Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  The literary Zeitgeist is, to use the famous phrase, Against Interpretation; and it is into such a philosophy, freed from existence, and above all freed from the notion of the morally accountable Deed, that Other Voices, Other Rooms ought almost flawlessly to glide. For just as its outmoded Negroes do not matter—essence transcends history—so also does the impediment of its rusty narrative works vanish in the dazzle of its prose-poem Being. Other Voices, Other Rooms is, as we always boringly say, a vision: a vision apart from its components, which include a paralyzed father who signals by dropping red tennis balls, a Panlike twin, a midget, a transvestite cousin, the aforementioned sad-happy darkies, not one but two decaying manses (one of which is called the Cloud Hotel), and the whole apparatus of a boy’s rite de passage into probable homosexuality. But the vision is not the sum of any combination of its parts, no more than some or all of the churches of the world add up to the idea of a planet redeemed. Joel Knox, the boy who comes to Skully’s Landing in search of his father, is nevertheless after a redemption that has nothing to do with the stuff of the story he passes through; and at the close of the novel he is redeemed, because the novel itself is his redemption, the novel is a sacrament for both protagonist and novelist.

  A less fancy way of saying all this is that Other Voices, Other Rooms is the novel of someone who wanted, with a fixed and single-minded and burning will, to write a novel. The vision of Other Voices, Other Rooms is the vision of capital-A Art—essence freed from existence. And what is meant by the cant phrase “the novel ought to be about itself” is this: the will to write a novel expresses the novel itself; the will to make art expresses art itself—“expresses” not in the sense that one is equivalent to the other, but that the fulfillment of desire is itself a thing of value, or enough for literature. This is so much taking the imagining to signify the thing itself (which is, after all, literature) that quotidian life—acts followed by their consequences—is left behind at the Cloud Hotel. To quote the theoretician Gass again: “Life is not the subject of fiction.”1 One would be willing to broaden this comment to strike a more percipient grain: life is not the subject of the sort of fiction that is at home in the American Zeitgeist at this moment—despite some beginning strands of dissent. The novel that is said to be “about itself,” or “about its own language,” belongs not to the hard thing we mean when we say “life,” but rather to transcendence, incantation, beatification, grotesquerie, epiphany, rhapsody and rapture—all those tongues that lick the self: a self conceived of as sanctified (whether by muses or devils or gods) and superhuman. When life—the furious web of society, manners, institutions, ideas, tribal histories, and the thicket of history-of-ideas itself—when life is not the subject of fiction, then magic is. Not fable, invention, metaphor, the varied stuff of literature—but magic. And magic is a narcissistic exercise, whether the magic is deemed to be contained within language or within psychology: in either case the nub is autonomous inwardness.

  The Zeitgeist is just now open to all this. Yet Other Voices, Other Rooms—a slim, easy, lyrical book—can no longer be read. Dead and empty. And what of 1948, the year of its publication? What was that time like, the time that sped Capote and his novel to a nearly legendary celebrity that has not since diminished?

  In 1948, cruising the lunchbag-odorous Commons of Washington Square College, I used to keep an eye out for Other Voices, Other Rooms. That place and that time were turbulent with mainly dumb, mainly truculent veterans in their thirties arrived under the open enrollment of the GI Bill, and the handful of young aesthetes, still dewy with high-school Virgil (O infelix Dido!), whose doom it was to wander through that poverty-muttering postwar mob in hapless search of Beauty, found one another through Truman Capote. Other voices, other rooms—ah, how we felt it, the tug of somewhere else, inchoate, luminous, the enameled radiance of our eternal and gifted youth. Instead, here were these veterans, responsible clods, jerks, and dopes, with their preposterous eye-wrinkles, their snapshots of preposterous wives and preposterous little children, the idiotic places they lived in, dopey Quonset huts on some dopey North Brother Island, slow-witted all, unable to conjugate, full of angry pragmatic questions, classroom slumberers grinding their joyless days through English and history and language, coming alive only for Marketing and Accounting, sniggering at Sheats and Kelley, hating Thomas Wolfe, with every mean money-grubbing diaper-stinking aging bone hating Poetry and Beauty and Transfiguration. . . .

  Capote was the banner against this blight. To walk with Capote in your grasp was as distinctive, and as dissenting from the world’s values, as a monk’s habit. Capote: that is what the pseudonym signified: a concealing cloak, to be worn by enraptured adepts.

  If Other Voices, Other Rooms was written by Somebody Else, it was, even more so, read by Somebody Else. Who made Capote famous? I, said the fly, with my covetous eye—I and all those others who clung to him and made him our cult, I and my fellow cabalists for whom he embodied Art Incarnate (among them the late Alfred Chester, who, priestlike, claimed to have Capote’s unlisted telephone number). He was not much older than we were, and had already attained what we longed for: the eucharist of the jacket biography. So we seized the book, the incongruous moment, the resplendent and ecstasy-stung words:

  . . . the run of reindeer hooves came crisply tinkling down the street, and Mr. Mystery, elegantly villainous in his black cape, appeared in their wake riding a most beautiful boatlike sleigh: it was made of scented wood, a carved red swan graced its front, and silver bells were strung like beads to make a sail: swinging, billowing-out, what shivering melodies it sang as the sleigh, with Joel aboard and warm in the folds of Mr. Mystery’s cape, cut over snowdeep fields and down unlikely hills.

  Whereupon the room commenced to vibrate slightly, then more so, chairs overturned, the curio cabinet spilled its contents, a mirror cracked, the pianola, composing its own doomed jazz, held a haywire jamboree: down went the house, down into the earth, down, down, past Indian tombs, past the deepest root, the coldest stream, down, down, into the furry arms of horned children whose bumblebee eyes withstand forests of flame.

  Who could withstand these forests of flaming prose? In the generation of his own youth Capote was the shining maggot in the fiction of the young.

  The Zeitgeist then had nothing to do with it. The Zeitgeist now ought to have everything to do with it, but masses of the young do not now read the early Capote; the new cults form around anti-stylists like Vonnegut and Brautigan.

  Something needs to be explained. It is not that the novel was written, and read, by Somebody Else; after twenty years all novels are. It is not that the mood of the era is now against Poetry and Transfiguration; the opposite is true. Above all, it is not that Other Voices, Other Rooms is dead and empty only now; it always was.

  What needs to be explained is the whole notion of the relation of Zeitgeist to fiction. In fact there is none, yet there is no fallacy more universally swallowed. For what must be understood about an era’s moods is this: often they are sham or nostalgia or mimicry, and they do not always tell the truth about the human condition; more often than not the Zeitgeist is a lie, even about its own data. If, as Gottlieb persuades us, Solzhenitsyn comes to us with all the mechanism of the Tolstoyan novel intact, and yet comes to us as a living literary force, it is not because the nineteenth century is not yet dead in the Russian mind, although that may be perfectly true. It is because, whatever its mechanics, the idea of the novel is attached to life, to the life of deeds, which are susceptible of both judgment and interpretation; and the novel of Deed is itself a deed to be judged and interpreted. But the novel that is fragrant with narcissism, that claims essence sans existence, that either will not get its shoes drekky or else elevates drek to cultishness—the novel, in short, of the aesthetic will—that novel cannot survive its cult.

  Further: one would dare to say that the survival of the novel as a form depends on this distinction between the narcissistic novel and the novel of Deed.

  On
the surface it would seem that Capote’s progress, over a distance of seventeen years, from Other Voices, Other Rooms to In Cold Blood—from the prose-poetry of transfiguration to the more direct and plain, though still extremely artful, prose of his narrative journalism—is a movement from the narcissistic novel to the novel of Deed; Capote himself never once appears in the pages of his crime story. But there is no forward movement, it is all only a seeming; both the novel and the “nonfiction novel” are purely aesthetic shapes. In Other Voices, Other Rooms it is the ecstasy of language that drives the book; in In Cold Blood it is something journalists call “objectivity,” but it is more immaculate than that. “My files would almost fill a whole small room up to the ceiling,” Capote told an interviewer; for years he had intertwined his mind and his days with a pair of murderers—to get, he said, their point of view. He had intertwined his life; he was himself a character who impinged, in visit after visit, on the criminals; and yet, with aesthetic immaculateness, he left himself out. Essence without existence; to achieve the alp of truth without the risk of the footing. But finally and at bottom he must be taken at his word that In Cold Blood has the blood of a novel. He cannot have that and the journalist’s excuse for leaving himself out of it—in the end the “nonfiction novel” must be called to account like any novel. And no novel has ever appeared, on its face, to be more the novel of Deed than this narrative of two killers—despite which it remains judgment-free, because it exempts itself from its own terms. Chekhov in “Ward No. 6,” one of the most intelligent short novels ever written, understood how the man who deals with the fate of the imprisoned begins to partake of the nature of the imprisoned; this is the great moral hint, the profound unholy question, that lurks in In Cold Blood. But it is evaded, in the name of objectivity, of journalistic distance, all those things that the novel has no use for. In the end In Cold Blood is, like Other Voices, Other Rooms, only another design, the pattern of a hot desire to make a form; one more aesthetic manipulation. It cannot go out of itself—one part of it leads only to another part. Like Other Voices, Other Rooms, it is well made, but it has excised its chief predicament, the relation of the mind of the observer to the mind of the observed, and therefore it cannot be judged, it escapes interpretation because it flees its own essential deed. Such “objectivity” is as narcissistic as the grossest “subjectivity”: it will not expose itself to an accounting.

  Despite every appearance, every modification of style, Capote is at the root not Somebody Else. The beautiful reclining boy on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms and the middle-aged television celebrity who tells dog stories are one, more so than either would imagine; nothing in Capote as writer has changed. If the world has changed, it has not touched Capote’s single and persistent tone. Joel Knox in the last sentence of Other Voices, Other Rooms looks back “at the boy he had left behind.” False prophecy. Nothing has been left behind—only, perhaps, the younger writer’s habit of the decorated phrase. What continues in Capote, and continues in force, is the idea that life is style, and that shape and mood are what matter in and out of fiction. That is the famous lie on which aesthetics feeds the centuries. Life is not style, but what we do: Deed. And so is literature. Otherwise Attic jugs would be our only mentors.

  _____________

  Essay published in The New Republic, January 27, 1973.

  1 It ought to be noted, though, that much of Gass’s fiction brilliantly contradicts his theory of fiction. Yet as the prevailing embodiment of this type of aesthetic formulation, Gass’s credo is significant currency, representative enough to warrant its appearance elsewhere in this volume. See “Toward a New Yiddish,” p. 152.

  Literary Blacks and Jews

  In 1958, in his celebrated collection The Magic Barrel, Malamud published a short story about a Negro and a Jew. It was called. “Angel Levine,” and it contrived for Manischevitz, a Joblike figure who has “suffered many reverses and indignities,” the promise of redemption through a magical black man. Manischevitz has already lost his cleaning establishment through fire, his only son through war, his only daughter through a runaway marriage with a “lout.” “Thereafter Manischevitz was victimized by excruciating backaches and found himself unable to work. . . . His Fanny, a good wife and mother, who had taken in washing and sewing, began before his eyes to waste away . . . there was little hope.”

  A black man appears. His idiom is elaborate in Father Divine style: “If I may, insofar as one is able to, identify myself, I bear the name of Alexander Levine.” Manischevitz at first doubts that this derby-hatted figure is a Jew, but the Negro says the blessing for bread in “sonorous Hebrew” and declares himself to be a “bona fide angel of God,” on probation. Of this Manischevitz is not persuaded. “So if God sends to me an angel, why a black?”

  The angel departs, rebuffed by Manischevitz’s distrust. Then “Fanny lay at death’s door,” and Manischevitz, desperate, goes “without belief” in search of the black angel. In a Harlem synagogue he witnesses a small knot of Negro worshipers in skullcaps bending over the Scroll of the Law, conducting something very like a Baptist theology session: “On de face of de water moved de speerit. . . . From de speerit ariz de man.” Passing through a lowlife cabaret, Manischevitz is jeered at: “Exit, Yankel, Semitic trash.” When at last he finds the black Levine, he is broken enough to burst out with belief: “I think you are an angel from God.” Instantly Fanny recovers, and as a reward Levine is admitted to heaven. “In the flat Fanny wielded a dust mop under the bed. . . . ‘A wonderful thing, Fanny,’ Manischevitz said. ‘Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.’ ”

  A distinction must be made. Is it the arrival of a divine messenger we are to marvel at, or is it the notion of a black Jew? If this is a story with a miracle in it, then the only miracle it proposes is that a Jew can be found among the redemptive angels. And if we are meant to be “morally” surprised, it is that—for once—belief in the supernatural is rewarded by a supernatural act of mercy. But the narrative is altogether offhand about the question of the angel’s identity: Levine is perfectly matter-of-fact about it, there is nothing at all miraculous in the idea that a black man can also be a Jew. In a tale about the supernatural, this is what emerges as the “natural” element—as natural-feeling as Manischevitz’s misfortunes and his poverty. Black misfortune and poverty have a different resonance—Manischevitz’s wanderings through Harlem explain the differences—but, like the Jews’ lot, the blacks’ has an everyday closeness, for Manischevitz the smell of a familiar fate. To him—and to Malamud at the end of the fifties—that black and Jew are one is no miracle.

  A little more than a decade later, with the publication of The Tenants,1 the proposition seems hollow. Again Malamud offers a parable of black and Jew culminating in fantasy, but now the fantasy has Jew slashing with ax, black with saber, destroying each other in a passionate bloodletting. The novel’s last paragraph is eerily liturgical—the word “mercy” repeated one hundred and fifteen times, and once in Hebrew. Nevertheless The Tenants is a merciless book. Here are the two lines which are its last spoken exchange:

  “Bloodsuckin Jew Niggerhater.”

  “Anti-Semitic Ape.”

  It took the narrowest blink of time for Malamud, who more than any other American writer seeks to make a noble literature founded on personal compassion, to come from “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere” to this. How was the transmutation from magical brotherhood to ax-murder wrought? Is it merely that society has changed so much since the late 1950s, or is it that the author of “Angel Levine” was, even then, obtuse? If the difference in Malamud’s imaginative perception lies only in our own commonplace perception that the social atmosphere has since altered in the extreme—from Selma to Forest Hills—then “Angel Levine,” far from being a mythically representative tale about suffering brothers, is now no more than a dated magazine story. One test of the durability of fiction is whether it still tells even a partial truth ten years after publication. The conclusion of The Tenants seems “
true” now—i.e., it fits the current moment outside fiction. But a change in social atmosphere is not enough to account for the evanescence or lastingness of a piece of fiction. There are other kinds of truth than sociological truth. There is the truth that matches real events in the world—in The Tenants, it is the black man and the Jew turning on each other—and there is the truth that accurately describes what can only be called aspiration. Even in the world of aspiration, it is a question whether “Angel Levine” remains true. And on the last page of The Tenants, when Jew and black cut sex and brains from each other, Malamud writes: “Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.” This is the truth of invisible faith, and it is a question whether this too can survive.

  “The anguish of the other” is a Malamudic assumption, endemic in his fiction. The interior of many of Malamud’s fables resounds with the injunction that for the sake of moral aspiration one must undergo. Yakov Blok of The Fixer is an ordinary man with ordinary failings, born a Jew but not yet an accountable Jew until he has undergone, in his own flesh, the terror of Jewish fate. In The Assistant Morris Bober’s helper, the Italian Frank Alpine, formerly a hold-up man, becomes a Jew through gradually taking on the obligations of a Jew, ultimately even undergoing painful but “inspiring” circumcision. The idea of the usefulness of submitting to a destiny of anguish is not a particularly Jewish notion; suffering as purification is far closer to the Christian ethos. Jewish martyrs are seen to be only martyrs, not messiahs or even saints. Malamud’s world often proposes a kind of hard-won, eked-out saintliness: suffering and spiritual goodness are somehow linked. The real world of humanity—which means also the real world of the Jews—is not like this. “Bad” Jews went up in smoke at Auschwitz too—surely embezzlers as well as babies, not only tsadikim but misers too, poets as well as kleptomaniacs. Not one single Jew ever deserved his martyrdom, but not every martyr is a holy man. For Malamud all good men are Job.