Nonconformity, Page 2

  What Kelly is struggling to say, from “a professional, artistic point of view,” is that the chief thing is not to be seen in shabby company. Like Kafka’s advocate, he feels that “the only sensible thing was to adapt oneself to existing conditions.… One’s own interests would be immeasurably injured by attracting the attention of the ever-vengeful officials. Anything rather than that!”21 To be, indeed, precisely the man Fitzgerald feigned so mordantly to admire, one of those who say “business is business” and “I’m not the person to see about that.” For Fitzgerald himself became so submerged in the waters that have no shore that he had at last in anguish and bewilderment to ask why he had “become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”22

  Thinking of Melville, of Whitman and Jack London and Stephen Crane, Bierce and Sandburg and Mark Twain, it would seem there is no way of becoming a serious writer in the States without keeping shabby company. Thinking of Poe and Fitzgerald, Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay, Lafcadio Hearn and George Sterling,23 it would seem there is no way of becoming such a writer without becoming a victim.

  The flabbiness and complacency of American writing at the very moment when the Italians and the French have so much sinew and fire can be accounted for, in part, by this same scorn of shabby company. Our practice of specializing our lives to let each man be his own department, safe from the beetles and the rain, is what is really meant by “a professional, artistic point of view.” For it is not a point of view at all, but only a camouflaged hope that each man may be an island sufficient to himself. Thus may one avoid being brushed, even perhaps bruised, by the people who live on that shabby back street where nearly all humanity now lives.

  A view that betrays an uneasy dread of other men’s lives; a terror, bone-deep yet unadmitted, of the living moment. Nothing could be more alien to our Stateside lives than Gide’s belief that every instant is precious because, in each, eternity is mirrored.24 To our businessman’s morality such a view is so repugnant it must be declared out of bounds; for it mocks the faith of all true believers that no virtues are greater than thrift, self-preservation and piety.

  “If your God is forgetful of your life,” the novelist Jean-Baptiste Rossi puts it better than Gide, “keep your life. Your life is all that matters.” All that matters among the things of man’s own earth. Where the life that does no more than maintain itself, denies itself.

  The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.

  The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York. If he is already there, he will go to work for Fleur Cowles.25 We feel it to be only one more fact of our matter-of-fact morality that birds of a feather ought to flock together. Thus, out of a conviction that every man should be his own department we have specialized ourselves into a condition where every man is actually his own broom closet.

  That “that sort of thing” is not the novelist’s job is true only in so far as it is the novelist’s primary consideration to be clean-shaven and well-pressed with the brass of all his little buttons sparkling. Mr. Yerby reduced the art of writing to a ballroom game of seeing who can serve the heaviest tipper the fastest. Like any hotel manager, he demands that writers disregard what is true in the world, and real, in order to dedicate their lives to the guests. What a bellhop here was lost to the world.

  No book was ever worth the writing that wasn’t done with the attitude that “this ain’t what you rung for, Jack—but it’s what you’re damned well getting.” “A novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling,” Conrad tells us.26 Not to say that an American writer cannot keep his faith that staying warm and dry-shod is the main thing, and still write honestly. Who can say that the works of Clarence Budington Kelland27 are anything but honest?

  A line of reasoning that ought to bring an Academy Award this year to Zsa-Zsa Gabor and a Nobel Prize for Literature to Louis Bromfield. How do you know you don’t have talent till you try? Openings in a big new field for young people with pleasing personalities. Send for our Aptitude Test. Take our short easy course. Learn while you earn. You too can be an artist and go to parties with the swells.

  “By a long, immense and reasoned derangement of the senses,” Rimbaud decided, “the poet makes himself a seer. By seeking in himself all forms of love, pain and madness, by turning himself into the great sick man, the great criminal, the great accursed, the poet reaches the unknown; and if, maddened, he should end by losing understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them.”28

  “What I get out of it financially doesn’t come under consideration at all,” Kelly assures us. “I write what I feel and think.” Obsession remains the price of creation and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing more creative than The Foxes of Harrow or Mrs. Parkington.29

  So obsessed, he will perceive that the true shore lies against the tides of his own time. If he is not to betray himself he will have to move against that current. Even though aware that the hour he’ll find land will be that one when the waters toss his blue and bloated carcass up. Perhaps upon those very sands where those who play the safer game are drinking Cuba libres under beach umbrellas, murmuring contentedly, “I’m sorry, but I’m not the person to see about that” and “business is business.”

  … A novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a firearm; many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either one or the other. Of him from whose armory of phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art, I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large forgiveness at men’s ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social status, even their professions.… I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature the strength of his imagination among the things of this earth.…

  —Joseph Conrad,

  from an essay entitled “Books”

  190530

  IV.

  SUMMER ON SEVENTY-FIRST STREET, when I was a Southside sprout, was blue as peace. The cross above St. Columbanus caught the light of a holier daybreak than ours while the wan gas-flares still wavered. Then the bells of early mass rang out, for our own morning had lightened the alleys at last.

  And long after the twilight’s last lamplighter had passed, ladder across his handlebars and gas-torch against his shoulder, somebody else’s twilight burned on behind that cross. The light that lingered, the light that held, belonged to somebody else’s night. Somebody else’s somebody else, who ran daybreak and evening too.

  But not the hours that ran between. The wan little flares that the lamplighter left, the flares that tried all night to shine—then faltered and flicked out one by one—belonged to us like the alleys.

  Wherever they led, the alleys were ours, and all the
ir littered spoils. Between that early alien light and that twilight like a spell, we patrolled those battleways bearing gas-grenades made of garbage wrapped tightly in the tricolors of the Saturday Evening Blade.31 We had had enough of peace.

  Beside the armored schoolyard, behind the guarded bars, we tracked the treacherous Hun. Keeping one eye peeled for the barbarous Turk as well. Our bayonets were hewed from sunflower stalks: we had had enough of peace. Now we were out for blood. And on the heights of the Rock Island tracks we lost Chateau-Thierry to six anemic Swedes. (The solitary triumph of modern Swedish arms.) When we refilled the grenades from the deepest cans and crept out to the counterattack, one of us fastened a rusty wire onto an empty tomato can, pulled it through the schoolyard fence and hooked it onto a grapefruit tin: the field telephone had been invented at last.

  What’s more, it worked. By lying prostrate you could communicate with the courier on the other side of the fence and still stay out of the line of fire. You could, of course, have stood up and told him over the wood what you had in mind. You might, for example, have suggested, “Peace, it’s wonderful”—but we were sick to death of peace. And lying prostrate was infinitely more strategic.

  The accurate ear and the retentive memory of such a writer as James T. Farrell constitute a kind of literary field-telephone, a two-party line possessing the added advantage of getting a message down straight without getting smacked in the teeth with a hatful of slops. A method based on the judicious non-com’s understanding that if you can keep from getting hit long enough, you’ll still be passing water when the war is done. As well as upon the sensible novelist’s premise that if you can nail your literary fences high enough and get enough code down behind them fast enough, the end result must be art.

  It must be art because it pays so well.

  Where the morning-report school succeeds is in its stenographic fidelity. Where it fails is in affording the breath of life to its morning reports.

  Thus while Scott Fitzgerald’s people possess considerably more standup vitality than those you met last night at your analyst’s house-party, Farrell’s, like inkblots arranged by Rorschach, own even less. Flat as the print, prostrate as one of his own shattered infinitives, Studs Lonigan no longer requires serious criticism. The most he can bear by now is an autopsy.

  What Fitzgerald risked, that the field-telephone school dares not, was an emotional sharing of the lives he recorded. “I have asked a lot of my emotions,” he once took mournful count, “—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up there with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.”32

  But he wasn’t like you or me, or James T. Farrell, or anybody. He stood on the precipitous edge of exhaustion, a man who had spent himself, by coins of pity and love and pride, into spiritual bankruptcy—“I only wanted absolute quiet to think out … why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”33

  Infected as younger writers are today by the current passion for caution in everything, the reportorial method affords an emotional detachment that makes a virtue of stenography. The advantage of replacing the complexity and the pain of the living experience with the painless and simple process of giving dictation has become sufficiently plain to the sensible writer. For by this method one could report on the overburdened without identifying himself with them. One could preserve a sense of superiority to the dead and the overburdened. A surefire means, it seemed, wherewith to gain one’s art without losing one’s life.

  Yet time’s terrible eraser sweeps the board swiftly of the names of those who succeeded, like Tarkington,34 by never taking the risk of failure. But out of the shambles that he made of his personal life, Fitzgerald’s art triumphed. Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them.

  And so died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin. “… The natural state of the sentient adult,” he wrote, “is a qualified unhappiness.”35

  The price had been higher than Kipling’s.

  One harassed and despairing night I packed a briefcase and went off a thousand miles to think it over. I took a dollar room in a drab little town where I knew no one and sunk all the money I had with me in a stock of potted meat, crackers and apples. But don’t let me suggest that the change from a rather overstuffed world to a comparative asceticism was any Research Magnificent—I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

  Does this seem a fine distinction? It isn’t: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. I mention these because they are the men best known to us all.…

  My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was very distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war.… I had stood by while one famous contemporary of mine played with the idea of the Big Out for half a year; I had watched when another, equally eminent, spent months in an asylum unable to endure any contact with his fellow-men. And of those who had given up and passed on I could list a score.

  This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one.… A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person—to be kind, just or generous.…

  I have now at last become a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be became such a burden that I have “cut him loose”…. Let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods. A writer need have no such ideals unless he makes them for himself, and this one has quit.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald,

  “Handle with Care,” autobiographical fragment in The Crack-Up April, 193636

  V.

  NOT THAT FITZGERALD OR ANYone else ever forged a novel out of nothing but pity and personal recklessness. You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. Compassion is all to the good, but vindictiveness is the verity Faulkner forgot: the organic force in every creative effort, from the poetry of Villon to the Brinks Express Robbery, that gives shape and color to all our dreams.

  “Vice, as vice, is bad and unwanted,” the French light-heavyweight philosopher, Carpentier, once philosophized, “but there must be deep down in the makeup of every fighter a kind of viciousness. Wells (Bombardier Wells) had me in extremis but he failed to see red.” Marking the only known instance of a fighter speaking Latin to the working press, as well as the only known instance of an English heavyweight having anyone on earth in extremis.

  Leo Durocher, a utility infielder with a resonant baritone, put it somewhat less literally: “I don’t get this stuff about sportsmanship. You play to win, don’t you? Say I’m playing short and Mother is on first and the batter singles to right. Mother comes fast around second with the winning run—Mother will have to go down. I’ll help her up, dust her off and say ‘Mom, I’m sorry, but it was an accident’—but she won
’t of scored. Nobody asks how you happened to lose. All they want to know is did you win. If I’m spitting at a crack in the wall for nickels I still want to win. Anybody can come in second. Nice guys finish last.”37

  A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even.

  And, of course, neither will. Whether or not either has actually been robbed by society is beside the point. A man so convinced, however illogically, will endure the agonies of the damned to get his own back. For if he felt he had nothing coming he’d be out of business, as strong-armer or poet, that same day.

  If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either. “The artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed,” Degas agreed in essence with Durocher.

  In the more meaningful writing, as in the defter sort of jack-rolling, this is either candid or concealed. Candid as in Céline, Genet or Dorothy Parker, concealed as in Koestler, Richard Wright or Mickey Spillane. And in the very best writing the one becomes a complete sublimation of the other.

  “Even then,” Dostoevsky’s underground man recalls, “I carried this hole in the floor of my heart. I was terribly afraid to be seen and recognized.”38