In “The Boarding House,” one of his Rambler essays, Samuel Johnson talks about his search for affordable quarters:
When I first cheapened my lodging, the landlady told me, that she hoped I was not an author, for the lodgers on the first floor had stipulated that the upper rooms should not be occupied by a noisy trade. I very readily promised to give no disturbance to her family, and soon dispatched a bargain on the usual terms.
After a short time as a tenant, Johnson becomes curious about the previous lodgers. He learns of the tailor who complained about the lack of light and skipped out owing a few weeks’ rent; the young woman from the country who paid her rent promptly but had to be dismissed because of frequent visits from a male “cousin”; and a pleasant gentleman who turned out to be a counterfeiter, and who narrowly avoided capture by creeping out the window and across the roof as the local constable thundered at the front door.
At last, a short meagre man, in a tarnish’d waistcoat, desired to see the garret, and when he had stipulated for two long shelves and a larger table, hired it at a low rate. When the affair was completed, he looked round him with great satisfaction, and repeated some words which the woman did not understand. In two days he brought a great box of books, took possession of his room, and lived very inoffensively, except that he frequently disturbed the inhabitants of the next floor by unseasonable noises. He was generally in bed at noon, but from evening to midnight he sometimes talked aloud with great vehemence, sometimes stamped as in rage, sometimes threw down his poker then clattered his chairs, then sat down again in deep thought, and again burst out into loud vociferations; sometimes he would sigh as oppressed with misery, and sometimes shake with convulsive laughter. Whern he encountered any of the family he gave way or bowed, but rarely spoke, except that as he went up the stairs he often repeated,
This habitant th’ aerial regions boast.
hard words, to which his neighbors listened so often, that they learned them without understanding them. What was his employment she did not venture to ask him, but at last heard a printer’s boy inquire for the author.
My landlady was very often advised to beware of this strange man, who, tho’ he was quiet for the present, might perhaps become outrageous in the hot months; but as she was punctually paid, she could not find any sufficient reasons for dismissing him, till one night he convinced her by setting fire to his curtains, that it was not safe to have an author for her inmate.
Jazz great Charles Mingus was always looking for ways to combine words and music, usually in the form of settings for poetry, as with “The Chill of Death” from Let My Children Hear Music, or “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. Late in life, he approached Joni Mitchell about adapting some of T.S. Eliot’s poems — an encounter that led to Mitchell’s album Mingus.
For my money, Mingus’ most perfectly realized fusion of words and jazz was the title track of The Clown, the 1957 album I like to spring on people who’ve never tried Mingus before. (Pithecanthropus Erectus and Mingus Ah Um are also good introductions to this superb American composer.)
Man, there was this clown. And he was a real happy guy, a real happy guy.
He had all these greens and all these yellows and all these oranges bubbling around inside of him, and he had just one thing he wanted in this world. He just wanted to make people laugh – that’s all he wanted out of this world. He was a real happy guy.
Let me tell you about this clown. He used to raise a sweat every night out on that stage, he just wouldn’t stop. That’s how hard he worked. He was tryin’ to make people laugh. He used to have this cute little gimmick where he had a seal follow him up and down a step ladder, blowin’ “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” on a B-flat Sears Roebuck model 1322-A plastic bugle – a real cute act. But they didn’t laugh.
Oh you know, a few little . . . things . . . here and there, but not really. And he was booking out on all these tank towns, playing the Rotary Club and the Kiwanis Club and the American Legion hall, and he just wasn’t making it. And he had all these wonderful things going on inside of him, all these greens and yellows, and all these oranges. He was a real happy guy, and all he wanted to do was make people laugh. That’s all he wanted out of this world, was to make people laugh.
And then something began to grow, something that just wasn’t good began to grow inside of this guy . . .
The music is a bouncy waltz tempo, with a jolly sliding trombone part and overdubbed laughter. The narrator is Jean Shepherd, who in the days before he became the amiable nostalgia-merchant of A Christmas Story was a late-night radio jock whose free-form monologues addressed those he called “night people” — nonconformists and ne’er-do-wells capable of passing among the day people but always longing to break free of the conformist straitjacket. Anyone unfamiliar with Shepherd’s earlier work is in for a shock with this piece.
“Tank town” is a bit of obsolete showbiz slang, from the days when railroad engines would stop to draw water for their boilers from an overhead tank. Small clusters of stores grew up around these stops, simply to cater to people getting off the train and stretching their legs. In other words, a “tank town” was synonymous with Nowheresville — a flyspeck community hardly worth stopping at. An entertainer who played lots of tank towns would have a pretty bleak career.
Mingus had conceived a loose storyline about a clown who only becomes successful after he pulls out a gun and commits suicide in front of an audience. Shepherd, who loved jazz and prided himself on improvising with words the way musicians did with notes, gradually transformed the story during rehearsals into something that was, in a subtle way, even grimmer. Mingus pronounced himself delighted with the result.
You know it’s a funny thing. Something began to trouble this clown . . . you know, little things . . . little things once in a while would happen that would make that crowd begin to move. But they were never the right things.
Like for example that time the seal got sick on the stage, all over the stage, the crowd just . . . just broke up. Little things like that, and they weren’t supposed to be in the act, and they weren’t supposed to be funny. This began to trouble him and this began to bother him, this little thing began to grow inside. All those greens and all those oranges and all those yellows . . . they just weren’t as bright as they used to be. And all he wanted to do was to make that crowd laugh. That’s all he wanted to do.
There was this one night in Dubuque when he was playing this Rotary Club. All these dentists and all these druggists, all these postmen sitting around, and they were a real cold bunch – nothing was happening. He was leaving the stage when he stumbled over his ladder and fell flat on his face, just flat on his face, and he stands up and he’s got this bloody nose and he looks out at the crowd and that crowd is just rollin’ on the floor – he’s knocked ‘em flat out. This begins to trouble him even more. And he sees something – he begins to see something . . . hmmm?
Clowns crop up often enough in Mingus’s work — e.g., “Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid, Too” — to suggest they had a very personal meaning to him. One of the curious things about “The Clown” is that the protagonist is feeling alienated because the audience expects him to do what clowns do — take pratfalls, slip on banana peels, get a blast of seltzer in the face, whatever. But if this clown is a stand-in for any artist, then doing the expected thing is not enough. Despite what he may think, this clown wants to do more than make people laugh. They have to laugh when they’re supposed to, at the things the clown wants them to laugh at.
Even in his nightclub days, Mingus was famously insistent on having the audience’s full attention: he thought nothing of chastising people for talking too loudly during his sets, and on one occasion, when two women kept chattering through the group’s performance, he grabbed a microphone and slammed it on the table in front of them. One of his best albums, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, is recorded as a dream-gig, with Mingus thanking an imaginary nightclub audience for shutting up, not ordering drinks, and staying in their seats. He was also angry, not without justification, at what he saw as second-class treatment — not only for himself as a black man, but also for jazz musicians in general as the popular audience headed in another direction.
And right about here things began to change, but really change. Not the least of which, our clown changed his act. Bought himself a set of football pads, a yellow helmet with red stripes, hired a girl who dropped a five-pound sack of flour on his head every night from maybe twenty feet up. Oh man, what a bit! That just broke them up every night – but not like Dubuque!
And all those colors? All those yellows, all those reds, all those oranges? A lot of gray in there now, a lot of blue. And all he wanted to do was to make this crowd laugh, that’s all he wanted out of this world. They were laughing all right. Not like Dubuque, but . . . they were laughing.
And the dough started to come in, and he was playing the big towns, Chicago, Detroit. . . . And then it was Pittsburgh one night – real fine town, Pittsburgh, you know. About three quarters of the way through his act, a rope broke. Down came the backdrop, right on the back of the neck, and he went flat. And something broke. This was it. It hurt way down deep inside.
He tried to get up. He looked out at the audience and man you should . . . man you should have seen that crowd – they was rollin’ in the aisles! This was bigger than Dubuque!
This was bigger than Dubuque! He really had ‘em going . . .
This was it. This was the last one. This was the last one. This was the last one. He knew now. Man he really knew now. But it was too late. And all he wanted to do was make this crowd laugh – well, they were laughing. But now he knew.
That was the end of the clown. And you should have seen the bookings coming. Man, his agent was on the phone for twenty-four hours. The Palladium . . . MCA . . . William Morris. But it was too late.
He really knew now, He really knew.
He really knew now . . .
William Morris sends regrets.
What did the clown realize in his last moments on earth? What was it that he knew . . . he really knew? That audiences are basically sadistic? That all his artistic striving was meaningless? That success always comes too late? That an artist has to kill himself on stage, every night, and it’s all the same to the audience?
I don’t think Mingus (or Shepherd) believed any of that, though I’m sure the thought crossed their minds more than once. I don’t know if either man ever addressed “The Clown” in an interview. If so, please send e the link. What the clown knew. That’s what I’d like to know.
Santo Domingo summers have their own particular allure. For two months, Santo Domingo slaps the diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carrousels groan under the accumulated weight of that year’s cadenas and paquetes; restaurants, bars, clubs, theatres, malecones, beaches, resorts, hotels, moteles, extra rooms, barrios, colonias, campos, ingenios swarm with quisqueyanos from the world over: from Washington Heights to Roma, from Perth Amboy to Tokyo, from Brijeporr to Amsterdam, from Anchorage to San Juan; it’s one big party; one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateyes, the kids whom certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape—yes, sir, nothing like a Santo Domingo summer, and so for the first time in years Oscar said, My elder spirits have been talking to me, Ma. I think I might go. He was imagining himself in the middle of all that ass-getting, imagining himself in love with an Island girl. (A brother can’t be wrong forever, can he?)
So curious a change in policy was this that even Lola quizzed him about it. You never go to Santo Domingo.
He shrugged. I guess I want to try something new.
One of the best things about Junot Diaz’ novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that it doesn’t read like something that took well over a decade to write. It has the same deceptively light touch and tidal surge of the stories in Drown, his debut collection from last century. When I interviewed him on the occasion of that book, Diaz (a Dominican-American who grew up in Parlin, studied at Rutgers and peppers his work with references that ring plenty of bells for anyone familiar with the Middlesex-Union-Essex corridor) said he actually hated writing short stories. Novels, he said. He preferred novels by a mile.
After reading Oscar Wao, I could see he wasn’t just spouting quotes. Here is the work of a man who benefits from having room to stretch out:
After his initial two weeks on the Island, after he’d got somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up in another country, after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You Do Not Belong, after he’d gone to about ten clubs and, because he couldn’t dance salsa or merengue or bachata, had sat and drunk his Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he’d explained to people a hundred times that he’d been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own on the Malecón, after he’d given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin to get home, after he’d watched shirtless, shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he’d left on his plate at an outdoor café, after the family visited the shack in Baitoa where his moms had been born, after he had taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corncob, after he’d got somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in the capital—the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the beggars, the Pizza Huts, the tígueres selling newspapers at the intersections, the snarl of streets and shacks that were the barrios, the masses of niggers he waded through every day and who ran him over if he stood still, the mind-boggling poverty, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the Friday-night strolls down the Avenida, the mind-boggling poverty—after he’d gone to Boca Chica and Villa Mella, after the relatives berated him for having stayed away so long, after he heard the stories about his father and his mother, after he stopped marvelling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall, after the touched-in-the-head tío who’d been tortured during Balaguer’s reign came over and cried, after he’d swum in the Caribbean, after Tío Rodolfo had got the clap from a puta (Man, his tío cracked, what a pisser! Har-har!), after he’d seen his first Haitians kicked off a guagua because niggers claimed they “smelled,” after he’d nearly gone nuts over all the bellezas he saw, after all the gifts they’d brought had been properly distributed, after he’d brought flowers to his abuela’s grave, after he had diarrhea so bad his mouth watered before each detonation, after he’d visited all the rinky-dink museums in the capital, after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo, after he’d been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy, after the terror and joy of his return subsided, after he settled down in his abuela’s house, the house that the diaspora had built, and resigned himself to a long, dull, quiet summer, after his fantasy of an Island girlfriend caught a quick dicko (who the fuck had he been kidding? he couldn’t dance, he didn’t have loot, he didn’t dress, he wasn’t confident, he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t from Europe, he wasn’t fucking no Island girl), after Lola flew back to the States, Oscar fell in love with a semiretired puta.
When I first encountered Diaz through “Edison, New Jersey,” a story about an alienated young Dominican-American man split between his ethnic roots and his surrealistic day job (delivering and installing pool tables in white suburbia), I was impressed by the sheer readability of his work. That quality is all through Oscar Wao, and it deserves all the praise it’s been getting — including, how about that, a Pulitzer Prize.
Through the good offices of James Marcus I came across these two passages from Martin Amis’ memoir Experience, a work that has a warmth and poignance missing from his fiction:
I see [Saul] Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.
Nice, right? Now this, about the aftermath of a troubling visit at Bellow’s house with Christopher Hitchens, when Amis and Hitchens found themselves helplessly laughing off their tension and anxiety:
But feelings were being mourned: feelings about the first half of life. Youth can perhaps be defined as the illusion of your own durability. The final evaporation of this illusion parches the skin beneath the eyes and makes your hair crackle to the brush. It was over. There would be hell to pay. Dying suns of a certain size perform the alchemist’s nightmare: they turn gold into lead. And there we were, in 1989, heading towards base metal. Transmutation had come to him, and would soon come to me.
The first will be instantly accessible to any serious reader. The second might have more impact for Readers Of A Certain Age right now. Wait a while, then come back to it.
Early geographers had a habit of studding their maps with representations of monsters supposed to exist in the regions they delineated, and my geographical memory works the same way. For elevenyears after D Day, the five-mile stretch of beach under the cliffs between Port-en-Bessin and Pointe du la Percee, on the Channel coast of Normandy, was marked in my mind by a line of American soldiers waist-deep in water and immobilized by fear. Descending arcs of tracers were entering the water around them, an LCT (Landing Craft, Tank) was burning nearby, and they could not bring themselves to move. They seemed as permanently fixed in time and space as those Marines in the statue of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, but the circumstances were different. While the men stood there, the LCIL 88, on which I was a deeply impressed observer, went in one their right and landed its passengers, and then pulled out. That image of the beach, for me, superseded pleasant earlier memories of the same strip of coast. Prior to 1944 I had visualized the water there as blue under a summer sun, as it had looked to me in 1926, when i strolled along the tops of the cliffs behind it. After 1944, I remembered it as gray, except for the lines of the tracers, and disquietingly narrow between the LCIL 88 and the beach.A.J. Liebling, “The Men in the Water,” Normandy Revisited
The Library of America has just issued a collection of A.J. Liebling’s World War II reportage, originally published in The Road Back to Paris and Mollie and Other War Pieces, and his 1958 followup Normandy Revisited, in which his return to France stirred memories of D-Day along with musings on the way those apocalyptic events were entering the collective memory — or not, as the case might be. It’s all terrific stuff.
Liebling’s standing among journalists as a writer’s writer is second only to that of Joseph Mitchell, and Liebling had a vastly wider range than Mitchell. Where Mitchell’s legacy can be contained within a single volume, Liebling’s body of work sprawls across several books and almost as many genres.
His methods, no matter how many people have claimed them as an influence, were too arbitrary, and his temperament too personal and idiosyncratic, to leave a pattern for greatness that others would follow. In truth, despite the frequent comparisons to his friend Joseph Mitchell, there really wasn’t anyone much like Liebling back in the ’40s and ’50s. Liebling was always much better than those who claimed to be influenced by him, including Wolfe, who finally gave up chasing Liebling’s ghost to pursue John O’Hara’s — not exactly a trade up. As Herbert Mitgang pointed out, reading Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” turned out to be better preparation for covering World War II than the apprenticeship served by some of his fellow war correspondents in the press boxes of professional football games.
If Liebling actually had a philosophy as a writer, it could probably be summed up in three brief tenets, which run through all his books. 1) Know your subject really well. 2) Don’t ever force the humor; always look for it and you will find it. And 3) Spar with the little guys, but put on the eight-ounce gloves when taking on the big shots. The last one was his main point.
Late in life, Liebling became an astringent and observant critic of the trade he had mastered and surpassed without ever quite leaving (“Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one,” remains his most famous line) and I first encountered Liebling through his 1961 book The Press. But whenever I see Liebling’s name, my first thought is a passage from “Acceptable,” the final essay in his book Between Meals. In it, Liebling reminisces about the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1920s, and the women he met there:
To one I owe a debt the size of a small Latin American republic’s in analysts’ fees saved and sorrows unsuffered during the next thirty-odd years. Her name was Angele. She said: “Tu n’es pas beau, mais t’es passable.” (“You’re not handsome, but you’re passable.”)
I do not remember the specific occasion on which Angele gave me the good word, but it came during a critical year. I am lucky that she never said, “T’eis merveilleux.” The last is a line a man should be old enough to evaluate.
My brain reeled under the munificence of her compliment. If she had said I was handsome I wouldn’t have believed her. If she had called me loathsome I wouldn’t have liked it. Passable was what I had hoped for. Passable is the best thing for a man to be.
To get the full measure of Liebling’s gratitude, you can look at a photo or, better still, read this description of him by novelist James Salter:
Physically, Liebling was not attractive, yet women liked him. Bald, overweight, and gluttonous was how he described himself. He ate and drank to excess. He was shy and given to long silences. He wore glasses. His feet were flat and it was painful for him to walk, especially in later life when he had gotten so large, a fellow writer said, it was impossible to walk beside him on the sidewalk. He also had gout. Despite this, women were often fond of him, even pretty women. As a friend of his explained, he made them feel intelligent. This was not a tactic, it was genuine.
I’m glad to have this first LoA collection but I hope there will be others joining it soon. The press criticism, the articles about boxing, the essays about food, the random acts of journalism — all deserve to be returned to the light of print. It’s only appropriate. Liebling was a man who appreciated a big dinner, and a single course of his work will never be enough.
J.G. Ballard, author of Crash and numerous other works that fracture time and narrative, was born in Shangai in 1930 and spent time as a child in a Japanese-run internment camp. That experience informed his fine, tough novel Empire of the Sun, which is the springboard for the 1991 BBC Bookmark profile posted above. In his upcoming memoir, Miracles of Life, Ballard describes the city of his childhood:
Shanghai was one of the largest cities in the world, 90% Chinese and 100% Americanised. Bizarre advertising displays – the honour guard of 50 Chinese hunchbacks outside the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame sticks in my mind – were part of the everyday reality of the city, though I sometimes wonder if everyday reality was the one element missing.
It was not a British colony, as most people imagine; but it was home to about 50,000 nonChinese who lived mostly in the International Settlement and the adjoining French Concession. It was celebrated as the “wickedest city in the world”, though as a child I knew nothing about the thousands of bars and brothels. Unlimited venture capitalism rode in gaudy style down streets lined with beggars showing off their sores and wounds.
Every day the trucks of the Shanghai municipal council roamed the streets collecting the hundreds of bodies of destitute Chinese who had starved to death. Partying, cholera and smallpox somehow coexisted with a small English boy’s excited trips in the family Buick to the country club swimming pool.
Every drive through Shanghai I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal – the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; a vast firework display celebrating a new night-club while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a screaming mob of rioting factory workers; the army of prostitutes in fur coats outside the Park hotel, “waiting for friends” as Vera, my White Russian nanny, told me. Open sewers fed into the stinking Whangpoo River and the whole city reeked of dirt, disease and a miasma of cooking fat from the thousands of Chinese food vendors. Anything was possible and everything could be bought and sold.
In the early 1980s, my wife and I went to London on a combined business/pleasure trip. I fell asleep on the plane and had a dream about a popular writer (it may or may not have been me, but it sure to God wasn’t James Caan) who fell into the clutches of a psychotic fan living on a farm somewhere out in the back of the beyond. The fan was a woman isolated by her growing paranoia. She kept some livestock in the barn, including her pet pig, Misery. The pig was named after the continuing main character in the writer’s best-selling bodice-rippers. My clearest memory of this dream upon waking was something the woman said to the writer, who had a broken leg and was being kept prisoner in the back bedroom. I wrote it on an American Airlines cocktail napkin so I wouldn’t forget it, then put it in my pocket. I lost it somewhere, but can remember most of what I wrote down:She speaks earnestly but never quite makes eye contact. A big woman and solid all through; she is an absence of hiatus. (Whatever that means; remember, I’d just woken up.) “I wasn’t trying to be funny in a mean way when I named my pig Misery, no sir. Please don’t think that. No, I named her in the spirit of fan love, which is the purest love there is. You should be flattered.”Tabby and I stayed at Brown’s Hotel in London, and on our first night there I was unable to sleep. Some of it was what sounded like a trio of little-girl gymnasts in the room directly above ours, some of it was undoubtedly jet lag, but a lot of it was that airline cocktail napkin. Jotted on it was the seed of what I thought could be a really excellent story, one that might turn out funny and satiric as well as scary. I thought it was just too rich not to write.I got up, went downstairs, and asked the concierge if there was a quiet place where I could work longhand for a bit. He led me to a gorgeous desk on a second-floor stair landing. It had been Rudyard Kipling’s desk, he told me with perhaps jusitifiable pride. I was a little intimidated by this intelligence, but the spot was quiet and the desk seemed hospitable enough; it featured about an acre of cherrywood working surface, for one thing. Stoked on cup after cup of tea (I drank it by the gallon when I wrote . . . unless I was drinking beer, that is), I filled sixteen pages of a steno notebook. I like to work longhand, actually; the only problem is that, once I get jazzed, I can’t keep up with the lines forming in my head and I get frazzled.When I called it quits, I stopped in the lobby to thank the concierge again for letting me use Mr. Kipling’s beautiful desk. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” he replied. He was wearing a misty, reminiscent little smile, as if he had known the writer himself. “Kipling died there, actually. Of a stroke. While he was writing.”
I went back upstairs to catch a few hours’ sleep, thinking of how often we are given information we really could have done without.
Stephen King, in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, goes on to explain how what he expected his story to be — a novella titled “The Annie Wilkes Edition” — instead became a lean, mean novel called Misery, all starting from that bit of dreamed speech. Which only goes to show how a story can kick down the corral of a writer’s intention and go frisking off through the woods while the writer pants along after it, snaffle and curb swinging in his hands. I’ll leave you to read King’s book and find out what he had planned to do in “The Annie Wilkes Edition,” but I think you’ll agree that while the novella might have made for a good nasty EC Comics-type shocker, we’re all better of that he wrote Misery instead.
Wormold, a character in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, is playing checkers with Captain Segura, a Cuban military officer and torturer:
“Did you torture him?”
Captain Segura laughed. “No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.”
“I didn’t know there were class-distinctions in torture.”
“Dear Mr. Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.”
“There’s torture and torture. When they broke up Dr Hasselbacher’s laboratory they were torturing . . . ?”
“One can never tell what amateurs may do. The police had no concern in that. Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.”
“Who does?”
“The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal. You see, I was right to make that king, and now I shall huff you for the last time.”
“You always win, don’t you? That’s an interesting theory of yours.”
“One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or in the prisons of Lisbon and Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.”
“We’re not shocked by that any longer.”
“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”
From “Revelation,” a story in Flannery O’Connor’s collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. Mrs. Turpin has just had a pretty bad day: not only did she have to share a doctor’s waiting room with a bunch of trashy people, one of them actually called her a wart hog from hell. Now she’s back home and she’s demanding an explanation from God, insisting that he tell her why, after a lifetime of piety and good behavior, she deserved to be called such a thing:
Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting halleujah.
One of the things I like best about Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is the way she treats religion as a disruptive, scarifying force in people’s lives rather than a comforting flannel blanket for their minds. Religion, as often as not, is like a live wire lying on the ground, pulsing with immense power but terribly dangerous if handled improperly.
Consider the fate of young Harry Ashfield in “The River,” a neglected boy whose visit to a riverside baptism and the words of a charismatic evangelist (“You count now,” the preacher said. “You didn’t even count before.”) leads to tragedy. Or The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” who finds the Gospels have thrown everything off balance: “If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can — by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.” Or Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, who spends his life trying to outrun Jesus by preaching The Church Without Christ — “Where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk, and what’s dead stays that way.”
Mrs. Turpin gets off relatively easy: after enduring a stretch in The Waiting Room From Hell, she gets a vision of heaven in which she really understands what happens when the first are last and the last are first. I’ve read this story for years and I’m still not sure if the epiphany does her any good. Something in the vocabulary and the way her unthinking racism and snobbery remain intact lead me to suspect this is the moment she loses her religion, as they say in the South. But I could be wrong — I could be missing some nuance underneath the grotesque surface. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened with Flannery O’Connor.
From Cultural Amnesia, a collection of biographical essays by Clive James:
Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer’s ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie. Jazz was a brimming reservoir of these contending qualities. Eventually I was listening to so much classical music that I left jazz aside, but I never for a moment thought that I had left it behind.
If I ever need a quotation on how writing can be influenced and affected by the unlikeliest things, that passage will be my first choice. James has a real gift for aphorism, and Cultural Amnesia is full of little gems of summation and description. The trouble is, getting to them is like digging through a huge box full of styrofoam peanuts.
The passage quoted above is emblematic of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. It comes from an essay that is ostensibly about Louis Armstrong, but mostly about whether Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman were as good at playing jazz as black musicians, and whether Fred Astaire’s dancing was as compelling as the footwork of Bojangles Robinson. (The short answer, to end the suspense, is yes all around.) Satchmo can barely get his foot in the door while James charts the rise and fall of his own listening habits, and muses on the terrible ways that racism distorted the careers of black artists. All true, and yet once the curtain comes down, we are left with the feeling that Armstrong has been kept offstage by the man who stood up to introduce him.
I’m all for loose, discursive essays with room for interesting asides, but far too often James loses the thread of his own writing as he goes frisking off after pet peeves and fond remembrances. His essay on Marcel Proust, for example, is really about Jean-Francois Revel and the supposedly shrewd things Revel said in his book about Proust, which I will certainly want to read one of these days but which I suspect appeals to James mostly because Revel’s politics do as well.
Similarly, the essay on Rainer Maria Rilke barely gets going before James, spurred by Rilke’s shrewd observations on the nature of fame, starts blatting about how Marion Davies should be remembered for her talent rather than her role as the inspiration for Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, and how Bertolt Brecht was a dreadful man and an inferior poet. Again, while everything I’ve read about Brecht makes him sound like a mutt — I think it was Ezra Pound who said that not only was Brecht the only man who deserved capital punishment, he was also the only man Pound himself would like to carry out the sentence upon — we end up hearing less about Rilke than we would have liked.
James’s long-windedness amusingly undercuts itself in the essay about Albert Camus, which approvingly quotes a line from The Rebel — “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes” — and then goes on at tedious length about the tedious speeches given by Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Having finished James’s drone about droning, we are left to muse on the fact that Camus needed only seven words to convey what James needs to pound at for seven pages.
Part of the problem with Cultural Amnesia — a big part of the problem, actually — is that it comes freighted with ambitions that cannot be supported by collection of short pieces and knock-offs. Each of these essays is supposed to use the subject as an object lesson in the defense of liberal humanism against totalitarian ideologies. This works well when James is evoking the cafe intelligentsia of Austria in the years before the Anschluss, but it becomes hilarious when James throws in celebrity appreciations of Tony Curtis and W.C. Fields, and groaningly tedious when James derails a salute to Beatrix Potter in order to denounce Soviet children’s books.
The rest of the problems lies in the fact that Clive James, while formidably well-traveled and well-versed in languages and literature, is at bottom a middlebrow snob — often an amusingly fatuous one. No madeleine crumb falls from Proust’s table without exciting his wonder and awe, but he groans like a bored high school student over Herman Melville’s philosophical musings in Moby-Dick. James is also howlingly ignorant of science and all too ready to convict it of complicity in the mass murders that defined the 20th century:
The future of science, Renan’s cherished avenir de la science, can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don’t yet know about it, one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all.
Spoken like a true creative writing student who just flunked his physics exam! Here’s another ripe piece of intellectual cheese:
Science lives in a perpetual present, and must always discard its own past as it advances. (If a contemporary thermodynamicist refers to the literature on phlogiston, he will do so as a humanist, not as a scientist. Nor did Edwin Hubble need to know about Ptolemy, though he did.) The humanities do not advance in that sense: they accumulate, and the past is always retained. The two forms of knowledge thus have fundamentally different kinds of history. A scientist can revisit scientific history at his choice. A humanist has no choice: he must revisit the history of the humanities all the time, because it is always alive, and can’t be superseded.
A pity that James, who includes Tacitus among his list of notables, did not cook up a profile of Isaac Newton, who wrote in a letter to another scientist that “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Scientists carry their history wherever they go, simply because they want to avoid repeating its mistakes; writers and artists are forever reinventing the wheel — it’s part of their charm. No scientist would talk about phlogiston as anything but an antique theory, tested and discredited by other scientists. Clive James, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of humanist who might still be impressed by it.
Plenty of mushy thinkers blame science for the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, as though anti-Semitism had not existed before there were trains, as though the czars had not been equally careless and vicious with the lives of their subjects, as though the decay of the old European monarchies had not set loose poisons in the political and cultural bloodstream of the world. Worldwide cataclysm was launched from Germany, the land of Goethe and Beethoven, and Italy, the wellspring of classical civilization.
I recommend that Clive James read Jacob Bronowski and learn that the gap between the two cultures is not as vast and unbridgeable as he thinks.
