Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Yes, watch the ugly man of letters. How he craves imagination’s risks!

  And watch me. How sometimes I, at the other pole, I crave his.

  In school and early childhood, fantasy is sometimes coddled, but the didactic is what we are urged to trust. Early on, I ran from it, as from what teachers and other crocodiles fed on only to regurgitate a dead corpus of that literature which I had to find out for myself later was still painfully alive. Fantasy, imagination, whatever you called it, a great free river of possibility in language, was what you could trust. Once you learned to swim and mull there, life and feeling accreted to it. From its dark shallows came those anode-cathode associative bounds, those sudden firm ledges of insight, of something put into the world that had perhaps never been there before. A small babe of vision might be made. After a while, I never read critical comments any more; their comparable river ran so sandy and thin. Critique was a game that I had played at in college, trifled with as a possible vocation, and done too wildly well at: “You certainly sling the King’s English—but what is this you say!” I was too young to confess that the only authority for it was myself. Or others like me but better at it. Even later, I would always rather read what I still tend to think of as the primary manuscripts. And if confined to hard choice—rather write them.

  What I know now is that one need not make it a hard and separate choice—indeed one cannot. Slowly, all those categories the crocodiles put in me were one after the other to melt away. Grudgingly, I would see that in the greatest of writers, the fantastic and the didactic combine. (Not always, surely, in the first person singular, or any of its facsimiles. Sometimes in a wildly differing array of personae, not all of whom could possibly be her or him.)

  For if criticism doesn’t precede writers but follows them (never a popular theory with those “influential” reviewers, who prefer to project a more innocent version of their influence), then writers do not consciously or collectively know the change that is coming upon them, at the time. And prefer not to. Talk can kill verbal art. That blind orphic impulse wants not to be phrased, but to phrase.

  But one inescapable way of learning what literary change is, is to live through one. Unconsciously.

  Category, I can tell you, is the only real crocodile.

  In 1948, it was astonishingly true that the reigning ideal of the “proper” short story—not only at The New Yorker, which published my first few, but generally in America—was the absolute reversal of what I have called ego-art. Author should not appear. A story, a novel, possibly even a poem, was designed—should be—to drop from a hand which was nowhere, as a Ding an sich, a globe maybe ready to burst inside the reader from its own hot internal pressures, but meanwhile wholly contained, even coolly so, by only its own symbolic skin. Later, when I was more knowing if not wiser, I would term this method “the oblique.” It is one of the great modes of art, and at first I was writing in it, but I didn’t know that. The one supernal fact about any mode of art is that it isn’t the only one—but I didn’t know that either. (Not consciously, though an inner tug was soon to move me). At this time, I knew no writers, only a couple of very restrained editors whom I saw rarely, in fact almost nobody who “talked books,” and this isolation was to continue for some time. Further, I had read almost nothing of the “modern” short story, American or otherwise. I hadn’t known I was going to write any, for one thing, and even if so, hadn’t the temperament for research. Even then I was perhaps self-protectively reading books strangely unallied with what I was doing, and always books a little behind or tangential to “current” ones—a habit that has persisted and one I often suspect other writers of. It keeps you out of the collective conscious.

  First influences, they say, are always the deepest. Well—for a time. Back in high school, I had read much on my own among the Russians, but only the novels were important to me. Chekhov I absorbed silently along with the rest, but in college, where I found him in the curriculum, I immediately backed away. I had a tendency to back away from whatever was touted there. James (except for Daisy Miller) was not yet studied there. Sometimes I touted him (and other stumbled-upon oddities like Gide and Colette) to them. But at home, much earlier than any of this, what I remember is the thumbed small book of Hawthorne’s stories, and one of Flaubert’s (containing “A Simple Heart,” “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaler” and “Herodias”) which I still have. Also Wilde’s Fairy Tales (I knew “The Nightingale and the Rose” was a sexual dream though I didn’t know of sex yet), some Jewish Publication Society folklore where the one-level characters never grew, so rather bored me, but I would read anything—and a corner of tattered paper Nick Carters, where I much lived.

  Make what one can of it. The likely truth is that any actual influences were outside “the short story” entirely: in the Bible (mostly Ecclesiastes and the Prophets), whose rhetoric I was never to recover from—and a complete set of Thackeray, read and re-read by the age of ten, in which I was quite as happy with “The Yellow-plush Papers” as with Vanity Fair. Thackeray keeps appearing in his own pages, remember? (Always welcome too, except when he quoted Greek.) And the Bible, though pithy, keeps saying what it thinks.

  This was soon to cause differences of opinion between me and The New Yorker, the causes of which neither of us really knew. On my side it was not yet opinion at all. I had a rhetoric not always calm, though it did tend to collect. At the ends of stories. Stories? When I wrote them, I wanted to end them, and often in a burst did so. At the time this was felt to be unsuitable. Why? Because in her way, though still so anonymously, author did appear. I had violated the oblique, as I was increasingly to do. (To the point of finally breaking away into other forms, novel to essay, where there was more natural space for it.) Twice, in two of the earliest stories, editorial suggestion (which, apart from the fact-questioning done by the checkers, was never concrete, always delicate, rather like a maitre in an atelier flicking with his pointer a passage in the nude drawing, here, there, which had not quite fulfilled itself) got better endings out of me than I had first put there. (Once, with the first story written, “A Box of Ginger,” where I took a corny sentence out and felt much the better for it. And once, with “The Watchers,” justifiably rejected for not being quite finished, where, after some months’ mulling I found the right sentence—while looking into the toilet as a matter of fact—and put it in.)

  But with “A Wreath for Miss Totten,” a story bracketed in two paragraphs, opening and concluding, which are quite plainly both rhetorical and moral observation (shoot the oblique from both sides), when it was flatly suggested that these be removed, though I was of course otherwise “free to send the story elsewhere”—I sent it. Not merely because I knew that the story, unbracketed, thereby fitted nicely into these memoirs-of-a-memorable-old-character which are a New Yorker genre. Something else in me, an instinct not yet formulated, lurked beyond that. Several stories on, with In the Absence of Angels, there was to be another controversy, this time in a way political. It was the time of the first SHELTER signs in public buildings, when New York City feared Russian bombing (Collier’s printed an entire issue devoted to a mythical such bombing). My story (of Westchester under totalitarian rule), though already much praised “at the office” was finally regretfully rejected on the grounds that the magazine wished to do nothing to contribute to that fear. I replied with a letter of protest suggesting the magazine’s obligation to print what it had on all other grounds highly praised. Later, on telling an editor there that I was abashed over the letter (I am always abashed, later) he replied, “That letter did you no harm.” And indeed the story was later printed, the delay and soul-searching on their part (or on Harold Ross’s part as I was told it was) being in a way a credit to their still admirably sustained conviction that the pen is or can be—a sword. I agreed with them. During our correspondence—for the total of nine stories they ultimately printed there was quite a lot of it—I several times wrote to tell them so. These early statements were my first lette
rs of indignation. The burden of them was “It has to be my sword.”

  I felt pretty shaky about it. It seemed that I would have to do—what I had to do. In whatever guise—some of which I am not yet sure of—whenever author wanted to appear, author would. But I wasn’t at all sure I had the figure for it—as a dancer, I knew that those girls who didn’t, were often the ones most willing to strip. Later still, I would often wonder how some editors could be so knowing, why they never were as shaky as me. Simple. They don’t appear.

  By which a writer meant—in what he writes. Which then meant—no commentary of any kind. Nothing on literature, neither of the world or one’s contemporaries, and no comment on one’s own work—above all nothing on that. In the American convention of the time (to which, from an inclination to privacy that still persists, I inarticulately subscribed to without knowing it) “author” like his works remained oblique. He had almost a responsibility to, which went far deeper than the mere preservation of a private life, or a dislike of public “personal” appearances. Superficially among lesser writers, the attitude may have had to do with snob dignities. Going down or out to the litry hustings, they surmised must indeed be a descent. For the “best” writers, hunted in picpost flashes, or traced in gingerly answers to news interviews, still were aloof. Except when acquiring Nobel prizes, they kept their thoughts on literature—and on life—to themselves.

  There were good reasons for this, practically and psychologically. Even on the eastern seaboard, American literary life couldn’t concentrate as it does in Britain and France; the distances between writers, in backgrounds as well as miles, were often vast. Often, and most poignantly before the 1950s, American artists had gone to those countries half for art maybe, but also to meet those semblables, themselves. At home, for discussion companionship a writer had a choice of small letter-united friendships, or perhaps a provincial group (agrarian or not) attached by ethnic origin or to a “little” review, or else a social life essentially unserious, ranging from the New York martini, to the leftovers of Boston tea.

  But paramount; in the realms of opinion, the American writer per se, had long since lost his supreme authority or relegated it. In the academy the critics cluster, in the reviews they bluster; to them now belong the barricades. Except for James, a special case, American writers had never much had an authority in the European tradition of a Goethe or Gide, or of those dozens of minor writers who by aristocratic right would both formulate over the corpus of literature and create it. Or of those like Lawrence, who were savagely and openly anti-critical. When the American writer finally appeared to explain or defend himself, or to express judgments he had perhaps been nourished by, it would more often be in posthumous letters like Hart Crane’s, or post-hoc crackups, or in memoirs which were the pre-death flare sent up to show that his work and his quarrels were done. Now and then, in interview, to a younger person or in a foreign country, a Hemingway or a Faulkner unbent. But characteristically they hoarded their mana, like men who had wiser uses for it.

  A writer may well mistrust literary companionship. Talk is bloody hemophiliac. The orphic in us is a pulse; the didactic is a code and a restraint. All work involves pre-judgments too delicate for aeration perhaps, or which codify best of themselves. Gestation goes on best in the dark. When it is over, you are already gathering energy for the next, in the usual anxiety over what you can’t do, arrogance over what you can. It is then, idle and meditating, that an urge to write about books may arise. An intent one, gaze bent on the dark coil that makes books.

  The counter-urge—not to spill the seed; not to expend the love—is one of the strongest I know. And comes from the same fear—of not having enough. Enough energy and time (a day’s writing is a day) and enough fertility for both art and analysis. Yet, sometimes, one has the, wild urge, need, to assess or correct the critical attitudes of the day—which almost certainly are not one’s own. Why bother?—they never will be. I suppose that is why.

  Professionally, in America, you ran a risk. Since you were not an equal-opportunity critic, having neither the lingo nor the connections, you could not really be talking to them, about literary concerns. It would be assumed you were really talking to reviewers, about your own concerns. You could earn equal time, of course, by constantly writing reviews yourself and joining in all the litry cabals, on the principle of the partygoer who by accepting all invitations, both insures himself against gossip behind his back, and makes it known he’s been asked. If you don’t want to be an underdog of literature, hadn’t you better set yourself up as the watchdog of it? I have heard many writers shrewdly take this into account. There was of course the chance, especially if you had never before spoken up about books, yours or other peoples, that attention might be paid because of the oddity of it, and those who respect your work might respect your views. Never of course engage with reviewers on any score—and not merely because of these obvious revenges—silence, or the last-word slash. Even if you respected a reviewer, and he you, it was dangerous. The American gap was still too wide for it. If you respected yourself, you would know enough to keep your pose arcane. You might not think you were lowering yourself by speaking publicly to him. He would.

  That hasn’t much changed since the ’50s. Slowly, other author obliquities which also had nothing to do with literature itself, did seem to be giving way. Media has had much to do with it. University teaching has had more. With a press and a pulpit, many a silent writer has learned to talk—and talk always enlarges itself. The habit of the lectern instills the habit of knowing. The habit of writing instills the habit of finding out. As in my own way I was enveloped in the usual media-clouds and university respectabilities, I sometimes knelt inwardly, praying to remember the difference.

  Meanwhile, for me and others, a categorical silence familiarly imposed on short-story writers was breaking down—as it could not help but do. Perhaps because we were in a short-story renaissance, it was felt that writers of them should not—in fact could not—turn into novelists. When the novels did come on, good or bad, it was always keenly observed that they were “not the same,” although the one sure difference between the two forms—length—insures that they can never be the same. Looking back it is clear that stories were getting longer everywhere; writers were tiring of the short stint. On my own side, almost at once I felt I had finished with the “Hester” stories, typically a young writer’s autobiographical material which I no longer wanted to stay in, but also the “environment” I was told The New Yorker had bought me for, never having seen it “done” before. For me it was merely my childhood; I felt no obligation to stay in it. Already stories had shifted subject—and were getting longer. It felt like Alice, I must say, or adolescence—gawky skeleton enlarging, qualifications crowding in on childhood’s gospel, and in the half-poemed cherub’s enclosure that so many stories of the time stayed in, the long gaunt boots of another kind of prose. (By 1953, I would begin the novel False Entry, whose related novel, The New Yorkers, written years after, would finally return in part to that never-since-used environment, now altogether transfused out of the autobiographical.)

  Paradoxically, stories were having to be defended—were they really as good as novels?—meaning were they as important on the literary scale, and in a Times interview I was asked that. My answer was much what it would be now, “Whose scale?” As another complication, many of the best story-writers of the day were women, and this was seen as a sign of special affinity between the form and the sex, rather than as part of the greater intrusion of women into general literature. Actually, once again the real truths went deeper. (Deeper even than sex, which is pretty far, but a distance writers are used to.) … Why list the old false imperatives though, if you never believed in them? Because you didn’t know that, at the time.

  All over, in the same way that scientific “discoveries ignite simultaneously half across the globe from each other, writers were not merely going from short forms to long, which they classically do; they were getting damned t
ired of the oblique. Which had been perhaps a rather specifically American reaction to rambling Victorian morality, had never been as tightly and totally the thing in European writers anyway, and was now over. From then on, author would appear on his pages in that capacity when and where he chose, commentating on absolutely everything. And stories in this style, soon in its turn to become a category, would appear in the best magazines.

  For there were other sides to the explosion, far more important ones—political and sexual revolutions, and the last throbs of the Freudian one. What one must say ultimately has the greater effect on how one says it. And should. When numbers of writers begin to think the same about the world, then a literary tradition is made without their ever having corresponded or met—and one not really based on expressional modes. Explaining why is like answering the question, “Why I had the baby,” and of about the same use—it makes ya think. The material of the world—which precedes art—was forcing us all to be more dogmatic, open, shrill at any cost, and committedly personal. We had to give the picture of our own pain. In the name of all of it. Art for art’s sake? Ah, that was an ivory tower, belonging to Anonymous.

  Well, here we are not so many years later, and in the name of either world or personal pain, a great many writers have since appeared both on the platformed page and in the world publicly, as authors who are themselves continuously. And on the page, in all guises and pronouns—:as “he,” “she,” “you,” “we,” and even “they”—as long as it is understood that’ these are all surrogates for the most popular pronoun, the out-and-out confessional “I.” “Fiction” and “non-fiction” (those words made of plastic elastic) now do not merely combine. Nor yet see themselves as inter-mirrored in any of the ways that normally have confounded philosophers. The only fiction now worth, writing is from fact. This has made all the difference.

  A reader-critic must now be able to feel that any of the “old” pronoun approaches to experience really are masks for the literal “I” of the writer. The experiences described must have happened, or be conceivably happenable—to him. So why bother with those other approaches, which no longer seem to work anyway? (As indeed they don’t, under such an assumption, since they are avenues out from the solipsistic world, not toward it.) Since they no longer seem worth doing, why bother with “fiction” at all?