It has been several other clichés in its time. Once, as in Dos Passos, it was the Great Collage. Before that, the abattoir, and the “teeming poor.” Or in a later frivolous era, the Penthouse. For the real American interest is in change, and the city is the place that changes most, and most “modernly.” In time, the city has become the best place for an American novel to be, since all psyches of any importance are presumed to be there. At last it has escaped the old dilemma of place altogether, by becoming the existential Place. Totally surreal, of course, never parochial; the absolutist novel cannot be both. Personae in the novels of this type wear their eyeballs on stalks and float down nameless avenues, like paranoid balloons. The Action: Unisex in Nighttown. Probable Title: a single symbol, maybe &, or $. And, presto, a new cliché, of sorts. Natives of the city will once again recognize an old one: The City—by an author who comes from somewhere else.
A writer’s region is what he makes it, every time. Great novels will not be impeded by the presence of cows there. And the absence of them, or the presence of pavement, has never kept great urban novelists from a kind of rural concentration. Dickens, Musil, Biely, Proust—are all great regionalists of a city kind. London, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris all “live” in their pages, through people who if written of elsewhere would not be as they are. Looking back to those eras, the perfumes and stinks, and the ecology, are all clear to us now. The people live in the scenery of those cities, and the city now lives in the people, tangentially, through their eyes and minds, or as in Biely, like a hero itself in the wake of the supernumeraries, its streets following like waves the little people it makes flotsam of. Simple. Yet for our times, our own times always, what a balancing! For a novel at best is never a historical or descriptive thesis, but a sub-news or a supra-news of the world, which all but drags the novelist down, or up and out with it. The novel is rescued life.
What a novelist must trust to is that continuity exists somewhere, somehow to be seen, perhaps as a useful terror strikes his heart. Casting ahead, in order to see change in the name of intellectual duty, will not help me. Nor will going back—to such as West Egg or Wessex or Yoknapatawpha; these and their kind hang like mosques made for once only, above their own documents. The novel never goes back in that sense, just as it never leaves the documents as they were. After seeing an enclosure, which means making one, a writer may then choose to leave it, as a philosopher leaves a fully expressed idea. Or he may elect to spend his writing life there. But except as a reader, another writer will not be able to accompany him.
So, every age is a sighing Alexander—how can there possibly be more than this? Yet every decade brings in more documents. Ours asks the literary artist in particular to shiver and to bow before these—forgetting that the “facts” of the past are often very much what art has made of them. Sometimes, one is tempted to say that all art of any kind is an attempt to make the unimaginative imagine—imagination.
And there’s no perfect time for it—except now. “Modern times” sees itself as the time of the breaking up of the myths. That may well be its. The age which my own most reminds me of is the medieval—the same brutality and enchantment, the same sense of homunculus peering around the cornice of a history happening far from him—and the same crusade toward a heaven not here. It’s chill, lone, and wuthering for some, an overheated faery-land for others, and running with guilty blood for all. An age when change can be caught like quicksilver and held up against the gloss of what we think we remember, where all the gauntlets of starvation and curtailed freedom are still thrown down to us, while sex will be our aphrodisiac and the documents our earthly paradise—who can fail to recognize that description? It is a marvelous time for art.
I WANTED MORE. BUT I had no idea where I was going next.
I had always loved slang, collecting it as the energy of language—and of the nation. It keeps your ear to the ground—and to the groundlings, on whose side I most wanted to be.
We were coining slang very fast now, hacking it out with the coughs and cheapened body odors of the television ads, or buying it up bright and carbon-streaked as the goods at a firesale—wonderful mobile images whose jokes or poignancies were dead in a month. For our reactions to such language ran the same quick course as it did, from natural to fashionable, from honest to false.
There was a phrase of the day—did it come from Harlem streetcorner or Hollywood press-agent, out of “real” jive-ass music, or from the curly boys at the recording studios?—“Let it all hang out.”
Such a phrase means what you make it, depending also on what you are. We coin ourselves from day to day out of such phrases, which interlock enough to keep us going and understanding one another. So if I am feeling false-rural or mock-naive—or if on the other hand I am merely young enough to be nearer the slang—such a phrase may perhaps conjure up women at the washline of the ancient grievances, freed at last of their corsetry and proudly breastfeeding their babies in public places. Or men with bellies hanging easy over their beltlines, from all the good greeds of simple, open life. But if we are merely feeling jazzy, city-corrupt, for today, then the words, jumbling from the crowd, say “Stop the Mafia-style whispering, let down your hair and/or your pants, admit old sins, like maybe that you still say cullud quicker than black, stop being a closet-queen, roll the shirtsleeve from your junkie-arm—be anything you weren’t allowed to be yesterday, even if it’s bad news or badmouth taste, which it is bound to be, for all honesty is really shame.” Shake with “natural” music—even if unnaturally! And above all, loose the pajama string. On anything from the genitalia to literature and politics. For connections between the three are once more being made.
From as far back as Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” American popular-sexual slang has had its own brand of coyness, odd if one considers that most of such slang probably comes from the male side. Bottom of it all is the dinky phallus that the country has kept in the dark of the bedroom, or in the decent jockstraps of the locker-room, and has shyly immortalized best perhaps in its skyscrapers (with plenty of heavy money at their roots).
Some of this is what I was thinking. And that not all the modesty in the country was male.
Let it all hang out. Rather a fine phrase, that one.
So, gathering my own echoes together, I did.
Sex. Literature. American.
A mug’s idea of it, I always thought. Whenever I saw any two of those words paired together.
Sex was never just a topic, to me. Literature doesn’t move by topic; critics do. Our literature hadn’t been all-American since well before I was born. And my fellow American writers, who so often fought out their friendships in the magazines—or their judgments—had never been joined there by me.
For two and a half years, until that summer of 1968, I had scarcely read any of them. The novel I had been working on had become a meditation enclosing all I could handle of a sustained metaphorical world: I wanted no interruptions except from life. Increasingly, for the duration of each book, I had found myself doing this, perhaps ever since that first novel of 1961, after which I had been made to see (if I hadn’t seen it before, or not as parochially as the commentators demanded of one) that I too was writing about “America.”
Every writer is a loner in his own way. By circumstance, I had been a late and fairly innocent beginner at an age when others were professionals, belonging to no school except in the minds of those who fixed on those eight early stories in The New Yorker, by temperament alien to the nitpicking of the quarterlies, by sex a woman in a period when the short story was a great female province but the novel was felt to be male, by heritage European, American Southern, and a Jew. When it was complained that I couldn’t be trusted from book to book to hold my own “image,” I gratefully agreed. Yet I could see that all of them were as much American as anything else, and as much about America, as anything else. In this latest book, I had faced that in a way I hadn’t before. Or rather, the book had led me to this conclusion, one outside its own
pages or purpose, because it was a chronicle of the past, done in terms of the hot present of the past, but not of the now—in a way I had never attempted before.
But now it was done. We were in summer, on island. I was a reader again. Each morning the postmistress handed me a bundle from the New York Society Library, and I returned her one. I groaned in empathy over every book. As for their “status,” that lay embalmed in the silurian light of the winter claques.
Then—for the record, while pausing in James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works at a sentence—I happened to look into the eyes of a deer.
In June, those deer who all year have the run of that island come to the porch to stare. Behind them, their dark wood nibbles our scent. We have left the city of literature. Bringing with us our pathetic fallacy that nature is not watching us. They have left nothing. They bring the gloaming. So, under their eyes—there was now the doe, the fawn, and back in among the trees the stag—I closed the day’s book, on that sentence: “I could drink your come in goblets”—said “millionaire Reuben Masterson.”
Why a goblet, I thought irritably, why not a plain glass? Why does he have to be so fancy? Then I burst out laughing. “Oh, well”—I said to the vanishing scuts of the deer “these days there are millionaires everywhere.”
The idyll was over. The reading had become the meditation. For days I took notes on the flood of it. At first I seemed to be writing of Sex in American Literature, but as other sideshows advanced, I let them, and writing for myself, I named names. Sex, literature, America, I was seeing as sideshows in a circle. Male, female and otherwise, created He them. He was looking for His image. I went looking for mine.
Finished with my orgy of judgment, I made no rewrite, and hid the packet away as one does the minor madnesses. From time to time, hoping to understand what it was to me, I took it out again. I saw nothing in it but what any critic has—ego and empathy, prejudice and taste. Yet perhaps one slim advantage. The creative critic will sometimes do a showy interpretive dance around another man’s book, reworking it in rather the same hungry, possessive way in which certain Freudian biographers seem to want to relive the very life. Writers have small interest in such recreation.
Some of what I had said had not yet been remarked as far as I knew, or not in this way. Or not by a writer. A critic usually thinks he is objective. A writer always knows he is not. At any given moment he can tell you where his ego is. But the empathy wrung from him by the work of other writers tastes of his own sweat. And the balance between these is his brand of scholarship.
I saw too that such notes as these ought to be left in their original circularity. The silent jumps between sections seemed to me to make of themselves a kind of connective current, and the repetitions also. My contemporaries and I knew well enough what it is that “order” destroys.
Meanwhile, I trembled at what I had said of them. For whatever axes I had ground, in the end they ground me. And by now, I was on another book. An odd one, for me. Or odd in a new way.
But until well after its completion, I had no realisation of what the following pages, since transcribed, really are to it.
There are writers whose blessed perversion is not extra the universe which they “share” with “the rest of us,” but total. A writer like Firbank is not only eccentric to the marrowbone, though he may seem merely that, in the first freak delight of encounter. He takes us into the marrowbone. Where exists no “the rest of us,” but the same unity anyone feels when man can take us into his universe. Social and sexual distinctions do not weigh, except in laughter; the sociological or religious critic would be absurd here; delicacies and profundities create themselves according to the relationships in this world, astonishing and fresh as any art new to us is, but no more mixed and polyglot in the end than incontinently truthful art is anywhere.
A writer like Angus Wilson—who in political discussion with a stranger I have heard interject matter-of-factly “Well, I’m a homosexual, you see”—is as an observer and recorder so thoroughly upheld by a particular tradition—here the whole background of the British “class” novel, that his satire is impersonally directed outward, no more homosexual or less heterosexual than a mythical anybody’s; homosexuals in his gallery get the same shrift as everybody, and if the compassion, when it comes, is a bit directed also, that too is British to the core.
Is an American like Albee less lucky for not being centered in such a tradition, or more? He gives no affirmation to any sex, but has used the heterosexual clichés to bitter advantage. When it is complained that he is not only constrained but compelled to do his work in these terms, even to obscure or hide it there, what is really being asked of him? Is he being asked to declare a sexual bias—which is a personal affair, and to couch his work strictly in terms of whatever it is—which is an artistic one? Or is he being asked to affirm—which is a national affair as well? It seems to me, that like the rest of us, he suffers from his Americanism on all these scores, and where he can, also makes very good use of it.
By contrast, Tennessee Williams seems to me more simply a writer of a kind, much gifted with feeling, whose personal vision, whatever its sex, sometimes transcends into poetry and sometimes not—in which case it does become ridiculous. The absurdities do become sexually divisible along a line that one can after a while predict—the girls gone dippy or bitter over homo husbands thrust on their innocence, the bull-like uncles and butch husbands, and with increasingly baby-blue religiosity, the young men always assumpting toward heaven in gilt-gesso featherbeds. If Williams’ work, always heavy on the symbol and the Freudianism, now seems old fashioned, that is why—and really most why the adoration of boy-muscle seems outmoded too. Theater treatment of homosexuality has meanwhile become more liberal. But I never feel that Williams is writing of the homosexual world. From Streetcar on, I have felt that he is writing of “the world” in the heterosexual terms in which it couches itself to him. Sometimes he gives us poetic moments, a kind of intensity-to-the-left-of-feeling—rather like a radical poet in a roomful of Republican ones, certain of whose sensitivities he shares. But I have never-seen a play of his which I didn’t feel was akimbo emotionally, or that stayed with me after-theater, to be returned to—as the major intensities anywhere do. He has always made me feel that he has got “our” world squeegee, and is stuck with it. The worst of this being that the “our world” he brings out in me is a false one too. Oftenly too narrowly heterosexual by far.
I think that the heterosexual artist himself rarely sees the “breeding” world—which is basically as far as I care to define the difference—as narrowly as the consciously or secretly homosexual must. Basically, these must deny the breeding world all its implications of feeling or worth. All their satire will proportion itself toward that, and all their self-exaltation away from it. As for that part of life—death, war, taxes, money in general, and even birth—which is only peripherally sexual, or asexual, or a no-man’s-land mixture of the comedie humaine—they are forced by circumstance to deny that it exists nonsexually, or to castrate themselves from it; they must take a sexual stance on everything. By its nature often an hysteric one. For the world do breed—and is not altogether to be talked out of it.
At present. As food and good rivers grow scarcer, maybe sexual difference, already on its way to optional, may sink the whole frame of reference we now know, in a puree of pills. (Even now, what is a “heterosexual” writer—a man who copulates with women strictly non-anally, if not in the missionary position? Is a woman writer, after a certain mild point of subject and aura, dubiously heterosexual altogether?) Meanwhile, if the English-speaking world, and American literature in particular, has undergone a sexual revolution in the last fifty years, then it is the homosexuals who are its latest suffragettes.
Like all writers, their position toward society—intellectually, emotionally, influentially—starts from their place in it as people. And is altogether different from the suffragettes who preceded them. Women, however kept to the back stai
rs in the pantheons of art, are admissible to society as people, if only so far. The homosexual, as a person forced into underground alienations or flashily outsize compensating reactions, can feel closer to the categorized—to the black and the Jew. Art, however, has always accepted him as a fully participating member of at least the world of art. Where the women writers, still somewhat relegated to their end of art’s living room, must earn their way across it much as in that kind of segregated American provincial society (and with the same mixed results), the male homosexual writer’s place in the pantheon—and in the host of earthly connections which arise from that privilege—is still with the gentlemen. He may or may not also have additional “homintern” access to spheres of sympathy and influence. The female homo writer, even if a type bold enough to assert its place with the men, also instinctively tends to align herself with that “homintern,” thereby acquiring a coterie to face the world with, much as Southern women writers, linking themselves to the Southern Agrarians, or linked by the critics to that renaissance, were enabled both to escape the stigma of female, and to achieve the connections.
One pays for any connection, of course—is the usual moral tone taken. One pays in a narrowing of sympathies, in exchange for sympathy, and in a loss of autonomies important to artists—in exchange for not being literarily alone. So be it—if it is also admitted that all writers in America, and the heterosexuals as much as any, suffer from their connection with a society which in the most rigidly gross way arrogates what shall be considered male or female in people, taking no note that the antipathies which it has manufactured for itself: soft-hard, virile-weak, delicate-strong, sheltered-experienced, etc., etc., are elsewhere much more loosely defined—as in Europe even of the nineteenth century, or are partially blended or altogether reversed—as historically in Asiatic and Muslim countries everywhere. (What would be said of a flower-arranging American who spent his days in exclusively male cafés, or walking hand in hand with a male friend, meanwhile expecting his wife and her female relatives to run the family business and practical relationships? Or of a country where the practice of medicine and dentistry is more for the female, and a poet can therefore tell me “I am free to write of course, and have this beautiful house, since my wife is one of the best dentists in Manila”?) That so-allotted sex characteristics vary wildly with geography is still a matter of merely anthropological or travel interest even to the educated here—rarely entering their thoughts about themselves. And the democratic fear of acknowledging that money makes us different really, shuts off even the artist from freely admitting in his work that where you dig your ditch or your dough has more to do with some so-called feminine-masculine divisions of personality than human nature does—or than personality does. American society, certain portions of it, can take up sexual “looseness” for fun or freedom’s sake. Or it can learn to let fathers change diapers, for dear psychology’s sake. Or it can admit that there’s a little feminine in the best of us, and a little heterosexual in the worst of us. What it fights to the death, even on the highest intellectual levels—literary critics, say, or really male novelists—is any admission that those ingrainedly fem.-masc. activities or movements of the reason, which our lifestyle apportions as such and takes for granted—are actually “so-called.”
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