I treasure the categorizers, nevertheless. Like weeds in the garden, they tell us where the flowers are. For, little as a good writer should know about the general logistics of the Elysian field, while he writes he has to be cocksure about his own. Afterwards—when he is telling himself and humanity how he did it, in the exquisitely punchy journalese which comes to all of us at such moments—then maybe it is healthy for him to read what one of those cats may have written of him. Let him read all about how he did it, and in the best Latinate agglutinate. That’ll humble him back to his own vernacular. And maybe send him on, to a kind of book he himself had never thought of before.
For the writer knows well enough how he did it of course, from the first reveries through the rheumatics of the daily chair. His dilemma is that he can’t really talk about his work in any words or terms but its own. If he were seriously to try, his “extrapolation”—more exhaustive than any outside analyst’s, though maybe not as lengthy—would be to reconstruct, step by step, the work itself. And he doesn’t want to bother, but to do something different. Not merely from other writers’ works. From his own. Something different from last time. Which will again make its own rules.
Is this anarchy? Yes, of course. And no. The anarchic appearance of experience is what stimulates a writer to regularize it in the telling—and to tell the world. The ways of doing that, when seemingly inimitable, make writers who are “hew.” For the moment. Then somebody smells out a few “theories”—for which read mannerisms and preoccupations—and the imitative race is on. After a lapse of time and dust and followers, a few writers remain who are not merely inimitable, but of whose work it can now be freely admitted—that it was not done by rule. These are the great.
The ordinary artist however—that is, the live one—will never persuade the world that his magic calculator and charisma computer isn’t somewhere—and somehow communicable. The sadder likelihood is that the world may persuade him. People will pay him to teach them his secrets, for one thing. He can usually fob them off with his own personal ambience, or with his convictions about other writers’ works.
Yet one honesty he will never be allowed. He will never be excused from explanation of his own work by lazily pointing to the work itself. If he insists, a variety of vengeances are taken, the most indulgent one being also the most irritating: writers, like the dear saints, don’t know how the mystery occurs. From which it follows, that if the poor naif doesn’t know how he does what he does, then he can’t know what he’s said, in its true and full significance. If he answers in a rage, as I have often done, “The book is what I am saying. That is what a book—a novel, short story is!”—well, watch out for that kind of stuff. He may be illiterate.
Once, at a party for the first issue of Discovery, in which I had a story, I was led humbly up to an Authority. I mean I was humble—there “were about 400 other Discoveries there. He watched my approach with a gaze I know better now—the true appreciator’s air of having discovered himself. Then said, down his Apollonian nose (it was John Aldridge): “I wonder. If you really know. If you really saw. Everything you said in that story. I can’t think you really saw.” It was my first encounter with internists of this order. (And of course it occurred to neither of us to question whether he had seen everything there was to see.) For days after I thought of replies both deep and brittle. Like, “Oh well, the midwife is the last to know.” What I said however was, “Well, unh, I wrote it.” He smiled. And like a deb who’d tripped over her train, I was led away.
That’s all changed now. Or is it? In a way. They used to warn writers not to “talk it out” and so waste subconscious material—until we learned this was merely “their” way of pre-empting the field—for talk. It would give us “blocks,” they said. But writers are quicker than anyone to know where the power is. These days I can count on a hand the quaint characters who have blocks. Once I’d have needed an abacus.
Talk has done it—and the breakdown of the distinction between print and talk, between “fiction” and “autobiography.” Nobody has to wonder which he’s doing anymore; it’s all reportage. Poets have helped. “Readings” have made us all troubadours. Sound is king. And on the terrible bandwagon of present-day politics, quite a number of johnny-come-latelies to the world of social concern have rediscovered themselves—in a kind of talk-print-feint social action, which is a medium all in itself. The new slogan for the writer is “Don’t just complain; Explain.” We’re invited to do it endlessly. Writers are almost their own critics now.
They have often been the most prophetic ones, against all the standpat formalities of the lawgivers—Blake against the Whole eighteenth-century academy, Proust retroactively against Saint-Beuve. Uncommitted to any theories but their own—and uncommitted to the permanence of these. A writer’s arrogance toward the present is often really a humility toward the future. And very hard to maintain. For it’s such fun to be easily doctrinaire, most of all about our own work. Especially now. America, always hungry for a Left Bank, now has one. The college is the café now—and offering the talk-print carte-du-jour. Writers have helped make it so. We now have the classic two establishments, money and the salon, “to help us contend with what we are. Wherever a glass is drunk to the Muse these days, the circulation manager of some modish mag stands ready to foot the tab. The café categorizer has even higher aims. He wants to make us like himself—a man who understands the “the” of everything.
How can we tell him our aims are infinitely lower! To flourish as we are. Magicians whose pockets are literally empty, until the next time. Apostles of what is unphrasable to us except in those primary manuscripts. Before which, all others appear to us secondary.
So gentlemen, my thanks to your symposium, which I leave just in time to escape. Your job is to clean up the past. Ours to keep the future clean for possibility. Meanwhile, very humbly, I toss a lion to you Christians. Here’s a book.
I sent my friend on The Kenyon Review something else.
Sometimes art has to be defended even from the young—as from any who confuse it or associate it inseparably with living either the “arty” or the “revolutionary” life. Here, as quoted by John Leggett in “Metamorphosis of the Campus Radical,” is a student, now a senior, looking back on her year as a freshman radical: “It was really nice then. They were the bad guys and we were the good guys. Everybody who was a writer or an artist or smoked dope was us.”
I was always glad that the young thought writers were good guys generally. It spoke well for both of us.
I took it for granted that some people assumed that all artists doped or drank or did something to excess, their work being the product of it. (And that the possibility of art itself being the “excess,” never occurred to these outsiders.)
But be damned if I’d let them say that taking dope made you an artist.
I was hearing a lot of that, from the young especially. And had heard it before.
In “A Five-Sense Psyche” I answered them.
When I was twelve, I spent a lot of Saturdays at the museum, staring at the Corots. Until recently, I had gauged those half-dull, mindlessly brown reveries as the first clear signs of an aesthetic feeling separate from all the other lymphatic swelling’s of the adolescent self. It would be possible, of course, to interpret into that communion with those cobweb Barbizon forests, landscapes carefully dreaming as only the nineteenth century could dream, the first properly saloniste stirrings of sex. Fortunately, my fantasies in that direction took place in quite another red room of verse, sound, sobs, and touch, all floating with the naked human figure, male and mine, in which I had as yet no interest one could call classical. No, what I was seeing in those paintings, and with the exquisite recognition of relief, was something much more literal than either case—the trees. At the time, of course, I must already have been suffering from some sensibility. But also, in those days of irregular eye-tests, I had a mild myopia, as yet uncorrected by lenses. I knew what trees tended to look like “artistically”
to other people—from the wintry black-and-white of etchings at home to the luscious green clumps of colored advertisement. But here on the museum wall, if I got close enough, was comforting testimony that once upon a time another vision, and one considered worthy, had seen real trees exactly as I saw them, on my walk in Central Park—now.
What I was experiencing, as I would later be told in college, was the well known phenomenon of the “element of the familiar” in art—in visual art, or perhaps in any art, the prime satisfaction of the novice; but to the artist himself, and to the people who can learn his vision, the most primitive. “It’s what makes people say, ‘Look, just like the barn at home!’” said the instructor. “But you can find that satisfaction on a postcard. If postcard naturalism is all you are able to see, or have learned.” He was being loftily modern. And he went on to be what he thought was witty. “But, until you can also see the composition and color-relationships the artist poses, you too will be up against a barn door!” Unknown to both of us, we there in front of him were already hopelessly far beyond him in what our eyes saw as reality normal to us—and in the music that would seem sonically normal to our ears, and in the literature already dropping unalienly into our minds, as well.
For he, born circa 1880, was talking principally of the components of objective art—which to him was still the principal art. And we, still gazing so innocently up at him, according to his own predilections, with Greuze-blue eyes perhaps, and here and there a Jacques David curve of odalisque above our wool kneesocks, already had the cells of almost another reality—non-objective, atonal, anti-heroic—in our bones.
Between our cradle days and our instructor’s, reality, that open secret, had once more been changing its terms. At the time of his birth, the impressionists had already broken up light. By the time of ours, the a priori tenets of all the arts had themselves been smashed to bits—in music the scale, in language the words. And the dimmest of us, from the most conservative backgrounds, had taken some of this, like fluoride slipped into a city’s water, into our mental lives. I still knew nothing of “modern” art, but in ballet school I had long since danced to Stravinsky, as nonchalantly as the ballerinas preceding us had to Chopin, and those before them to Rameau. A foreign girl next to me in the dorm had Max Ernst and Kurt Seligmann on her walls, and both our mercantile fathers, before they retired, would become used to ads no longer couched in the visual terminology of Landseer or even-Marie Laurencin, but in the poster techniques of Stuart Davis.
Outside the school where we studied Spenser to perhaps Whitman, we ourselves and our men friends were reading Eliot. In philosophy, we had long since given up teleology or else had never even experienced the feeling—by instinct already sensing that even in science the world wasn’t progressing on any upgrade toward heaven, Utopia, or peace. In religion, we had given up church, or had never had it. In literature, where I was, we laughed at continuity in any form—of moral view, or of form itself. Or, rather, we were puzzled by, or doubtful of, it. Secretly, we sometimes mourned the death of character, which had become fluid, vaguely attached to regions or to dissenting opinions, or to violence, but rarely personal enough to be great or even interesting in the old style. But there wasn’t an apple-cheeked one of us who didn’t know that reality, or rather the ways of proving it, was radically different now. If we were to have heroes they would have to be nonobjective ones, for that was the way reality was expressing itself and affirming itself to us.
And, as we gazed up at the art instructor with his slides, this was really all we knew. Since we were university students, we would try to clock what we were pedantically, as in terms of an educated vision which had come upon us consciously. Actually, all our habits of reading, viewing, and discussion, and the conclusions, too, were only after-the-event expression of what had already effortlessly happened to us in being born when we were. This we did not suspect, either. We would have denied with vigor the shocking idea that every human being is already a participating member of the fear-guard the minute he is born.
Actually, the visions and insights of art-in-general—plastic, musical, or literary—are ways of expressing reality, which is to say, of proving it. And while individual artists may seem to be ahead of the general current, or enough out of it to be individual, they are all the while actually augmenting it with their work; the seepage of that current is continuous, and waits for no man, educated or not, to be born. The most important fact which the instructor or we might have mentioned had escaped all of us. For in fact, by then, even thirty years ago, even the “postcard” people were no longer looking at visual reality in strictly postcard style.
But all we stubbornly knew, that day, and for the conventional number of years after, was how modern we were. And how old-fashioned “Mr. Slides” was. As old-fashioned as I am now or appear to be, as I sit here, in the new world acoming, stubbornly ensconced, entrenched in my mere five senses—limited as a stereopticon facing whole nebulas of radio-telescopes, all of them lodged in one room. As I sit here—lodged merely in my five senses—in any one of the sugar-cube, hemp-sweetened parlors, conversational or actual, of the “psychedelic” world.
As I sit here, what am I trying to do? As usual with humans, I am trying to assess the “new” reality, more than likely either by refusing it or asserting mine. Dr. Johnson, confronted by such Berkeleyan conundrums as where the room went when the observer was out of it, was able to prove the existence of matter, and of himself, by kicking a stone. But he was a lexicographer, and a critic, too. Being what I am, I might do it better via art itself. But art is long. So as I sit here in the pot-clouded room, with the cubes of “acid” scattered delicate as sesame on the table, and the needle-and-spoon in its ready little box, stashed say at the bottom of the baby’s bassinet (all of which, for the sake of the Feds, shall we say is imaginary, excluding only the baby?)—I shall settle for one or two insights which anybody might have, on reflection. How did I get here, for instance, in this peculiar position, refusing the glorious sense-data of the unknown, standing on the mere equipment which nature has given me—and will shortly take away—as on a beleaguered isle? Is nature still the newest, freshest thing around—or a has-been? In the role of artist alone, am I at worst a coward before experience, at best a fool, at likeliest a conservative? Or is it still possible that I can get as much out of my five senses and brain as anyone who gives up his autonomy over them, such at least as he was born to have? Will it one day be seen that this room—like vomitoriums, saunas, the baths of Caracalla, the chapels of the flagellites, the massage-room at the New York Athletic Club, or you name it—is only modish in its turn? Or only valuable when it is not communal but tragically personal—as, say, the bedroom of Thomas De Quincey? Am I really, in my isolation, gloriously reasonable—an angel who refuses to be confined to the pinpoint of a needle, or a pill? Stop the questions. Let us see how I got here.
Take a look at historical reality, which, whether you consider it most influenced by the battle, the plough, the apse, or the monumental person, is ever in a state of change. Alongside its panorama goes that other, more single-file drama, preoccupation of the philosophers—the problem of the observer versus the observed. Like the question of the existence of God, the problem is pitiful in that it is unsolvable, wonderful in that the mind subject to its condition can still conceive of it. Meanwhile, man, who has to live under the assumption that reality is fairly stable, has always had spiritual-physical ways of relieving himself of the dailiness of his own psyche. These vary from time to time, in means, method, and popularity. But that we should want to escape from our self, or to enlarge it, is eternal. This particular room, in its clouds of acrid smoke and sweet illusion, its pleasure in the possible company of the foul angels or lucky devils we are sure to have within us, is nothing new. Nor is art’s specious presence here new, nor youth’s. Like so much in life, it is merely new to us.
In the youth of many who are now middle-aged, Sex was the respectable way to be revolutionary. This was es
pecially so for those not involved in “pink” politics, but often was a sideline or indulgence for those, too. For some of the literati, both practicing and fringe, assertive Sex was a way of proclaiming that literature was life—or that one had found this out. Or that one was a member of the literati. In the other arts, and gradually for much of the populace, the mystique went much the same: sexual conduct, though still pretty much a private flight of the psyche, was publicly meaningful, and in certain places an avowed synonym for poetic pioneering into both Eleutheria and la boue—into both the mysteries and the mud-slush of life. A current mystique always is. (Just as it is always a sign that mystique and mysticism have once more been confused.)
Nowadays, of course, sex is for everybody—either everybody’s Eden or everybody’s duty, seems to be the line—and to capitalize the word, as was then often done, seems scarcely amusing. But to do so is owed to history, and helps to note that Sex, to those pioneers (and for that reality), had in the main a holy, male-female connotation. Not to say that other forms of love or orgy were unknown or not busy at their mystiques; at any time in the world all of the latter somewhere coexist. But one may always recognize the fashionable, the Mother Mystique, by the difficulty of slanging it without being thought “not with it”—as is the case today. Youth particularly tends to revere the connection between the orgiastic and the serious. Innocent as we might be of sexual orgy in the old days, we were chary of kidding it. But only yesterday I heard a young “swinger,” to whom “turning on,” whether or not she does it, is still the sacred key to Eleusis, say laughingly of the other, “Oh yes, that. Group-grope.”
In the ’40s, alcoholism was particularly fashionable for writers, and some of them made art of it. Other writers tried to inherit these men and women’s demons intact. But men’s personal demons, or the art that may go with these, are never heritable in a straight line. A writer-cum-bottle is now old hat, as “out of it” as any member of Rotary. Those demons are the property of any club car, now. The furies don’t come in a bottle any more, or in the pure-and-simple bed. Sex as revolution, alcohol as the black-mass acolyte of the soul are both supremely out of style.
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