Why indeed? This is segregated art, with all the limits of art wherever artists are so confined—this time to their own autobiography: to black-white, male-female, national, ethnic, country-city writing, to the end that only a pup called Rover can truly tell you about Lincoln’s doctor’s dog. The “Active” world, whatever that is, must never sound imagined beyond the life-mobility of the author. The story or novel, to be living, whatever that now is, must never be—oblique. It must spurt, hot and unwilled, uncorrected and undirected by art (which is only a fake word for artfulness)—the real red-ink blood of a poet. Into your honest hand. You’ve got the real thing now. (Don’t ask how he got it to a publisher.) The burden of belief a reader once had to carry is lifted. You don’t any longer have to be guilty of that lie, imagination. Know what? You’re not vicarious any more!
This is the willing suspension of our disbelief now.
And if the novel (whatever that is) won’t do that for you in that way, or begins to bore you at it—then it is soon to be very dead. So it will be. That way will be. It is one of the great modes of art, but it isn’t the only one. Segregation, in art as any where, is a straight road to escape. For a time. Look back on how, in painting, the human body, once individualized, canonized, was finally impressionized out of all personality. And now, unerringly, returns. The human figurative always does. And in any art, it also knows how to hide. The novelist (whatever that is) is also and always has been a quondam-diarist, proto-historian, part-time pundit, pseudo-dramatist, and putative poet—he eats roles. And frequently smells of them. He as often wants to conceal himself in his work as to reveal. Give him the wide-open chance to be himself on a platter and he may take this as his right; compel it and he will as soon chuck it back at you, in exchange for the delights of being a hunted, wanted man, and for the sheer professional practice of peering at you from some other bunghole.
What is the fictive world? Does a fact, the moment it is phrased, start to be imaginary? Does the imagined earn reality through very language? Where, on the street of shadowboxes that is now our life, is the non-fictive world? Can you and I tell each other sometime? Don’t bore me, I’ll bore you. I’ll tell you about I.
I was well used to finding out in my books what I dreamed of the world. Slowly, at another point of the pen, I began to find out what I thought of it. At times it was almost as if those old philosophical divisions, in the anatomie of our melancholy intelligence, were true. There were two rivers in me, two pens that dipped in these, very separate and entirely alternate. The connection between them—for there is one—could give a critic no cheer. A writer’s critical ideas were always preceded by his books. (I don’t do as I say. I say later what I can then see I hoped to do.) Special pleading? Of course. A writer would be mad not to. He has an obligation to keep the field free, always to enter it against those who knew too well how to do precisely what. Generalized pleading, toward a system, was for the critique, and not his affair.
There’s peril in it—in that second pen. I have never got over my fear of it. Too much logic destroys the image, which is a fusion of the vague. Imagination had its own precisions, which a habit of critical thought could blunt. There is a certain amount of hermetic air around us at the beginning of things; once carved into attitudes, could it ever return to the nobility of an emptiness waiting to be made?
Long ago, describing how a story began, I said, “One wants to show this thing. One feels a clean … strong … almost anger, that this half-visible thing is not yet known. It’s a paranoia toward, not against. One has seen. One must rescue it.” A story, a poem, a novel was a rescue of life, a muckraking of it, or even a letter of indignation—to one’s friends. Criticism still seemed to me more like a lettre de cachet, meant for the enemy, which might turn out to be mine. I might end up outside the beloved prison, looking in.
At the same time the conscious feeds the unconscious; that stream is not always one-way. The creative in us (I knew we would come to it) is not always the hothead part of a writer, the critic in us not always the objective and willed. Each passes through the sieve of the other. Outside in the world, wars between the two come less from the critic’s secular power than from his assumption that he is there to instruct. When he loses his cool, dropping into the ego-explanation, the life justifications that afflict other writers, I find that encouraging. It is a sign that, at his pole of literature, he is aware that no man can be its procurator; each man may add to it.
But when I write with the second pen, I still think of it as ego-art.
Once, wandering into a round-table conference, I came upon a rising young American critic who was addressing a group of European writers. “Oh, h’lo,” he said over his shoulder, when the rest of us entered, and went on: “We—” he said, and at that pace, “—who are working in literature—” I stood behind him, uncredentialled and feeling it. He sat. Who was working in literature, dammit? Suddenly one of the others at the table, not a critic either (the blessed Richard Hughes as a matter of fact) winked at me. It was better to be uncredentialled in that way. Better to stand behind.
And once, I was taken down in the bowels of the British Museum, where by law a copy of every piece of printed matter originating in England, broadside to ballyhoo, had to be kept. Libraries all over the world were choking on their own goods, and reaching for the microfilm. Yet as I stood there, it seemed to me that I could hear the huge, rosicrucian murmur of language reincarnating itself in the old habit; what was Cheapside down here would someday be taken into a poem upstairs.
Literature is a continuum. We can only continue it.
I thought so. I dreamed it.
Am I coming to the end, for me, of one more kind of expression? In my other work, this displacement process has become a familiar, one. Though I don’t want to investigate why I write what when, in fact want to be the last to know consciously, I can’t help an awareness as innate as any body-rhythm, that after a long or massive and perhaps “irregular” piece of work, I will want to do something “small and finished,” or that after some concentration on the “inhuman” or metaphysical, I will want most to “get back to people.” Or that after work in which I have tried most of all to invest the ordinary with strangeness, I may find myself stretching toward the reverse. Each time, the feeling, physical and plastic, is that I break the mold in the act of making it, leaving it behind me. (Just as, nearing the end of this book’s auto-biology, I already know that if someday I should have a further span of life to report on, biographing that in this way will no longer be possible.)
The sensation of leaving, dependent of course on one’s private admission that one has soared a few feet up, and not too badly—is rather as if one has been an eagle-for-a-day in a certain vicinity, and is now bored with eagledom in that neighborhood. I am able to get away, perhaps, because each piece of work, like any living organism—which for the time being it is to me, somewhere contains the seed of the next.
Anti-criticism, I begin to find, won’t remain fixed for me either. At first, as a squib tossed out to set fire to some too-fat-and-fancy bottoms, it can progress to avuncular chat, dangerous though it is for the writer to be sage uncle rather than fresh green nephew. But after two or three such anti-rounds, even anti-criticism has to be something more.
Under the working title In Full View Of The City (which I sometimes wish I had kept) I had just done a long novel, in some ways set in a “real” New York I thought I remembered. I labored for that realism, not only to capture a period now gone, which I had in part inhabited, but also because the people in the book, the two principal women especially, were thus set off in their own strangeness—in its turn that very human oddness which the “realistic” side of any environment tends to create.
Behind these forces within the book, there was another influence I had never worked under before. This book, The New Yorkers, was in a sense a sequel to my first novel, False Entry, though actually prior to it in time sequence. Since either one could be read alone, before or after t
he other, their permanent intersection lay somewhere in space—in the reader’s mind after he had read both. Both were intensely concerned with the notion of “place.” For my generation, changes in that concept had become the number-one trauma, outdistancing even the touted changes in our concept of the psyche, secondary only to the traumatic looming of death itself, personal or racial—and in some ways allied to both.
In the earlier book, “the real place” was that romantic, metaphysical or spiritual one we all yearn for, often confusing or combining it with other elsewheres seemingly in situ—notably “time.” The later book was concerned with that actual place which is so much where we are that where treated in the novel it does better to be more real than real. In the first book’s climate—one essentially still prevailing when I appeared in the world—the spaces between rich and poor, grandee and dressmaker’s boy, England and America, were still fixed enough for encounters between the two poles of social class to have an exotic flavor—as for North and South, I remember thinking that its “Knights of the Midnight Mystery” (drawn from actual Ku Klux Klan records still in force when I wrote) belonged as much to the gothic novel as to mine.
The second book explored that class where the novel is said to have begun—the middle. Not so much in its social relations as in its dreams and textures—to outsiders always furnished to the nth, and full of its own darkness. Almost unconsciously, I used everything my class had accumulated in its carpetbagger progress and crisscross realms of perception—because I too had them, in our mutual background.
Here in my book were the talk-thought marathons of the novels our youth had admired, the chapter alternations our shared reading had been fed on, plus one of those culminating dinner-scenes in which everybody arrives (an integral part of middle-class life in any time) and two of those long monologues which novelists from Richardson to Joyce have unerringly given to women characters—perhaps in recognition that free association and internal monologue are part of the essentially feminine.
As always with me, the style or form had aped its material, or inflected with it. This time, I seemed to have made the novel’s ontogeny—where it and its people were “now”—echo their joint phylogenetic history—what both they and the novel in general had come through, to be what they were. This is what living people do every day, so acquiring a more than present-day density. And this is “where” the book was set.
Taken together, the two books were in their way a recapitulation of what the American “mind” of my time had come through. Afterwards, I began to think about that. Because, once again, I was leaving.
That year, in a hired hall somewhere, or maybe the “Y,” three or four writers got together and more or less reported the death of the novel. A lot of people paid to hear. I didn’t go, because I already knew about it, but I read the account the next morning. What these sighing Alexanders had said was that “modern times” wasn’t good for novel-making. They were right, of course. Modern times never are.
If a writer sees himself too regularly as an inhabitant of this, he may well be in trouble. An Era is such a dull place for a book to be. Once, when I told a “serious” novelist he had a talent for the comic he oughtn’t deny, he took it as a put-down. “I want to make a serious impact on my times.” He and I clearly differed on what comedy was, but still I was awe-struck. He sighted “the times” along the barrel of his .22—bang! Meanwhile I was up to my neck in it—it was having such an impact on me.
Modern times is a bad place for seeing the great metaphors that all art must have. In the mixed media that modernity always inhabits, God is often very possibly dead, but the arts are surely. They are so because they form part of the tangible godhead of that daily life which all men, including artists, are trained to see small. There, in the slim incarnation of our lives as we can see them now, painting is always on its last pop cycle, and music, shorn of the “ancient” melodies, is silent. Even the past is never as rigid as modernity is. For, looking back, we can see without pain that art is fluid, or even celebrate how art has united with document. But for today, the arts are always catatonic—fixed. This comes about because the document of our own time affrights us all. And the idea that art must be document, or should be, or will be—cuts at the very wrist of the artist, as his hand grips what it can, midstream.
A novel is a kind of enclosure. So of course is a poem, a watercolor, a fugue. But the novel, whether it maps by way of people or dream, or in the very essence of the void, still sets itself, up as taking place somewhere within the human stockade. So, in effect it always takes place within that prison. It makes a place for itself there, sometimes cosmic or international, sometimes parochial, in a street or a town or a childhood—or in the great savannahs of a single mind. But always, the novel in some sense will tell us about a place, actual or metaphysical. For the novel, place is the devouring unity. The nature of the novel is to tell us what the nature of some part of the prison is.
“And it was so much easier, wasn’t it,” you hear people say, “when the enclosures were there for all to see—and almost certain to be strictly regional. When the world had useful boundaries, never seeing itself too large or too small—look at Barchester! While look at us—fragmented moonborne, yet at the same time colonized to the inch, tape-recorded in every known Babelese, and shhh, worst of all, on camera, down to the very declivities of our newly-to-be-exchanged worlds—or hearts.” I think rather that the people of an era never really see themselves as living in those neat amphitheatres which art or history will later assign. Where are we to find again the tidy Barchester of yore? In the reminder that Trollope—a man of many other milieus by the way—gave us it.
In the nineteenth century, a novelist expected to depend on the dignity of a literal setting, often an agreed-upon reality gained from what men already knew of such a habitat—from which starting-place he might then go on. The degree to which he could depart from it into further recesses or heights, would determine the greatness of his work, and this is what keeps great novels accessible. Agreed-upon reality never stays the same. Places disappear. But in time, a great novel sheds its literal place, whatever that may be, for an eternal one.
To that modernity of the moment—us—it is the concept of place itself which has most altered. Will we ourselves be magnificent in all those spaces that are to be—or only ever more cramped back into what we miserably are? In literature, has even the most traditionalist sense of a particular place long been swamped by those other unities, action and time? What’s going to go next? For the world and the novel, what is “place” now?
I guess we see clearest what it no longer is. As late as 1932, there was another English novelist in the tradition of Bronte, Winifred Holtby. Her much praised South Riding could subtitle itself An English Landscape and mean it, in the old exhaustive way from manorhouse to councilhall, squire to alderman. Reading it now, one suspects that for many in its own time it was already déja vu. For by then, the concepts of place and place-time had so altered that novelists either were affected, or had already helped to alter them. For all men, the old Aristotelian unities were shaken forevermore—or again. By 1930, Robert Musil had already published The Man Without Qualities, where a 1913 Vienna vibrated with all the interpenetrations of a “modern” city, and chapters had headings like “If there is such a thing as a sense of reality …,” or “Which remarkably does not get us anywhere.” Proust had written. Joyce had given us his Dublin of the mind, and Kafka had given us a paralyzed geography in which man stood on the pinpoint of himself. Some of this had already been done before—some always has. But for the art of the future, and the man—the psyche was to be the recognized “place” now.
So, it’s come about that literal place-reality in the novel can no longer impose the same dignity or force. We can neither read nor write about it solely in the old way, without that unalterable flash of déjà vu. New enclosures, long since sighted by literature, make this impossible. And these in time become the new convention, as we have it n
ow: “Better to ignore place altogether now. Or make it metaphysical.” For of course, a convention is an either-or proposition. It never lets you do both.
And in the American novel, the dilemma has been particularly sharp. For we were still lagging in the pioneer’s lively enthusiasm for real places, new ones, and for that “American experience” so rooted in them. No one wished to annihilate this, or could. What happened was simpler. Certain places, mostly urban, became proper literary; “modern” novels could take place there without fear of ridicule, or damwell had to. The rest of the country could go back to pulp, and damnear did. The West went into the westerns. The South redeemed itself, as the special home of our guilt. The small town disappeared down a trap-door marked Babbitt. And nobody heard tell anymore of the farm. Not in high places. And so arose a new American literary convention, of unparalleled naiveté.
A “regional” novelist was now a man born in the sticks and doomed to write about it, under rhythmically weathered titles: Hardscrabble Sky, A Light Sweat Over the Carolinas, this to let the reader know that the book’s prostitutes would come from the fields and there would be no highclass restaurants. Metropolitan novels meanwhile, even if bad were never regional. The provinces had too much parvenu respect for the city, and the city agreed with them. Across the nation, the whole literary push had been toward the cities—as in Dreiser, whose novels were saved by that fact. Or toward Europe—for experience of which Cather, Anderson and Wescott could be condescended to, and Hemingway praised, for having once again (after Wharton and James) brought Europe back to us. For thirty years, literature rushed east, and many writers sank there, in all the artificialities that a buried nativity can become. But, as with any convention, all writers have been affected by it. For, if “rural” now meant “rube” forever, the city now became the very citadel and symbol of Nowhere.
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