I do not know that one can judge him. His first virtues are an appetite for life and an animal sense of who has the power, and maybe it would have been worse for Jones to deny himself. So he spent years hobnobbing with gentlemanly shits and half-assed operators and some of it had to rub off on him, especially since he had no art for living with his weaknesses, and a blind vanity which locked him out of his faults and took him on a long trip away from anyone whose mind could see into his holes.
The debacle of Some Came Running is, however, more of Scribner’s fault than his own. They handled him like poltroons. There was no one in the house who had guts enough to say that Some Came Running was a washerwoman at twelve hundred pages, and could be fair at four hundred. So a little of Jones’s very best writing was lost in the dreary wastes and tiresome egotisms of his most accurate if caterpillarish portrait of the Midwest.
Next came The Pistol, a dud. More vanity. The God of Sir Jones looking for his nose and wondering about applause.
Yet Jones could do ten bad novels and I would never write him off, not even if it seemed medically evident he had pickled his brain in the gin. For Jones, like a bull, is most dangerous when almost dead, and with a rebel whiff of self-respect all hell might break loose. If Jones stops trying to be the first novelist to end as a multimillionaire; if he gives up the lust to measure his talent by the money he makes; if he dares not to castrate his hatred of society with a literary politician’s assy cultivation of it, then I would have to root for him because he may have been born to write a great novel.
So may William Styron have been born, only I wonder if anyone who gets to know him well could wish him on his way. I will try to be fair about his talent, but I do not know if I can, because I must speak against the bias of finding him not nearly as big as he ought to be.
Styron wrote the prettiest novel of our generation. Lie Down in Darkness has beauty at its best, is almost never sentimental, even has whispers of near-genius as the work of a twenty-three-year-old. It would have been the best novel of our generation if it had not lacked three qualities: Styron was not near to creating a man who could move on his feet, his mind was uncorrupted by a new idea, and his book was without evil. There was only Styron’s sense of the tragic: misunderstanding—and that is too small a window to look upon the world we have known.
Since then only a remarkably good short novel, The Long March, has appeared by Styron. But he has been working hard over the years on a second novel, Set This House on Fire, and I hear it is done. If it is at all good, and I expect it is, the reception will be a study in the art of literary advancement. For Styron has spent years oiling every literary lever and power which could help him on his way, and there are medals waiting for him in the mass media. If he has written a book which expresses some real part of his complex and far from pleasant view of the American character, if this new novel should prove to have the bite of a strong and critical consciousness, then one can hardly deny him his avidity as a politician for it is not easy to work many years on a novel which has something hard and new to say without trying to shape the reception of it. But if Styron has compromised his talent, and written what turns out to be the most suitable big book of the last ten years, a literary work which will deal with secondhand experience and all-but-deep proliferation on the smoke of passion and the kiss of death, if he has done no more than fill a cornucopia of fangless perceptions which will please the conservative power and delight the liberal power, offend no one, and prove to be ambitious, traditional, innocuous, artful, and in the middle, breathy and self-indulgent in the beauty of its prose, evocative to the tenderhearted and the reviewers of books, then Styron will receive a ravingly good reception, for the mass media is aching for such a novel like a tout for his horse. He will be made the most important writer of my generation. But how much more potent he will seem to us, his contemporaries and his competitors, if he has had the moral courage to write a book equal to his hatred and therefore able to turn the consciousness of our time, an achievement which is the primary measure of a writer’s size.
Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. He is tart as a grandaunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a small classic. Capote has still given no evidence that he is serious about the deep resources of the novel, and his short stories are too often saccharine. At his worst he has less to say than any good writer I know. I would suspect he hesitates between the attractions of Society, which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and the novel he could write of the gossip column’s real life, a major work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world. Since I have nothing to lose, I hope Truman fries a few of the fancier fish.
Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty, and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollipop. Yet I think he has a large talent. His literary energy is enormous, and he had enough of a wild eye to go along with his instincts and so become the first figure for a new generation. At his best, his love of language has an ecstatic flux. To judge his worth it is better to forget about him as a novelist and see him instead as an action painter or a bard. He has a medieval talent, he is a teller of frantic court tales for a dead king’s ears, and so in the years of James Madison’s Avenue, he has been a pioneer. For a while I worried about him as a force from the political right which could lead Hip into a hole, but I liked him when I met him, more than I would have thought, and felt he was tired, as indeed why should he not be, for he has traveled in a world where the adrenaline devours the blood.
Saul Bellow knows words but writes in a style I find self-willed and unnatural. His rhythms have a twitch. There were some originalities and one or two rich sections to Augie March (which is all I know of his work) but at its worst it was a travelogue for timid intellectuals and so to tell the truth I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist. I do not think he knows anything about people, nor about himself. He has a whacky, almost psychotic lack of responsibility to the situations he creates, and his narrative disproportions are elephantiastical in their anomaly. This judgment is not personal, for we met only once, under easy circumstances, and had a mild conversation which left me neither remembering nor dismembering him as a man.
Since writing the above, I have read his short novel Seize the Day. It is, I think, the first of the cancer novels. Its miserable hero, Tommy Wilhelm, leads a life of such hopeless obstacles to the dreams of gentle love trapped in his flesh, that one would diagnose him as already in a precancerous stage. That Wilhelm bursts into tears and weeps before the bier of a stranger in a funeral parlor, in that surprisingly beautiful ending to Seize the Day, is the first indication for me that Bellow is not altogether hopeless on the highest level. But before he can begin to command the respect he has been given too quickly by the flaccid taste of these years, he must first give evidence, as must Styron, that he can write about men who have the lust to struggle with the history about them, for it is not demanding to write about characters considerably more defeated than oneself since the writer’s ego is rarely in danger of being punished by too much self-perception, and compassion can be poured over one’s work like cream from a pitcher.
If one does not request an apocalyptic possibility for literature, then I have been needlessly severe on Bellow, for his work does no obvious harm, but I think one must not be easy on art which tries for less than it can manage, or in the example of Augie March, does something worse, muddles the real and the false in such ambitious copulation that the mind of the reader is debauched. Augie is an impossible character, and his adventures could never have happened, for he is too timid a man ever to have moused into more than one or two cruel corners of the world. But there it is: to simulate a major mood, Bellow must create a world which has none of the psych
ic iron of society, none of the facts and nuance of that social machine which is geared to catch all but the most adept of adventurers by weakness and need.
When and if I come to read Henderson the Rain King, let me hope I do not feel the critic’s vested interest to keep a banished writer in limbo, for I sense uneasily that without reading it, I have already the beginnings of a negative evaluation for it since I doubt that I would believe in Henderson as a hero.
Algren has something which is all his own. I respect him for staying a radical, yet I do not feel close to his work. Probably it is too different from my own. If I say that I do not think he will ever do a major work until he overcomes his specialty—that ghoulish and weirdly sentimental sense of humor which is pure Algren and so skitters him away from the eye of his meanings—well, I offer this without the confidence that I see into him. Of all the writers I know, he is the Grand Odd-Ball. Once he took me to a lineup in Chicago, and I could have sworn the police and the talent on the line had read The Man with the Golden Arm for they caught the book perfectly, those cops and those crooks, they were imitating Algren. Yet all the while Nelson laughed like a mad tourist from Squaresville who was hearing these things for the first time.
Salinger is everyone’s favorite. I seem to be alone in finding him no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school. What he can do, he does well, and it is his, but it is finally not very lively to live on a campus where bully-muscle always beats those who feel but feel weak. I cannot see Salinger soon emerging onto the battleground of a major novel.
Of course, this opinion may come from nothing more graceful than envy. Salinger has had the wisdom to choose subjects which are comfortable, and I most certainly have not, but since the world is now in a state of acute discomfort, I do not know that his wisdom is honorable.
Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square (Port Moresby), the call of the orgy, the end of civilization; he invited all of us to these themes a few years ago, and he wrote one short story, “Pages from Cold Point,” a seduction of a father by a son, which is one of the best short stories ever written by anyone. Yet I am not ready to think of Bowles as a major novelist—his characters are without life, and one does not feel that the author ever lived with them. He does not love them and certainly he does not hate them—he is as bored with his characters as they are bored with each other, and this boredom, the breath of Bowles’s work, is not the boredom of the world raised to the cool relations of art, but rather is a miasma from the author. One can never disregard Paul Bowles, however, for whatever his lacks, his themes have been adventurous and pure.
Vance Bourjaily is an old acquaintance and upon occasion we are friends. I thought his first two novels were insignificant, and it seemed to me he stayed in existence because of really nice gifts as a politician. (Since very few people in the literary world have any taste—they are much too tense with fashion—the virtue of being a good literary politician is that one can promote one’s own fashion, be put in vogue, and so relax the bite of the snob to the point where he or she can open the mouth and sup upon the message.) But I never understood Bourjaily because I kept expecting him to go Madison Avenue, I was certain he would sell out sooner or later. Instead he did the opposite, wrote a novel called The Violated, which is a good long honest novel filled with an easy sense of life and detail about pieces and parts of my generation, a difficult book to do, and Bourjaily did it with grace, and had a few things to say. He is the first of my crowd to have taken a major step forward, and if his next novel is as superior to The Violated as was The Violated to his early work, he could end up being champion for a while. But I doubt if he could hold the title in a strong field, for his taint is to be cute.
Chandler Brossard is a mean pricky guy who’s been around, and he’d have been happier as a surgeon than a novelist, but he is original, and parts I read of The Bold Saboteurs were sufficiently interesting for me to put the book away—it was a little too close to some of my own notions. Brossard has that deep distaste for weakness which gives work a cold poetry. I like him as a man but I think there are too many things he does not understand; in common with many of us he is too vain about his strengths, too blind to his lacks, and since he has not had the kind of recognition he wanted and maybe deserved, I get the feeling he has temporarily lost enthusiasm for the race. Yet it would not surprise me if he appeared with a major work in ten or fifteen years, or however long it takes for the rest of the world to become as real to him as Chandler Brossard.
Something of the same may be said of Gore Vidal. He is one of the few novelists I know who has a good formal mind. We spent an hour once talking about my play of The Deer Park, and it was the best criticism I ever received from one of my competitors—incisive, detached, with a fine nose for what was slack in the play or insufficiently developed. The best of it was that he took my play on its own terms and criticized it in context rather than wasting our mutual hour in a set of artillery and counterbattery barrages about the high aesthetic of the theatre. Since his remarks were helpful to my play, and he knew they would improve the work, I thought it generous of him and more than decent. Since then I have seen sides of him I thought not so nice, and I do not know that one could call him a friend. I mention this not to comment on Vidal’s character but to correct the balance—I do not feel that I owe him a favor, and so my comments on his work may be considered more or less objective.
Not that I have the definitive word to say. While the considerable body of his work (the largest of my generation) still presents no single novel which is more successful than not (at least in those of his novels which I’ve read), he has developed a variety of styles, and he has continued to experiment. In his essays, where he is at his best, he often brings a brave and cultivated wit to the pomades of the national suet. But in his fiction it seems difficult for him to create a landscape which is inhabited by people. At his worst he becomes his own jailer and is imprisoned in the recessive nuances of narcissistic explorations which do not go deep enough into himself, and so end as gestures and postures. But if Vidal does not lose his will, he could still be most important, for he has the first requirement of an interesting writer—one cannot predict his direction. Still I cannot resist suggesting that he is in need of a wound which would turn the prides of his detachment into new perception.
I’ve read two stories by Anatole Broyard. They are each first-rate, and I would buy a novel by him the day it appeared.
One writer who was not properly applauded was Myron Kaufmann, whose Remember Me to God was one of the most honest novels written since the war. Kaufmann is not a fine writer, and his work is perhaps too solid, too sober, and too lacking in innovation to attract quick attention, but he had more to say about the deadening of individuality in the American Jew than anyone I can remember, and of the novels about Jews which I have read, his is easily the best since Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch. Kaufmann’s talents as a realist are so complete, and his eye for detail is so sharp, that he is bound to become important if he can amass a body of work against the obstacle of writing in a time whose first love is self-deception.
Calder Willingham is a clown with the bite of a ferret, and he suffers from the misapprehension that he is a mastermind. He has written what may be the funniest dialogue of our time, and if Geraldine Bradshaw, his second novel, had been half as long, it would have been the best short novel any of us did. But it is hard to bet on Calder, for if he ever grows up, where will he go? He lacks ideas, and is as indulgent to his shortcomings as a fat old lady to her Pekingese. This said, it must also be admitted that he is one of the few writers who can make an evening, and once he put me down with the economy of a Zen master. I had just finished Natural Child, and happened to run into him at the White Horse Tavern. “Calder,” I said, coming on like Max Lerner, “I’d like to talk to you about your book. I liked parts of it and didn’t like other parts.”
“Nawmin,” said Calder. “Could you lend
me two bucks? I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
That Ralph Ellison is very good is dull to say. He is essentially a hateful writer: when the line of his satire is pure, he writes so perfectly that one can never forget the experience of reading him—it is like holding a live electric wire in one’s hand. But Ellison’s mind, fine and icy, tuned to the pitch of a major novelist’s madness, is not always adequate to mastering the forms of rage, horror, and disgust which his eyes have presented to his experience, and so he is forever tumbling from the heights of pure satire into the nets of a murderously depressed clown, and Invisible Man insists on a thesis which could not be more absurd, for the Negro is the least invisible of all people in America. (That the white does not see each Negro as an individual is not so significant as Ellison makes it—most whites can no longer see each other at all. Their experience is not as real as the experience of the Negro, and their faces have been deadened in the torture chamber of the overburdened American conscience. They have lost all quick sense of the difficulty of life and its danger, and so they do not have faces the way Negroes have faces—it is rare for a Negro who lives it out to reach the age of twenty without having a face which is a work of art.)
Where Ellison can go, I have no idea. His talent is too exceptional to allow for casual predictions, and if one says that the way for Ellison may be to adventure out into the white world he knows so well by now, and create the more difficult and conceivably more awful invisibility of the white man—well, it is a mistake to write prescriptions for a novelist as gifted as Ellison.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 9