The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  “The trouble is that Mailer sees himself as an existential hero. In America, where action is frowned on among intellectuals, the existential hero would say, ‘The worst thing in the world is boredom. We must create drama by our own actions.’ Mailer creates this excitement, without giving an analysis of why that world is boring and dull. He says, ‘It is boring and dull, but it will be interesting if I inject myself into it.’”

  Existential: it was a Mailer word I was beginning to learn; it explained much of what I had felt about the campaign, its glamour and ambiguity. He was only nineteen, the Liberation News man, but the fluency of the American young no longer surprised me.

  “What is most important is that when Mailer is defeated it won’t be said that he’s been defeated by the unworkable and corrupt New York City system. It will be said that it was his individual failure. As a critical man he will have lost a marvellous opportunity of exposing the undemocratic nature of American politics.”

  It was easy to see why Banning didn’t want him around. Just then, though, the Liberation News man very badly wanted to see Banning: he had forgotten a roll of exposed film in the campaign car.

  We ran into one of the TV cameramen. I asked him how he assessed the day’s campaigning.

  “Oh, we’ll make it look bigger.”

  “Is that official policy?” the man from Liberation News asked.

  “We make everything bigger.”

  Outside the restaurant—Mailer having a slow lunch inside—we saw Banning, brisk and businesslike. His beard barely lifted; he ignored us.

  “He hates me,” the man from Liberation News said, and looked down at his soft suede boots.

  I wanted company back to Manhattan. I gave the man from Liberation News some of my notes and persuaded him to forget his exposed film. The train was full of boys and girls, red from the beach. Everyone in the Mailer campaign spoke of the sickness of the society. But to the visitor no city appeared richer in pleasure, and more organized for it. And Mailer’s trip to the races made a three-column spread, with a photograph, in the New York Times: that was the reality of our afternoon excursion.

  “THE THING about this campaign,” the girl in headquarters said, “is that it’s fantastically seductive.” She was twenty-four, thin, with a sharp little nose. “These boys here on the campaign are all like Norman. They have the same tremendous ego and this makes them fantastic to be with. They’re so fantastically alive every minute. Hardly anybody else is.” She herself came from New Jersey. “I had to leave because I was like a freak there. I am like”—she sighed, and her eyes widened behind her tinted granny glasses—“well, a socialist.” After the campaign she was going to do some summer work for GI Resistance. “It’ll be idealistic to say it’s because I have a brother in Vietnam. It’s more like, well, being addicted.”

  “I don’t know how the whole concept of doing your own thing became so sacred,” Banning said when the campaign was over. “I don’t know whether it’s American or just youthful. I know how vicious the establishment is. I am twenty thousand dollars in debt—well, say fifteen thousand. But maybe I’m not as disillusioned as everybody else. Maybe everybody is uptight. Notice the difference between the Kennedy kids we had and the McCarthy kids. The Kennedy people want to win. The McCarthy-oriented types are addicted not just to lost causes but to a concept of lost causes. They just want to make a statement and stand around being right. ‘I know what is wrong, I’m noble.’ This I don’t buy.”

  McCarthy types, Kennedy types, the New Left, the addicted, the Mailer-glamoured, the election-glamoured (bullhorns, loudspeaker cars, sticky labels): even with the heroic pattern-figure of Mailer, the wonder was that the campaign held together and looked professional, that the strains didn’t show more.

  The reporters came and went. The press became better and better. Dustin, who was in charge of Advance, told me that the article by the agency girl had come out. “They must have cut a lot,” he said. There were occasional muted reports of internal trouble: a public outburst because of some carelessly displayed posters; an amateur art show not opened, Mailer’s wife going instead to speak the nice words Mailer couldn’t bring himself to speak. Then Banning lost his beard.

  • • •

  THE GLOOMIEST day in headquarters was the Friday before the election. A Harlem rally had been planned for that day. But Clarence 27x Smith, a Black Muslim of some local renown, was shot dead in a lift in the morning (New York was always organized for drama, as it was for pleasure), and Mailer cancelled the rally. In headquarters they felt that Mailer had let them down; the show ought to have gone on. The cast and band of Hair, I was told, had been recruited and were game; black bodyguards could have been hired for a hundred dollars.

  “Don’t ask Banning too many questions,” I was told. “He’ll hit you like Norman.”

  Banning, tie-less, jacketless, with a beer-can, was dejected and acting tough. He said there was “an atmosphere of political death” over the campaign. I asked for the schedule. He mimicked my pronunciation. “Stick around,” he said. “You’ll hear.” It struck me for the first time that he would have a good microphone voice.

  “It isn’t all Norman,” the girl from New Jersey said. “Half of this is that it’s all going to end on Tuesday and everybody on the campaign’s got to go back to not having power. Everything else is going to go on. This stops on June 17, this closeness and intimacy with people who have become your whole life. And these boys, they fight with Norman, but they go to the meetings. And when Norman gets up there and tells it like it is, they all dissolve and you can tell it in their eyes. It’s why they come the next day.”

  Banning wasn’t in the office the next day. But Dustin and his wife and some others were, and after lunch we drove through the rain to Macy’s department store, where—but no one was sure—Mailer was campaigning among the shoppers. All we saw from the car were some very young volunteers offering damp leaflets; they didn’t know where Mailer was.

  He and Mrs. Mailer were inside the store, as it turned out, until the guard asked them to campaign outside.

  When we walked round the block we found them. Girl volunteers were asking people, “Have you met Mr. Mailer?” And the Mailers were shaking hands. Mailer looked worn, preoccupied, working only with his eyes; his hair, cut shorter, looked greyer. Mrs. Mailer was as composed as always. “I am an actress,” she said later. “This is the biggest audience I’ve played to.” A blind man stood beside Mailer, rattling his coins in a green cup and tapping his stick; his eyelids were sealed over hollow sockets so that his face, without expression, was like a dummy’s.

  It was an extraordinary, smiling scene. The Mailers smiled; the people whose hands had been shaken smiled, and they waited, smiling, to see others have their turn. The girl volunteers smiled; we were all smiling.

  “It’s good,” Dustin said, his gloom vanished. “We could win.” Dustin had been a Kennedy man.

  Mailer, getting into the car, called Dustin over. A girl volunteer turned on me with big eyes. “I’m crazy!” A minute ago she had been demure. “I love him! I’ve read all his books. This is the first time I’ve seen him! I love him!” She sat down hard on the table with the campaign buttons. “I’m crazy!”

  Dustin came back, exultant. “He wants a motorcade.” Dustin liked motorcades.

  Later, at the Sullivan Street fair—old brick houses with fire-escapes, the street muddy and littered, remote Italian women sitting with bandaged ankles and legs beside food-stalls and toystalls, sausages grilling over charcoal—Dustin and Mailer talked again.

  “Look at them,” Dustin’s wife said. “Don’t you think they look a little alike, with the hair?”

  ON MONDAY, at the last press conference, Mailer bounced back to form after a tired, constricted TV appearance the previous day. Banning was there, friendly again, in a suit, stage-managing again. The four motorcade cars were waiting outside. A German producer said, “The film in Germany is finished. It was shown Saturday night.” A girl with a f
oreign accent was told that press seats were reserved for the New York City press. Mailer, Mrs. Mailer and Breslin sat in the third car. Banning was in the loudspeaker car at the front; he was to do the talking.

  “Mailer-Breslin and the fifty-first state. You’ve had the rest. Choose the best.”

  It was the motorcade slogan. The story was that it had been suggested to Mailer by a Negro. Banning didn’t like it, but he was speaking it with conviction. On Broadway there were some waves and shouts. But Harlem, with its sullen privacies, where garishness and dereliction appeared one and indivisible, was silent. In the South Bronx the advertisements were in Spanish; and Banning—a new talent revealed—spoke in Spanish: “… dos coches atrás, en el carro abierto …” His accent was good. But there was no response from the pavements. The motorcade slowed down in the traffic, merged into it.

  Mailer signalled from the open car. Banning ran to confer, then came to us. “OK, we’ll meet up at 50th Street and Sixth Avenue, in front of the Time-Life Building. We’re just going to shake hands and cut the horse-shit with the motorcade.” Banning hadn’t liked the idea of the motorcade. The motorcade broke up; and in silence, without loudspeakers, the cars raced separately back to Manhattan.

  The reception outside the Time-Life building was very good. Mailer, with his vision of New York as two cities, spoke passionately for the disadvantaged. But his best audience was always the middle-class, the educated, the bohemian, the people who held him in awe.

  THEY HAD LAID IN THE BEER IN HEADQUARTERS. The TV cameras and monitors had been installed. The last partition had gone, and at the end of the room they had built a platform, against a wall decorated with the campaign posters (already souvenirs, already being taken away by collectors). The mood was good. It was a victory mood, and victory meant not coming last.

  “It’s been important to me,” Banning said, summing up the campaign. “Mailer’s obviously going to be important to American history. He’ll either be a force for enormous destruction or he’ll be one of the great builders. He clearly is going to do something more than write The Armies of the Night.”

  In the evening the hall began filling up: the media people (the TV reporters grave, aware of the envy of the young), the volunteers from the boroughs, a number of strays. There was a girl in half-Mexican, half-Hindu hippy costume sitting on the floor before a red candle. She had missed the point; she had also underestimated the crowd. The girl from New Jersey turned up with a Negro. Banning, dashing and unexpected in a pale-blue silk neckscarf, stood on the platform, like an actor in the lights, and repeatedly called for order. The results began to come in. They were as expected. Mailer was running above Congressman Scheuer, with 5 to 6 per cent of the votes; Breslin was doing even better in his contest for the Presidency of the Council: he was getting 10 per cent. There was applause and stamping.

  Banning said that the building would collapse. “If you have the death wish, don’t wish it on other people.”

  They were rebels, and the moment was high. But they were also Americans, careful of the self in every way, never reckless. They began to go.

  At about midnight Mailer, Mrs. Mailer and Breslin came, cameras and lights preceding them. Through handshakes they walked to the platform.

  “We can hardly claim victory,” Mailer said. It was their joke; victory was what they were celebrating. “Listen. You’ve been terrific. We’ve run further on less. We’ve spent one-tenth of what Wagner spent. I’ve got 5 per cent of the vote; he’s got 30. So we’ve done twice as well as he.” He was mischievous, the hero restored to his followers. Banning stood beside me, dissolving; it was as the girl from New Jersey had said.

  The TV lights heightened colour, deepening the beauty of Mrs. Mailer. Mailer’s eyes showed as the clearest blue. The posters on the wall glowed. It was a narrow hall, the platform central, and on the monitor screens the scene was like something out of a well-organized film. So that this last moment of glamour linked to that other, on the steps of the Old Treasury Building in Wall Street.

  One notice hadn’t been forgotten. Anyone interested in GI Resistance work this summer please sign name … There had been four signatures in the afternoon; now the sheet was full.

  I HAD LUNCH with Mailer a week later. He had spent a few days in Cape Cod; he had been to the Frazier-Quarry fight the evening before; he was editing a film that day; he would soon have to start working on his moon shot articles. “That’s going to be a strange assignment. The astronauts won’t talk to me. They’re writing their own book.” His writer’s life was catching up with him again.

  Politics seemed far away. But he was sensitive to the charge that he had split the liberal vote and helped the cause of the backlash. He thought that many of the people who had voted for him wouldn’t have otherwise voted. He didn’t think he had done well enough; he had lost some votes in the last week; not enough people had been reached. It astonished him that people who had shaken his hand and had been friendly hadn’t voted for him.

  He said again that, becoming a politician, he had become duller. But he understood now that politicians were serious when they spoke of “service.” A politician had to serve, had always to give himself, to his supporters, to the public. It was his weakness, for instance, that he couldn’t answer when people asked him whether he would clear their streets of garbage. He remained loyal to his ideas—the fifty-first state, power to the neighbourhoods—but he thought that perhaps another candidate, even someone very dull, might have done better politically with them.

  Dull: it was the recurring word. It was as though, during the campaign, Mailer had redefined his writer’s role by negatives. He couldn’t assess the value of the campaign. “If you don’t win, you change very little.” Perhaps some of the ideas would survive: time alone would show. “Or it might just be a curiosity. Perhaps four years from now, at the next election, someone might say, ‘Remember when that writer ran for Mayor?’”

  1969

  Steinbeck in Monterey

  A WRITER is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.

  Cannery Row in Monterey, the one John Steinbeck wrote about, disfigures a mile of pretty Californian coastline. The canneries used to can sardines; but the sardines began to disappear from Monterey Bay not long after Steinbeck published his book in 1945; and today all but one of the canneries have closed down. The cannery buildings remain, where they have not been destroyed by fire: white corrugated-iron buildings, as squat and plain as warehouses, backing out into the sea over a low cliff, braced by timber and tons of concrete which now only blasting can remove. Some are abandoned and show broken windows; some are warehouses; some have been converted into restaurants, boutiques, gift-shops.

  The old Row has gone: the stink of fish and fish-fertilizer, the cutters and packers who could work up to sixteen hours a day when a catch was in, the winos, the derelicts who slept in pipes in empty lots, the whores. It was what Steinbeck wrote about but transmuted. What remains is like a folk-memory of community, wine, sex and talk. The tourists come for the memory. The name, Cannery Row, was made official in 1958, long after the sardine went away; before that it was Ocean View Avenue. And today, in Ring’s Café next door to the Steinbeck Theatre in Steinbeck Circle—the whole complex on the site of a former cannery—the new shop-keepers and business people of the Row are meeting to talk about what they might do to get the tourists in in 1970.

  Nineteen seventy is the bicentennial of the founding of Monterey by the Spaniards. Some people in Ring’s remember the centennial of 1947; that was the centennial of the American seizure. The main street of Monterey (today a wasteland, awaiting renewal) was painted gold and there was dancing in the streets. History in the Monterey Peninsula is this sort of fun. Steinbeck wrote angrily of Indian servitude and American land-grabbing; but there is a mixed-up myth here of a gay and gracious Mexican past, of heroic Spanish missionary endeavour, and numerous Indian slaves, all converts, happily accepting the whip for religious misdemeanou
rs. In the dereliction of Monterey every adobe from Mexican times is preserved and labelled; there is even a movement to have the first Spanish missionary, “the first Californian,” canonized. The American seizure is celebrated on the Fourth of July with a costume pageant devised by the Navy League and the Monterey History and Art Association: old-time señoritas and Yankees listening companionably to the proclamation of annexation.

  Ring’s Café has been in Monterey for some time, but on the Row for just over a year. Like many new places on the Row, Ring’s honours the fishing past with a fishing net in its windows and wooden fish caught in the net. The proprietor is an old advertising man; from his café he publishes The Monterey Foghorn, a four-page satirical sheet whose cause is Cannery Row, gaiety and youth. Ring’s offers “beer, skittles and vittles”; it says it is “under no management” and has “the world’s cuisiest cuisine.” There are paintings; the Peninsula is full of artists. At the top of the inner wall a trompe-l’œil painting continues the braced timber ceiling of the cannery. And above the bar, among other posters, is one advertising “Doc’s Birthday.”

  This was an event that Ring’s staged last year, to bring to life and perhaps to perpetuate something in the book. “Doc” was the marine biologist in Cannery Row, the educated man around whom the others idled. Mack and the boys gave a party for Doc’s birthday, and the party went predictably wild. Doc was a real person on the Row, Doc Ricketts; Cannery Row is dedicated to him. Steinbeck lent him money to buy the low unpainted wooden lab which is squashed between two cannery buildings and will now, as a men’s club, be preserved. In 1948 a Southern Pacific locomotive ran into Doc’s motorcar one evening on the level-crossing just above the Row, and Doc was killed. On the bar of Ring’s, below glass, is a large photograph of the accident: Doc on a stretcher in the grass, the wrecked Ford, the locomotive, the crowd.

  Fact, fiction, folk-lore, death, gaiety, homage: it is unsettling. But it is how myth is made. Doc as the tallest “character” on the Row: it is as unquestioned now as the myth of gaiety. No one in Ring’s can say why Doc was such a character. He was nice to everybody, they say; he drank a lot; he liked the girls. It is the book, of course, and Steinbeck. But the book itself recedes.