The vice president has many words and he uses them over and over. “I am the Captain of the team,” he says. Many of the choice sentences of his acceptance speech had been the choice remarks of his appearance before the California delegation. (Peace and freedom do not come cheaply, my friends.) He brought forth Winston Churchill and St. Francis of Assisi—one strong and one humble—and topped the embarrassment of the first by the second. He is always frantically smiling; repose is a rapid fade to sentiment. In between, where feeling and person would lodge, there is simply nothing. He does not seem in touch. Empty smiles, a wound-up toy. Nothing in him inspires confidence. He cannot allow himself to be distracted by events. The entire convention appeared to intrude upon his smiles. Nothing has happened since the thirties: that is his message, that is the real Humphrey, now, “Captain of the team.”
A poor-boy rise through the graceful apertures of The System; labor support, early Civil Rights legislation. He seems alarmed and confused that this should not be sufficient. I am a good man! the manic manner cries out. The sense of an arrested consciousness makes him appear daily more empty. Now to be Here, at last, and to have nothing to say. Humphrey and Nixon, madly waving from the top of the pole: both of them must realize, with a peculiar helplessness, how oddly alike they are. One, a brash, free-wheeling liberal, the other, cautious, obedient, longing: in the course of their lives they have converged and are fixed, as with wax, in a numbing similarity. They are blind and deaf, but still wholesomely smiling.
It was not hard to tell the Humphrey supporters: they looked like Republicans, conservatively dressed, provincial, not quite at ease with the psychedelic Hubie, Baby button on their lapel. In the elevator at the Hilton, after the beatings in the lobby, several Humphrey supporters gossiped away saying, “Well, they were told not to come here.” The party system collapsed in Chicago, leaving instead Candidates. There were only memorials to The Nomination. And how long Humphrey had waited to lie down, naked, at last, with her.
•
McCarthy: nothing in his campaign became him more than the losing of it. His blossoming eccentricities separated him from the breathless mediocrity and banality of Nixon and Humphrey on the one hand and, on the other, from the more plausible and popular style of the Kennedys. A hatred of cant was not, as some would have liked, replaced in his speeches by an austere eloquence but rather by a flat recital of his position on the “issues.” These sensible and deflating addresses to a large, self-congratulatory audience were a perturbation. No, no, it is not a lot of mush and butter we want, they would say, but something. Perhaps something very scholarly and boring and thereby satisfying to the ego, or perhaps he might be cryptic, poetic, curious. Anything, anything except the dead fish thrown back into the warm, receptive waters. His wit seemed merely a rumor at Madison Square Garden, at the palpitating turn-out in Boston. Stories of a really good speech in Maryland came back to the followers. In the long run, no one turned away from him and perhaps they finally came to know what he would say and what he wouldn’t. In an “amateur” campaign—if that is what it was—in the participatory democracy of the kind the McCarthy volunteers practiced, each boy and girl seemed to think of himself as a sort of vice-nominee, ready with ideas, with suggestions for theory and practice. The disciples were tested, once and then once more, by their candidate’s surprising indifference to expediency and political maneuvering as we ordinarily understand them.
It is not possible to describe such a large group as the McCarthy workers: they were not as young as the newspapers implied and were closer to graduate school age and temperament than to youngsters. Perhaps some will become “radicalized” by the finale in Chicago. And yet, perhaps what held them besides the peace issue was the whole excitement of politics, this absurd theater of primaries and delegates, voting blocs and challenges, county chairman, caucuses, candidates. The sadness is that they have discovered the fun of something that has, in this presidential election, gone rotten.
In Chicago, the three candidates had an interesting debate before the California delegation. The presence of two genuine persons on either side of him put Humphrey at a disadvantage. He fell back on his empty frenzy, waffling about his opponents. “America is lucky to have these two men!” McCarthy passed up the chance to make a rousing speech by saying, “My position on Vietnam is well known.” Senator McGovern took the opportunity and was rapturously received. McGovern was a pleasing mixture of the two other candidates. His position on the issues was solid and courageous and in support of it he brought a character and style far enough from the inane, boyish masochism of Humphrey but still within our weary tradition. He spoke of the “great” state of California and addressed the delegates as “distinguished.” In the end he went to the Convention for the nomination and said he would support the Party. He appears to believe we can go on as before.
The most radical thing about McCarthy was his refusal to make the expected gestures. This was an unsettling condition and aroused anger and suspicion everywhere. True, the California delegation knew his position, but why not take the opportunity to score? He seems unwilling to tell people what they already know and feels apparently that a political campaign is the last place to instruct them in what they don’t know. He held even the Holy Grail itself—The Hallowed Nomination—at a distance and failed utterly to be grieved when he lost it.
There was a plainness to his views and the plainer they were the more unlikely they sounded amidst the elaborate rigidity of our familiar political discourse. He was asked early in the campaign if he thought he would make a good president and he said he would make an adequate one. God! they gasped. Another boo-boo! He conceded certain defeat at least twenty-four hours before one is allowed to concede certain defeat. His eccentricities were inexplicable; he peeled off a dozen political skins, this one the proper manner, that one the guarded answer, and yet another, the drooling hunger for the office itself. McCarthy missed all those sweet opportunities to “show compassion” but he had no company when he talked with the demonstrators, visited the wounded, stayed away from the Convention, and said he would not support Humphrey. Nevertheless there is something brilliantly troubling about him, in his political role: Perhaps what will last the longest from his campaign is the hint that many of the acts in our political repertoire aren’t worth putting on your makeup for.
Out of the meanness and hollowness, the degrading events and the worrying future, one suddenly saw a little Yippie with a sign saying, CHICAGO IS A GAS. That was transcendence, rebirth.
1968
REFLECTIONS ON FICTION
ART, OF course, lives in history. We are obliged to consent that a work is not today what it was yesterday, neither as a whole nor in its details. It is easy enough to agree that time alters the past and all its terms, but the agreement is rather abstract. In taste, as in love, the preferences are violent and few are willing to look ahead, to profit from experience. We have little power over our own sensibilities, even though they appear to us as singular and personal as our bodies. We know our ideas and likes to be formed by the present and yet it is hard to resist a belief that they are somehow in touch with eternity.
The novel: history sends the reader away and brings him back again. We explain the decline in great reputations as the working of a cyclical force, which dips low for a decade or a century only to swing up once again. Fashion corrupts, but, like artificial respiration, it also gives a second life to the fallen. Structure bores in this generation; freedom repels in the next. What is it they have in common, those great novels of the past? We cannot find words, except in tautology, for the power of splendid creations. Merit is an assertion, subject if not to proof at least to convincingness. Every work struggles for its rights, and few maintain them without remissions. Certain works, as if they were sovereign states, weaken from time to time and whole generations turn their attentions away.
The once large, well-defended kingdom of Sir Walter Scott comes to mind. Even over one hundred years ago, Bagehot detected a
n uneasy wandering in Scott’s audience. V. S. Pritchett thought the decay of regionalism and the dislike of dialect were at the source of the gradual loss of appeal. Galsworthy is a territory fallen into decay and a novelist like Sinclair Lewis seems used up, absorbed, like a fertilizer. There is much sadness in the history of taste, and joy, too, when he who was lost is returned. Still, it is not the sudden recognition of an over-estimation that puzzles so much as the apparent impossibility of reviving our own and other people’s interest in a major novelist like Scott.
It is not quite so easy to think of revived reputations and works in the novel as in poetry. Henry James? It seems now that an ebbing and flowing of popularity will attend his work—and not without a certain rightness. The beauty and grandeur and peculiarity of his novels and stories benefit from the proper setting, the propitious moment, the waiting and receptive sensibility. Melville? A discovery, not a revival, a correction of a mistake, an omission. It is not merely capricious taste that works upon us, but violent changes in the moral, political, and social environment.
The novel has always been resistant to abstract analysis, to structural definition, to purely formal speculation. When the English critic, Percy Lubbock, tried in The Craft of Fiction to build, brick by brick, a mild and sensible structural frame for the novel, he found immediately a mournful amount of difficulty with the work of the supreme Tolstoy. Lubbock wrote about War and Peace: “Tolstoy’s novel is wasteful of its subject: that is the whole objection to its loose, instinctual form. Criticism bases itself upon nothing whatsoever but the injury done to the story, the loss of its full potential value.” The critic has worked here according to an interesting and useful principle (“point of view”) and yet it hardly seems worthwhile to labor so forcefully on behalf of such wan rewards. Because, of course, few of us feel “the injury done to the story,” and are instead powerfully moved by “the loose and instinctual form.” You have the feeling, in the case of Lubbock, that a well-built house has collapsed in the first thunderstorm of a summer.
•
From the very beginning the novel was loose and unmanageable, unpredictable, and inclined to be formless a good deal of the time. Indeed too strict a demand for form will often lead to a loss of the rushing, raging sense of life that is the special mystery of certain novelists such as Dostoevsky and Dickens. The high degree of formal concern in a novelist like Flaubert is not typical of the novel, although many great novelists share it. Flaubert made a heroic and victorious assault upon the form and yet he understood with an ironic anguish his mother’s remark that “the mania for phrases has dried up your heart.” In the usual practice of fiction, the style of the lines, the symmetry of the paragraphs, the balance of the elements are likely to give way, almost unconsciously, under the stress of incident, plot, and characterization. Thus we cannot often make judgments on the claim of formal purity, or on the accusation of formal corruption.
“Non-fiction novels” and “fictionalized fact” are phrases of the moment, perhaps not always significant, but interesting in a critical sense. They would seem to indicate a high degree of impatience with the very roots of the novel form, to question the value of the designation itself. Sartre, in an essay on Nathalie Sarraute, speaks of the “anti-novel,” of works that “make use of the novel in order to challenge the novel, to destroy it before our very eyes while seeming to construct it, to write the novel of a novel unwritten and unwritable . . .” We cannot quite know whether the discontent with the form lies in the inability for cultural reasons to practice it in the old way or whether it points simply to the restlessness of the creative spirit. (Picasso could “draw like Raphael” and Joyce became a parodist out of a fabulous mastery of all the arts of prose.)
Even if the conception of the “novel” does not continue to satisfy we still feel that the word stands for something real and recognizable as an aesthetic entity. We acknowledge the presence of its possibilities when we speak of their absence. For how often we say of a piece of fiction that it is very good and interesting, but not very good “as a novel.” Some novels are clearly more novelistic than others. We do not use this distinction as a measuring rod for excellence, and indeed the last stronghold of the calculation and distribution of laughter and tears, plot and counterplot, sex and sentiment, comedy and pathos may be the arithmetical construction of popular fiction, manufactured dutifully for its audience, and a mode no doubt doomed to extinction, like the western story and the love story. To say that something is not pure as a novel is simply a description of its technique, not a judgment. And this becomes more and more true every day as the serious writers discard not only the skin but the bone of fiction.
We might say of a book like The Way of All Flesh that it is a fascinating work, but not supreme as a novel. In this case we would mean that Butler’s story is somewhat dry and narrow in a peculiar way. It is to the book’s credit and part of its satisfaction that it contains “the sum total of the author’s ideas on religion, economics and philosophy” and nevertheless we feel the ideas, if that is the right word, are bought at the expense of imaginative richness and detail, dramatic inventiveness. On the other hand, The Way of All Flesh is entirely genuine and deeply engrossing, and one could hardly wish it to be other than it is. In a sense we are most grateful for its “defects,” for the odd combination of the discursive and an on-going autobiographical narrative. You might say history, culture, wants it as it is, wants the unconsciously self-loving and distorted author as much as the self-loving fictional father he created for himself. Scope, grandeur, largeness, completeness are the grounds of the highest values—and yet smallness, perfection, inspired narrowness and concentration—in Jane Austen, in Kafka—share in the supremacy. The utterance of the obvious always accompanies the discussion of works of high rank: this is the acknowledgment of our certainty about their value, the hopelessness of trying to rank princes. To assert greatness does not give us the key; it is only the lock.
•
A novel is a long and complex creation. The parts bear a mysterious and clouded relation to the whole. The pages turn, one after another, and it is a distinguishing aspect of the novel that, around the next corner, almost anything can happen. We hardly know which to treasure most: expectation confounded or satisfied. A new chapter is a psychological shift and the interesting dislocations afforded by a flashback make great demands on the imagination. In the older works we were often grateful for the relief, the relaxation, as if for a short nap, brought to us by a sudden shift to the sub-plot.
In the novel, length is of obvious importance in excluding the merely anecdotal and in making a distinction from the short story. Yet the interesting thing about length is the calculation of its effects upon our mind, the way it dominates the art and defines its relation to the reader. How difficult it is to remember the mere incidents in a long work of fiction. Novelists themselves forget what has gone before. The passage of time need not be long to promote forgetfulness, nor the incident trivial. What indeed was Bulstrode’s crime in Middlemarch? If sometimes one cannot quite remember the shape of Bulstrode’s part in the plot, or even the final resolution of the Rosamund-Lydgate story, what can one mean when he says, with passion and conviction, that Middle-march is a favorite novel? (Middlemarch is only an example; many great books are much more dense and clotted in incident than this one.)
The length of a novel, the abundance of detail have a disturbing and exciting effect on the imagination; in a sense one reads on to find out “what happens” and yet what happens is exactly the most quickly forgotten, the most elusive. It is even difficult to know how to state the problem: is it psychological, simply rooted in biology, or, instead, an aesthetic condition, necessary to the special effects of the novel? What seems to remain locked in the memory is a general impression, a selection of detail, a blur of interesting scene, the shape of character, and, above all, a sort of remembrance of how one felt when one was first reading the book. The remembered exhilaration of the mind, pleasure of the senses,
hang upon the frailest thread of incident, the dimmest recollection of language. You know you were fascinated, you were convinced—at the time, when you were deeply there, in the story, in the turn of phrase here and the observation there, the surprise, the resolution that pleased. Tracks, not very deep, laid down in the memory prompt us to assert merit and excellence.
So much of a novel, after all, is information, necessary fact that gives a floor of understanding from which the flights of inspiration are launched. Filler, stuffing, dressing: all are dutifully manufactured—or at least they were in the past. But many writers question the production of so much direction and advice, analysis and landscape. The machinery of fiction is simply ignored in Burroughs and Genet. Only the genius of Vladimir Nabokov keeps alive the rather disappointing development of a surrealistic fiction. The destructive power of Joyce had a peculiarly disguised effect upon the history of the novel. The effort to move along the same rubble-filled road did not prove practical and most novelists simply turned back as though nothing had happened, back to more or less regular sentences and to stories, fractured and not very ample, but stories nevertheless. Still, there is always an uneasiness about a retreat, a feeling of anxiety and guilt, and many good novels show a degree of panic about the form. Where to start and how to end, how much must be believed and how much a joke, a puzzle; how to combine the episodic and the carefully designed and consequential.
•
Time: this is what the novel asks of the writer and the reader. And time is just what our contemporary existence is determined to shorten. So much of our homely, domestic technology is meant to make things go faster, the human effort shorter. And it is curious that saving time at one point does not make one ready to give it at another. Quite the contrary. If the laundry washes and dries quickly, the grateful housewife does not then think that she will give to the dishes the time left over from the quickened wash: no, she demands instantly that the dishes keep pace with the laundry. But it is really a more subtle time the novel depends on. A spiritual and intellectual lengthening, extending like a dream in which much is surrendered and slowly transformed. Perhaps it is the fear that something has happened to time, some change has taken place, which makes us wonder if a new generation will always be there to read the novels, particularly the novels of the past. The terms of the contract between the author and the reader are severe, the demands are serious. Frequently we hear the doleful warning of a retreat on the part of the reader, a withdrawal of attention, an indifference to the august tradition that stands there like so many stone and marble college buildings, ready for parody or destruction.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 21