Herself (40 page)

But, during those years over here after the iron curtain fell, when people wondered what the Russians were like now, when later one heard it surmised that the Russians were still Byzantine, still Slavophile, still in fact Russian, I often wondered why the knowledge that censorship denied us was not more sought in those books that ignore frontiers, in a book like this, where the author can say, in a casual aside: “The city of X, to which the two friends went, had for governor a man still young, at once progressive and despotic, as so many are in Russia.” Or where Bazarov can say of “Liberals”; “You gentlemen cannot go beyond a generous indignation … or resignation, things which do not mean much. You think you are great men, you think yourself at the pinnacle of human perfection when you have ceased to beat your servants, and we, we ask only to fight with one another and to beat. Our dust reddens your eyes, our mire soils you; you admire yourselves complacently; you take pleasure in reproaching yourself; all that bores us; we have other things to do than to admire or reproach ourselves; we must have other men broken at the wheel.” Does that sound familiar?

Later on I saw many other things in this book. Once, when I was reading another favorite, James’
The Bostonians,
I thought suddenly of Eudoxia Kukshin in the Turgenev book, the emancipated woman, and of how Turgenev had done, in ten hilarious pages, so much of what James had done in 378. And I thought of Turgenev’s portrait of Anna, Bazarov’s mother, the simple, household woman, whom he has set down forever in two pages of short sentences bright as silk, in a way that James, for all his long and marvelous respirations, perhaps could not do. Still later when, having become a writer, I was reading with a certain professionalism, more aware of trade-secrets, as it were, I saw how Paul, Arcadi’s uncle, the frustrated
elegant
of whom Bazarov says “his nails might be sent to the Exhibition,” a man who in a lesser book would be made to say all the properly wrong things that would conform him to type, is here made to step out of character now and then, to speak on the side of the angels, to say some of the right things that make him a man. Bazarov, of course, does speak in a straight “line”; the secret here is that while he does so, we watch him feeling in another.

But the story must end. Bazarov returns to live in his father’s house and help him doctor; he contracts a surgical infection from an autopsy on a typhus patient, and dies—untried.

And now I shall have to reverse myself. I’ve been telling you that novels are neither political tracts nor historical ones, are stories of individuals, not eras, and I am now about to tell you of two modern novels, one of which began as a political tract, and another, in which an era—ours just past—is the true subject. But “modern” means in part a “reversal.” And, as I have said, the novel is a protean form. If
it
won’t remain consistent, there is no reason why I should.

I was in Rome during the spring elections of 1953. The city, with almost every building plastered from roof-line to pavement with election posters, looked like an enormous mosaic. Almost all the posters had that wonderful Italian versatility of design and color, and many of my American friends were making collections of them. This was the period of McCarthy at home; it came uncomfortably to us to admit that the Communist posters were by far the handsomest and had the most effective slogans. A friend and I were sitting in his car, parked off the Piazza del Populo, looking at some of them. My friend was an Englishman, a Catholic who had spent some of his boyhood in Italy, had worked with British Intelligence there during the war, and was now a critic and editor specializing in Italian literature. We were looking at one poster that had a photo of a banquet table surrounded by members of ducal or princely families—one was a Torlonia. The name of each man was printed over his head, and beneath the photo there was a list of figures, enumerating the taxes each of the men should by law have paid, and the actual smaller amounts each had paid. “Can one trust those figures?” I said. “Is this true?” My friend sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is no need to exaggerate them. You in America have wealthy men, but you cannot understand the kind of wealth a man can have here. None of your American millionaires is rich the way Torlonia is—in privilege, in land, and in human men.” Just then, a group of young boys and girls surrounded our car—it was not a pretentious one—and spat into it. After they had gone, and we had cleaned ourselves, my friend said: “I don’t suppose I can make you understand the basis for Communism here. I love southern Italy, yet I cannot bear to stay here long, because I know how the peasants have to live. I’m a Catholic, but if I stayed there for any length of time, I would have to become a Communist too. Not in any intellectual way, in theirs. And in spite of all that we all well know. But I don’t suppose you could understand.”

But I did understand, because I had read Silone’s
Fontamara.
Fontamara is a town in southern Italy, and this is a story of how Fascism and Communism came to that town, and of what was there before. It was written in 1930, probably when Silone was still a member of the Party, but although he may have begun it as a pamphleteer, he finished it as a novelist, and the reader does not have to know or subscribe to any Internationale except that of human beings in order to participate. What Silone has done is to show how some people have to live, and he has done it from the inside of the peasant mind, using the choral dignity of a people who have no written language. As he himself says, the story is “woven”; it is
told
by three people, as an old man, his wife and his son, each of them handing over the next chapter to another: “my wife will tell you what happened next”; “my son will tell you what happened next.” And they do. And you see. As Silone says in his preface: “… let each man tell his story in his
own
way.” Many years later it was reprinted, not long ago, in a revised version I did not read. It did not seem to me to need revision.

And as each man tells his story in his own way, we are beginning to see, perhaps without even having paused to note the great landmarks of Joyce and Proust, what a long way the novel has come. People are still its subject, but now it is people in the aggregate, almost in the mass, as if the individual no longer has enough weight to hold a story together, against the single all-face of the human condition. The arena has become more compelling than the gladiators—as it had in the Malraux novels. Or the novel takes to an old and tried way of handling men in the aggregate—to satire—to Orwellian returns to
Erewhon
and
Gulliver’s Travels
. Or in those novels which cling, however tenuously to the story of the individual, we see the powerful, nullifying mask of the real hero—our era, our “spirit of the age”—peering always over his shoulder. And then the novel perhaps tumbles toward essay.

In 1949, a novel called
Do I Wake or Sleep
appeared under the name of Isabel Bolton, a pseudonym. Since then she has published several others. All of them were written during her sixties or later, and all have a similar scheme—a tenuous, brittle plot, touched upon sometimes faintly, sometimes luridly, and always transmitted through the mind of one observer, who is always a woman looking back upon her past, out upon her world. All of the first three novels were set in New York—
Do I Wake
opened at the World’s Fair in 1939, just after Hitler entered the Sudetenland. What she did with the New York scene was to make it no longer a scene only, but a fusion of the sensations peculiar to a city strung upon the nerves of its inhabitants. She had a style that, like all the best, seemed fatally wedded to the meaning it carried, the one inseparable from the other. Its nearest antecedent was possibly Virginia Woolf, the Woolf of the last extraordinary novel, that ought to be better known—
Between the Acts
. Like Woolf, she used breathless, cumulative phrases, flashing with participles, whose almost wearing cadence seemed certain to topple, but built instead into sentences whose strange effect is to make the present, our present, constantly palpable. “But isn’t this poetry?” it was said, and the next instant—because a strong analytic intellect, prosaic enough when it wished, was working there—“But isn’t this essay?”

What this novel was, was an essay of the emotions—ours—the haunted esprit of our age, expressed by an intellect wedding itself constantly to the immediate, like some antenna, some thinking reed drawing together the vibrations in our air. So just as we had begun to tire of the narrow limits of the stream-of-consciousness “inner I—me,” this novelist took up the method again, with all its limits, but transposed the subject—to the inner “we.” Her characters were dangerously limited—they stood on a single premise; what drew the reader was the acuity with which he found phrased for him those very limits, that very premise which, as a citizen of our time, we all share. The writer seems to have caught for us, in her half lyrical, half philosophical net, the “we” of her era and of ours—that individual whose private self appears to be shrinking in the face of all the mass-media obligations and terrors of his public one. It was one of the earliest novels of this type, over here. Now we are all too well acquainted with them; many a novel may be named for one man, but he seems to speak in the voice of the aggregate, as a prancing symbol of what we think we are. I think that too will change.

And so, the novel goes on. In fancy, I lend you these four. Each of them says to you what Turgenev remarks that little Feniitchka, the mistress of Nicholas Petrovitch, seemed to say when she became respectable: “Excuse me, I am not here for nothing.”

B
Y 1963, WHEN ROBERT
Hatch of
The Nation
asked me to review a clutch of foreign novels in any form I wanted, I had imposed certain rules on myself: never to do a review in order to blast someone or some book, never in fact to review anything not liked, only to review at will and at some length—and presumably for literature. (I had also kept off contemporary Americans—the only way I saw to keep friendships and avoid tea-pot tempests.)
The Nation’s
proposal seemed to me just on the order of what my British writer-friends might do—covering foreign news as it were, for a small, decent paper, at a thin, honorable price. ($75.)

I started out bravely anti-critical, fell into complacency over books I could easily despise, and was gratefully redeemed by a book I could praise, Günter Grass
The Tin Drum.
(And by the Germans—for me so long an
idée fixe
by way of war and family, that the slightest snuff of them hurtled me into the long view without half trying.)

The Nation
asked me to continue, perhaps in a column, but I had had enough. Meanwhile, toward the end of my connection with
The Reporter
, I did some drama reviews.

As a dance-student since the age of six and as a high school and college actress, I had had the amateur’s “inside” whiff of the theater; as audience, I had started as a patron of Gray’s Drugstore’s cut-rate tickets when I was twelve. After my first book, at the instance of Cheryl Crawford, who hoped for a play, I had attended the Actor’s Studio for about a year, but was not deflected—I still had too many novels to write. And I knew the theater would take all my devotion, not half. If I ever again wrote a play (in college I had been a student of Minor Latham) I would attach myself to a repertory theater. Meanwhile, at the studio, I had seen how a working theater can serve novelists; they see their own limits—and avenues—better defined.

To review a play was refreshing; it took me “out of my field.” (By now, having written two or three novels, I had almost accepted the category thrust at me.) But a thinker’s only boundaries are his own. I had a vigorous sense that I was testing these—or else constructing them. For “the Germans”—actually my own compound of a childhood hatred of their bourgeoisie’s servility and “schmutz,” their evil history and my perverse love of their language—had appeared again. This time, I thought I was ready for them. The subject Was Peter Weiss’s play about Marat-Sade. I called the review, “
The Agony of The Cartoon
.”

Some poets, painters, thinkers represent mankind always with the
risus sardonicus
of death and corruption on its face, whirling in a society which is a death dance. Others trace this face with a certain tenderness of perfectibility on it, and see the society too as teleological, pushing along that famous incline toward the stars. Between these two views lie all the gradations of art. In Peter Weiss’s play,
The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade
(and as performed with disciplined rage by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the wizardry of Peter Brook), the stage at the Martin Beck Theatre is a pitched one, for real and for metaphysical, angling its inmates
down
, and toward the audience. Musical accompaniment is fifed and tympanied, or rattled from the metal sheets used so often in productions of
Godot
, by inmates placed in the boxes, while a Brechtian chorus of four more sings and mimes from the stage or from trapdoors below. Coulmier, the director of the mental home where de Sade, as an inmate after 1801, wrote some of the theatrical entertainments that were produced there as therapy, sits onstage with his wife and daughter—as indeed the fashionable Parisians who came to watch the antics at Charenton did sit. There are incursions of actors into balcony and orchestra, wherever sit the aristocrats of the Martin Beck. For, as in Genet’s
The Blacks
, the audience is indictable. When it claps the cast at the end of the play, the inmates clap back.

The intent is “total” theater, and in production terms—short of a possible spastic song-and-dance response from the ticketholders—the play gets it. Everyman is onstage in all the grotesques of his overt and hidden lunacy—the obsessive, the autoerotic, the weeper in her mob-cap, the drooler with the thick tongue, all performing their silent rhythms, and attended by coifed male nuns and butcher-clad nurses; the mime chorus is Elizabethanly drunken or whorish; other types and professions pass” behind in Molièresque charade. Directorial invention underscores the author’s intent at every chance. Where the author himself, careful not to have his play “about” one thing or any actor speak for only one, specifies that the Girondist deputy be played by an erotomaniac “in the smooth, tight trousers of an ‘Incroyable,’” then the Royal’s customary fondness for humanizing touches of bawdry improves upon this suggestion very versatilely; in a play which as much as anything is about revolution, then the blood poured from buckets at intervals is of course red, white, or blue.