote in his obscurity one more masterpiece, Billy Budd, along the lines of these concerns. The vast land of America and the complexities of family life depressed rather than fired his imagination. So, his attempts to abandon his oceanic material rebuked, he abdicated the professional writer’s struggle and has probably made a stronger impression on posterity for it. He seems, at this distance, unencumbered by facile prolixity or mere professionalism; the lack of public means spared him public manners. In his professional defeat his imagination remained his own.

  In this present age of excessive information and of cheerful inaccuracy, where six shrewd or at least intimidatingly verbal critics exist for every creative spirit, the writer has no clearer moral duty than to keep his imagination his own. In doing so, he risks becoming offensive. Listen, if you will, to the tone of this contemporary review of Moby-Dick:

  Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon. He is gauging, at once, our gullibility and our patience. Having written one or two passable extravagances, he has considered himself privileged to produce as many more as he pleases, increasingly exaggerated and increasingly dull.… The truth is, Mr. Melville has survived his reputation. If he had been contented with writing one or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all his chances of immortality, or even of a good name with his own generation.

  “O generation of vipers” runs through the mind. All generations, each in their time, are viperish, and how the artist survives and makes his way in his own lifetime is fundamentally a personal problem, with many solutions, none of them ideal. But this much seems certain: what we end by treasuring in the creative imagination is the freedom it manages to keep, regardless of contemporary response. Or, rather, the degree to which it, imagining an ideal audience, succeeds in creating an audience with an enhanced capacity for response.

  Should Writers Give Lectures?3

  THE VERY FIRST PEOPLE whom we consider authors—the minds and voices behind the tribal epics, the Bible and Homer, the Vedas and the sagas—were, it would seem, public performers, for whom publication took the form of recitation, of incantation, of (we might say) lecturing. The circumstances wherein these primal literary works were promulgated are not perfectly clear, nor are all examples of oral literature identical in purpose and texture; but we could risk generalizing that the bard’s function was, in the Horatian formulation, to entertain and to instruct, and that the instruction concerned the great matter of tribal identity. The poet and his songs served as a memory bank, supplying the outlines of the determinative tribal struggles and instances of warrior valor. Who we are, who our heroic fathers were, how we got where we are, why we believe what we believe and act the way we do—the bard illuminates these essential questions, as the firelight flickers and the mead flows and the listeners in their hearts renew their pact with the past. The author is delivering not his own words but his own version of a story told to him, a story handed down in an evolving form and, at a certain point, fixed into print by the written version of a scribe. The author is not only himself but his predecessors, and simultaneously he is part of the living tribal fabric, the part that voices what all know, or should know, and need to hear again.

  The mnemonic function of poetry weakly persists: American schoolchildren remember a certain epic date with the rhyme “In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and verses exist that enable one to recall the Kings of England and which months of the year contain thirty days or, in the case of February, even fewer. The nineteenth century abounded in ballad versions of such historical events as the midnight ride of Paul Revere and the bravery, in the midst of the Civil War, of a certain elderly Barbara Frietchie, who brandished the Union flag at rebel soldiers and inspired this famous couplet:

  “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

  But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

  As recently as a decade ago, consumers of popular music were startled by a hit that rousingly set forth the facts of the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought in 1814.

  And the traditional, even sacred centrality of the bard at the tribal conference is remembered, I think, by the widely held notion that authors can “speak”—that their vocation includes an ability and a willingness to entertain and instruct, orally, any gathering where the mead flows and ring-gold forthcomes in sufficient quantities. The assumption is flattering but in truth the modernist literary tradition, of which we are all, for lack of another, late and laggard heirs, ill prepares a writer for such a performance. James Joyce, evidently, had a fine tenor voice and loved to sing, and he also, inspired by enough mead, could kick as high as the lintel of a doorway; but Proust was of a thoroughly retiring and unathletic nature, and murmured mostly to himself. “Authentic art has no use for proclamations, it accomplishes its work in silence,” he wrote, in that massive meditation upon the writer’s task which concludes Remembrance of Things Past. “To be altogether true to his spiritual life an artist must remain alone and not be prodigal of himself even to disciples” is another of Proust’s strictures. The artist, he repeatedly insists, is not another citizen, a social creature with social duties; he is a solitary explorer, a pure egotist. In a great parenthesis he explains that “when human altruism is not egotistic it is sterile, as for instance in the writer who interrupts his work to visit an unfortunate friend, to accept a public function, or to write propaganda articles.”

  In almost the exact middle of Time Regained, Marcel contemplates his task—the huge novel we have at this point almost read through—and quails at a prospect so grand and exalted. He has stumbled upon the uneven paving stones that have recalled Venice to him, has heard the clink of the spoon upon glass that has reminded him of the train journey in which he had observed the steeples of Martinsville, has felt the texture of the stiff napkin that has reminded him of Balbec and its beach and ocean; he has tasted the madeleine out of which bloomed all Combray, and sees that these fragments involuntarily recovered from the abyss of Time compose the truth he must deliver:

  Beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects. No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read. For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which is possible for us to extract.

  This extraction of meaning from hieroglyphs becomes on the next page an underwater groping:

  As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work
for us or even collaborate with us. How many for this reason turn aside from writing! What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task! Every public event, be it the Dreyfus affair, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature. But these are mere excuses, the truth being that he has not or no longer has genius, that is to say instinct. For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgement.

  Now, perhaps in this audience there have been some smiles at Proust’s enthusiasm over the still-fresh discovery of the unconscious and at his virtually religious exaltation of the private over the public—of instinct, which can be expressed only through concrete images impressed upon us by reality and re-created in works of art, over intellect, which can speak the language of men, of social commerce. Is not a bustling book fair the silliest place in the world to suggest that literature is an activity apart, an activity of the spirit as intimate as prayer, an activity for whose sake we must renounce deeds as praiseworthy and socially useful as helping sick friends, propagandizing for worthy causes, and accepting public functions such as the one I am now fulfilling? The religious tone of classic modernism, breathing austerity and fanaticism, strikes us as excessive. Its close imitation of European Catholicism seems puzzling, now that the vessel of Christianity is a century more depleted. Austerity and fanaticism are now given over to the Muslims, who alarm us each night on the televised news. What do the emanations from the ivory tower count against those from the television transmitting tower?

  This phrase “ivory tower” was proposed by Flaubert, the first modernist novelist, when he wrote,

  Between the crowd and ourself, no bond exists. Alas for the crowd; alas for us, especially. But since the fancy of one individual seems to me just as valid as the appetite of a million men, and can occupy an equal place in the world, we must (regardless of material things and of mankind, which disavows us) live for our vocation, climb up our ivory tower and there, like a bayadere with her perfumes, dwell alone with our dreams.

  The artist’s only possible camaraderie, Flaubert elsewhere asserts, can be with other artists. “Mankind hates us: we serve none of its purposes; and we hate it, because it injures us. So let us love one another ‘in Art,’ as mystics love one another ‘in God.’ ” God much haunts his mind, as in the famous dictum “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” God does not lecture, except to the Old Testament Israelites, who did not always listen. The modernist writer does not lecture; he creates, he dreams, he deciphers his hieroglyphs, he exists in a state of conscious antagonism to the busy bourgeois world. The lecture is an instrument of the bourgeoisie, a tool in the mass education essential to modern democracies. Though Flaubert says that no bond exists between the crowd and literary artists, the crowd offers to make one and invites the writer to lecture. “Descend from your ivory tower,” the crowd cries, “and come share, O bayadere, your fabulous perfumes with us.” Godlike and savage in his purest conception of himself, the author is thus brought back into society, into the global village, and trivialized into being an educator and a celebrity.

  I am thinking primarily of my own country in offering this last image. Lectures by authors go back, in the United States, to the so-called lyceum circuit, which, beginning in the 1830s, brought to the scattered American provinces inspirational and educational speakers. Ralph Waldo Emerson was such a star, hitting the road with secular sermons culled from his journals, and then collecting these oral gems into the volumes of essays that are among the classic texts of American style and thought. Mark Twain, a generation and a half later, began as a comic lecturer, a stand-up comedian without a microphone, and his best-selling novels and travel accounts retained much of his crowd-pleasing platform manner. Even writers relatively abstruse and shy followed the lecture trail; Henry James toured the States coast to coast in 1904–5 lecturing on “The Lesson of Balzac,” and Melville for a time in the late 1850s, when he was still somewhat famous as “the man who had lived among cannibals,” sought to generate the income that his books were failing to supply by speaking, at fifty dollars a lecture, on “Statues in Rome” and “The South Seas.” Even a figure as eccentric and suspect as Whitman travelled about, evidently, with a lecture on Lincoln. Yet in its very heyday the lyceum style of bardic enterprise had its detractors among literary men: Hawthorne wrote in The Blithedale Romance of “that sober and pallid, or, rather, drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the Lecture,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes returned from a tour reporting that “a lecturer was a literary strumpet.”

  Still, as one tries to picture those gaslit auditoriums of the last century, with the black-clad lecturer and his oaken lectern framed by velvet curtains heavy with gold tassels—curtains that the next night might part to reveal a scuffed and much-travelled opera set or the chairs of a minstrel show—one imagines an audience and a performer in sufficient agreement as to what constituted entertainment and edification; the bonds between the culture-hungry and the culture-dispensing were stretched thin but not yet broken in the innocence of the New World wilderness. One thinks of the tremendous warmth Emerson established with his auditors, to whom he entrusted, without condescension or clowning, his most profound and intimate thoughts, and who in listening found themselves discovering, with him, what it was to be American.

  Like book clubs and other movements of mass uplift, the lecture circuit gradually gravitated toward the lowbrow. The famous Chautauqua Movement, which persisted into the 1920s, blended with camp meetings and tent revival meetings—each a high-minded excuse to forgather, with the usual mixed motives of human gatherings. The writers most admired in my youth did not, by and large, lecture, though some of the less admired and more personable did, such as the then-ubiquitous John Mason Brown and Franklin P. Adams. But Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck were rarely seen on stages; their advice to humanity was contained in their works, and their non-writing time seemed amply filled with marlin fishing, mule fancying, skirt chasing, and recreational drinking. They were a rather rough-hewn crew, adventurers and knockabouts who had trained for creative writing by practicing journalism. Few were college graduates, though Fitzgerald’s years at Princeton were important to him and Sinclair Lewis and Thornton Wilder did hold degrees from Yale. But doing was accepted as the main mode of literary learning. Hemingway began as a reporter for the Kansas City Star at the age of eighteen, and at the age of nineteen Eugene O’Neill quit Princeton and shipped out to sea. The world of print was wider then: a major American city might have as many as eight or ten daily newspapers, and a number of popular magazines paid well for short stories. The writers of this pre-television generation, with their potentially large bourgeois audience, yet were modernist enough to shy from crowd-pleasing personal appearances; nor, in the matter of lecturing, is there much reason to suppose that they were often invited. Why would the citizens of Main Street want to hear what Sinclair Lewis thought of them? Gertrude Stein, of all people, did go on a nationwide lecture tour in 1934, speaking in her complacently repetitive and cryptic style on such topics as “What Is English Literature,” “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” and “Portraits and Repetition.” One suspects, though, that the audiences came to hear her much as they had flocked to hear Oscar Wilde in 1882—more for the spectacle than the sense, and to be titillated by the apparition of the writer as an amusing exotic.

  It is true that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, such very estimable literary artists as Shaw, Eliot, and Mann did not infrequently lecture. Shaw, however, was a man of the stage, with somethi
ng political—Fabian Socialism—to sell. Eliot was a critic as much as he was a poet, with an excellent formal education in his possession and a considerable financial need to urge him to the lectern. And Mann, well, was German, and in the mighty role of Dichter rather close to the primeval bard. By lecturing, with authority and aplomb, on Freud, Goethe, and Wagner, Mann was, besides acknowledging sources of his own inspiration, paying homage to tribal gods, to exemplary heroes of German culture. The French, too, one might observe in passing, now and then cast up literary figures whose magisterial presence consists of the sum of their work with something added from before and beyond. Figures like Valéry and Sartre even in their silences and refusals lecture, reminding their publics of the ancient glories of Gallic acumen. When one tries to think of who in recent French culture has projected the most vital images outward to the non-French world, one comes up with lecturers—Barthes, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Braudel.

  But in my own country, in the four decades since the end of World War II, one sees not the elevation of analysis and thought to the animated and brightly visible level of creative art, but the reduction of literary artists to the status of academic adjuncts. Where creation is taken as a precondition for exposition, the creator is expected to be, in Proust’s phrase, “prodigal of himself.” It is not merely that poets out of economic necessity teach in colleges and read their works in other colleges and in time understandably take as a standard of excellence a poem’s impact upon a basically adolescent audience, or that short-story writers move from college writing program to summer workshop and back again and consider actual publication as a kind of supplementary academic credential, while a karmic turnover of writing students into graduate writing students into writing teachers takes place within an academic universe sustained by grants and tax money and isolated from the marketplace. It is not merely that contemporary novels are studied for course credit and thus given the onus of the compulsory and, as it were, the textbook-flavored—a modernization of the literary curriculum, one might remark, that displaces the classics and gives the present a kind of instant fustiness. It is that American society, generously trying to find a place for this functionary, inherited from other epochs, called a writer, can only think to place him as a teacher and, in a lesser way, as a celebrity.