Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Looking back on our era, it may one day be said of us that travel, both literal and poetic, was our major attempt at once to extend bodily sensation and to relieve ourselves of the pains or burdens of the inner dialogue. New estimates of the nature of time and space, new powers over distance, have been with us scientifically for more than a generation, and the “new” time-space metaphors engendered by this have all but been exhausted in the arts. However, it takes a while for metaphor to seep into the general populace, and this, of course, includes the non-artistic side of the artists and scientists as well. Just at about the time the early intellectual intuitions of an era are codified and on the way to senescence, they become part of generally accepted reality. Like any other discoveries, once implemented or open to all, they are regarded as commonplace. Travel to the moon may remain poetic for a time, the moon being what it has been to humans, but it can scarcely remain mysterious.

  Once upon a time, the tour—the literal kind, on land, by sea or by air—was for fun, education, or rest. Now, even in this mode, it often has another aim. People go touring for the significant experience, as to the kibbutz; the idea is not to escape from responsibility but to find it. Or one vicariously follows the bloodbaths of the world as some follow sporting events, to be where the action is; yesterday’s papers report that voyeur tourism in Vietnam is on the rise. Voyeurism is of course deeply connected with the “real” experience that one dare not have oneself, or with the lost innocence of the real emotion that one cannot have any more. There are so few unspoiled private places any more—as the travel-agents used to say—short of other people’s graves.

  But there is one. The psychedelic “trip,” being limited to the self, must remain more arcane even than moon-going—until, at least, we perfect even other ways of self-peeking than those electronic buggeries we now have. As a testimony that travel in perception is as possible as travel by miles, the drug-trip has its dignity—though one not unique to it, surely. It is versatile, since the individual can travel either alone, or alone in a group. One advantage of the group is that it has a special attraction for those who have trouble with such relationships, or are limitedly seeking them. Philosophically, the drug trip has deeply seductive roots in the experimental psychology of us all, as drug-taking has had down the ages. For what could be closer, more clairaudient to that classic dialogue of the observer and the observed? Finally, the drug-traveller can give the white feather at once to those who stand and wait for experience to happen; he coins it, courts it by a process for which the word “happening” is so apt, advancing like Stanley into the inner darkness of himself. And, so doing—at once actor and audience, novel and writer, poet and poem (like Swinburne, like Coleridge, see?)—whether or not he already is an artist, or wants to join up, he has imposed an extra handspring on the processes of art. Hasn’t he? For he has used the very stuff of himself creatively. And that’s new, isn’t it?

  Having listed all the virtues of psychedelia, except the obvious one of escape, it now occurs to me that the process of ordinary thinking has most of these, and indeed travels by the very same routes and means. But it is so ordinary. As for Coleridge and Swinburne, one can no more measure what portion of an artist’s imagination is under stimulus, rather than native to it, than one can weigh the contribution of Dostoevski’s epilepsy to his. Except perhaps to remark that when a poet is also avowedly his poem, he is often at his worst. As an abstainer, it is even possible that I need feel no guilt at all.

  For those who hope to make, psychedelic connection with the arts, where other means have failed, the estimate is more certain, and has nothing to do either with moral wrong or with health. Great artists have been thieves and drugtakers, have starved or grown rich, but neither thievery nor poverty, wealth nor poppyseed, makes artists—or any coterie of circumstance or even intellect, or other laying-on of hands. As a fashionable mystique among artists themselves, psychedelia is as phony and temporary—and as ancient—as any other. There is nothing more innately artistic about drug-taking, solo or in soiree, than any number of modes of conduct, given the proper aura and spice. Naked communal birdwatching, say—in front of the Plaza. So many delightful ways of enlarging the perceptions are possible. But no more artistic because artists may be doing them. For the artist, once delivered of his insight or apart from it, is vulnerable to the reality of the day, like any other man.

  It has taken me a long time of sitting here in this room to see this. And it now occurs to me that I have been in such rooms, or ones very similar, before—often on greater occasion. I was here in the ’40s, when it proved guiltily impossible for me to transmute my young ache to help the needy into Communism’s doctrinaire. I was here once as a Jew, when, for all my will to build Zion in the name of the martyrs, I could not manage to see Zion as merely and only Israel: Every time I am tempted, either from ambition or solitude, to join a sympathetic or powerful coterie of artistic conviction, I am here—innumerable times. I am here every time I am tempted to give up my absurd autonomy, which any man may have: his reserved right to go on seeing the differences in the world, and to see it differently from the rest.

  This can be saddening for both sides, joiners and non-, as it has been since the beginning of the world. Moreover, that sort of dissidence can come, not worthily, from intellectual choice, but merely from a nasty sense of one’s own boundaries—as any yearner who sees the front lines of so many fracases dissolve into the arrière-garde before he can get there, well knows. Ours, however is a generation trained to fear a mysticism which thinks democratically, in groups—which is what Fascism was. From there, we have gone on to mistrust group thinking altogether; at least some of us have. Often, the mysticisms of ordinary people are frightening, precisely because they have little or no spiritual or intellectual content. The psychedelic movement is unlikely to shake governments or affect too many more than those engaged in its tarantella. But mass-moods toward mindlessness are scary, at least in the Western world.

  There is a certain snobbery, though, in insisting on the antennae of one’s own senses only. They afford no surety. After a certain age, surely, mayn’t the data of one’s senses be as decadent as any provided by C17H12N04—old-fashioned cocaine, once thought the height of psychedelic sophistication? And even when one is young these days, the hillside is no longer that dew-pearled; what does all that cleareyed gandering bring one except the stench of other peoples’ blood, or at best food already corrupted at the chemical root, desensitized sex, and bad air? To all this kind of argument there is no answer, not even to remark perhaps that nature corrupts and purifies itself faster than we can ever—for we are back at the duet of the observer and observed. It is a matter of temperament.

  A charming couple had lunch with me yesterday. Just out of grad school, they are as conventional for the breed of the times as any I ever saw. Husband is a physicist, where the best butter is, but is also a fiend at the guitar. They speak proudly of a working-class background, but find the actual Czech parental pad in Yorkville as stifling for a really groovy home-visit to New York as any rebels fleeing Scarsdale. (They have made the ritual visit to Paris and are now perhaps a little more European than their parents—in the way of food. He loves it, better than haircuts, and she, neat as a phoebe, is already watching his weight.) They adore each other, obviously. They are wise enough to sense that “folkies”—the “life-pattern” they have somewhat subscribed to—are on the way out, but their alert sense of style will keep them “with it,” totally unaware that this merely means being one’s age, at that age. She has a degree in home economics, but need not be ashamed of it. For, of course (not too often, as a matter of modernation and economy), they are in the habit of turning on, and that one symbol makes everything right. In ten years I see them, succumbed, as they already have, to that greatest of drugs—convention. There’ll be another name for what they’ll be, and no opprobrium for it from me. But they’ll be what they are now. Squares.

  They in turn are clearly disappointed in me. I
ntroduced by a friend, they know better than to expect antics of all writers. They don’t mind the lunch being good. But they are astounded at my attitudes as expounded above, and coming from someone who has published in their Koran—a magazine so hip that they don’t have to read it. They have listened politely. They speak of the material that turning on might bring me. I agree that bizarre thoughts and perceptions, which thank God I have constantly, are a fine matrix for creation, but useless when the controls are absent. “I like to be there, you see. When I have them.” But their eyes are onyx; in fact, orthodox. They’re in that room. And, as usual, I’m outside the church. Later, our mutual friend reports their puzzlement. “You wore an apron, you dog.” I can play roles as well as any—and I did cook lunch. “They can’t understand it. You were a sweet lady, they said.”

  Who of us knows for sure a revolutionary when he sees one, even if it is himself? I had my first experience with drugs at twenty, when an appendectomy went wrong. After days of dosage for the pain of having had intestines reeled out and put back again, and violent dope reactions of which I was totally unaware, I woke to an old harridan of a head nurse leaning over me. “Why didn’t you tell us,” she snapped, “that you were allergic to morphine?” Even my incision wanted to laugh, and answer, though I couldn’t, “How the hell should I know?” I had never had anything more vicious than aspirin in my life. “Trauma,” said the doctor at her side. “Next time it may be different.” And he was right. It is a question of the patient wishing to go under. Some rooms can be entered after all, at will.

  That is why the thought of death so troubles me. If I am in pain, I shall certainly want painkillers. But a mere five-sense psyche is always untrustworthy. Its trouble is that it never wants to die. And it never confuses nirvana with experience. Or lethe with life. That’s hard going at the end, that is. So I see why people might want to study the ins and outs of turning on and turning off, to learn how to prepare themselves early. Otherwise, even at the bitter end, one might not know how to go gracefully under. One still might want to rise. And kick the stone.

  (Thus spake who?—not reminded he was daily slave to a boiled egg.)

  Certainly what I am slave to is clear. I still want to kick the stone.

  I had never really looked back before, at my own literary history as entangled with others. I seemed to me just getting to be of an age to have a history, though not ready yet to embalm it in conventional autobiography. There have been eras, like the 1920s and 1930s, when certain writers have done that extraordinarily young—and some, having expended their stamina and lifescape, live the rest of their lives collecting their medals but without conclusive work. My era, elasticized by literacy, media and an ambivalent life-expectation—die older, if you dodge the bombs—seemed ever more hypnotized by the future. Art was at best a present seizure.

  The past for some artists was entirely a dead lava-plain.

  Oddly enough, their future looked just like it.

  Ego art. We know we are the era of it. Naturally, our reasons are compassionate: in clouds of self-media—but only after the death of certain gods, and under continuous war—we take on ourselves, as the supreme burden. Our century began, after all, with the great re-entry of Self into art. … Eras, before they decline, exaggerate. Ego art occurs when that great art-of-the-self becomes a trade.

  A writer is expected to use his ego like a great probe, suffering diagnostically to record the world. He always expected to, but now he must do it by convention. The “world” in turn no longer feels itself reportable in third person, or in imaginative art: everything must be first-person in order to be believed. Imagination as willed fantasy, or fantasy wilfully shaped, is therefore false: the “conscious” artist must fall back before the scrupuously accidental action-painting of “life.” Reviewers cannot read novels which present themselves as more than this or different from it, and novelists, quick to catch the blight, cannot write them. The suspension of disbelief is willing no longer. A writer must be his own character, so thinly veiled that we know. Fyodor Dostoevski—give him his full name—can still be his underground man, but how can one Dostoevski be Raskolnikov? Was he ever? Satire, always closer to the critical faculty, is still reputable. But once the imagination shaking free of the ego-possible, strays past “It really happened to me” into those mysteries which lie beyond, or once the writer declares his intent to make a world that lies beyond, made perhaps of third-person-reported pysches, or not clearly based on his journalistic ego—then he has crossed the Styx, into the world of ghosts. The facts are against him. The critical faculty—in novelist as well as critic—coaxes us to mistrust what cannot be explained or has not been literally lived, and to deny that powerful art is made of it. Non-ego art is still here, as it has always been. But speaking up for it, to those for whom the journalistic “I” is now the sole category of literary belief, is like trying to describe what even blind men can see with their eyes closed, to a very visual elephant.

  Modes of writing really have very little to do with the quarrel. “Fiction” and “non-fiction” are magazine words or workshop ones, indicating only as always that business is perfectly capable of influencing art. The real bite is not between novels and history, or journalism and novels, or even between confessional and “constructed” art. (Any more than that there exists a real quarrel between poetry and prose—instead of a teasing, Constantly changing, pingpong difference.) All are sides of the writer-animal, evoked as the spirit moves us. Or as the battle does. Or as the wind turns. The real tussle—paradise lost, hell regained—is between the orphic and the didactic poles in all of us. Literature is all the gradations between. Yes—all.

  Time was when the novel, that bastard upstart, was more clearly a poor fictive thing, and belles lettres—always doing what it could for other forms—more surely sublime. As almost always, the lettrists are still in power, and as always have to be reassured of it. For though men of letters start out from interest in the conduct of values, the conduct of their lives is often such as to persuade us—and even themselves—that power is what they are primarily interested in. The change in them is—that the lettrists of today, or critics once pur et simple, will do anything to keep from being genteelly called belles. They, learn their tough stance, of course, from the novelist.

  The old New Critics, less genteel than predecessors like Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, were still formally on the side of us angels, the pur et simple writers—although the effect of their honest dissections was usually to show that an angel is a winged creature who cannot walk. Men like Van Wyck Brooks went on to explore their own nervous crises as artists did—and men of letters often have, or wrote their critical work under the assumption that this too was art. Edmund Wilson, with the sincerest flattery, now and then wrote “imaginative” books. Why not? A critic attempting a work of imaginative art is only as assumptive as a writer attempting literary criticism. Each may be assuming that he can have or get the best of both sides. Or each may be freely reveling in the continuum that is literature. In which writers might more keenly remember that the limits of a critic’s generosity show up as quick as those of his intelligence. And critics might be warned that imagination never conceals what you are. And is most nakedly what you are. What is required of either of us is a soule—though soul is welcome too.

  Today’s men of letters want that as much as ever; only the form of their desire is different. As usual they copy those who, in the bitter nature of things, precede them by writing the books on which their own must wait. Today’s lettrist can’t be belle, not only because the world isn’t, but because the writers aren’t, anymore. He wants to be an ugly lettrist—a true-blue plug-ugly whom nobody gets to imagine, mind you, but himself. Where, if he talks about himself instead of books, as the critic does so much of nowadays, it is with a lash aspiring to Swift’s and a whine he hopes is Rousseau. Again, he gets this harsh-tender stance on himself from the novelist. On whose attitudes he must wait, before he can react, shadow-box, kill—per
form. The meateater smells of his meat. Often tainted with the “put up your dukes!” reverse romanticisms of the day (as in Making It, where a sensibility as conscious as any maiden’s becomes an insensitive ego sensitively recording). He craves the same wounds as the “imaginative” artist, given and taken in the same ring. Or the self-inflicted ones. Particularly those. So, the critic too, ends up writing ego art. He has to tell you about his psyche before he can render his judgments. Often it is very interesting—because psyches are.

  But when he gets around to the books again, to that other-directed artist to whose north pole he is south—watch this jolie laide very carefully. He himself has claimed the free man’s heady right to an obsession with his own life; now, for the novelist, he may stipulate it. He mistrusts the objectivity of another man’s imagination, on the same terms as he mistrusts the objectivity of his own intelligence—nothing will convince him that these objectivities are not the same. So, ten to one, he will be telling you what the imagination can’t do anymore. He never sees it as the other writer sometimes does—illimitable, grossly and gloriously unfactual. To him, the nonreal is never a true source. Artists must no longer invent. Novelists must report only their own dilemmas, in the appropriate areas, ages and sex of their own true lives, otherwise he can’t believe it—he won’t. Twain is not Huck; Anna Karenina is not Leo Tolstoi. It’s over. And of course it is. For this psyche is projecting. It is timid about imagining imagination. People who have to wait around for other people’s often are.