Just As I Thought (22 page)

In the case of Clarice Lispector, I accepted the word of translators and Portuguese speakers that she did truly bring a new sound to Brazilian literature. I was interested in the fact that her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants in Brazil, and the sounds of those two early languages, Russian and Jewish, in her ear on the way to Portuguese were the same that sang to me in childhood on my way to English.

I had been aware for years that Antonina Nicolaevna Pirozhkova’s seven years with Isaac Babel were important and had been translated. Anne Frydman, the translator and my friend, was full of this project and loved the journals. Then she was able to bring them to the attention of Steerforth Press.

At the end of this section I’ve put some shorter pieces in praise of writers—and people—I admire.

Writing an introductory paragraph or two means I can keep talking about Don Barthelme, for instance, my neighbor, a great writer, friend. We shared a street, West Eleventh—looking in my case north, in his, south. He saw directly into the elementary school, the teachers, the children. It domesticated him, which he needed. He used that improvement to talk about the whole city.

Not too long ago I was teaching an afternoon workshop at Manhattan Community College. There were GED students, English as a Second Language students, and some hoping-to-get-into-college-next-semester students. I’m expected in some of these classes to read a story of my own which they have already read, which I do, and there are always lots of good questions. This time I thought I’d try something else. So I read them Don’s story about Hokie Mokie the jazz saxophonist. They loved it, they wanted to know who the guy was who wrote it—was he a musician, could he come and read them another of his stories?—or would I? No, he can’t come, I said, he’s dead. A beautiful writer and understander, inventor in the English language, a funny guy, a moralist, younger than I—and gone—he would be glad to know you loved his story. But this is the great thing: there are his books and they’re still talking. You can’t shut them up.

Barbara Deming was my teacher before I knew her, and she’s my teacher now. I learned about nonviolence from three people: Bayard Rustin in one brilliant two-hour talk in 1961 in our brand-new Greenwich Village Peace Center—my politics and the politics of my friend Mary Gandall were turned around for life. I never heard him speak again, though for a year or two I saw him often. Then A. J. Muste at the War Resisters League, not so much by his speech as by his way of listening to the young men who were about to decide whether to go to prison or to war. And then Barbara Deming.

I think it was the May Day demonstration of 1973. Barbara and I were among about fifteen hundred people who were arrested protesting the continuing, seemingly endless war. We were, in our group, the first to step into the street to stop the Washington traffic as it moved, continuing, we believed, the business of war. Thanks to the decision of a dozen enraged drivers
not
to kill us for some reason, we were simply arrested. Then gathered into police buses and distributed here and there. We were dropped off in an old football field (why old?), where a number of young people, declared anarchists, proved the virtue of undominated organizing by digging a latrine at once and creating a tarpaulin shelter with some tarps lying around the field. It began to rain. God’s little rain. Then it stopped and became quite cold.

There were several hundred people who began, for warmth, to huddle in the edges of the shelter or lean into one another. Many of my students were there and naturally had forgotten their sweaters or by now lost them. To keep warm, Barbara and I walked arm in arm and talked and talked. Meanwhile, concerned helicopters flew over us and probably radioed information to other responsible means of transportation, which soon brought members of Congress into our football field. They seemed to worry most about the young people and the old people. At that time Barbara and I were somewhere in between and did not attract attention.

Then our own tough New York congresswoman Bella Abzug appeared and came to speak to us. She wanted to know if we were okay, had there been any trouble? No, we were fine, just talking one of our first long personal talks.

But it was getting cold. She gave us a rather long look. Barbara and I had had political differences with Bella—better to say differences about strategy or belief in electoral processes, and we were equally firm in our different views of civil disobedience as an appropriate, realistic response to the continuing war in Vietnam.

Well, she gave us, the mud, and the rain a grinning look and said, “I guess you’re where you want to be and I’m where I want to be.”

I’ve often told this story and learned with some amusement that she has, too.

I’ve included Claire Lalone, my husband’s mother, and my conversation with her. There’s a painting of her in what I call our middle room (to get to any other room you have to walk through it). A young handsome woman of the 1920s, a French Canadian working-class girl who had a hard time and assumed she was supposed to. Who can forget her generosity, her lack of bitterness, her pleasure when, dying, she imagined the transformed lives of younger women?

The Value of Not Understanding Everything

The difference between writers and critics is that in order to function in their trade, writers must live in the world, and critics, to survive in the world, must live in literature.

That’s why writers in their own work need have nothing to do with criticism, no matter on what level.

In fact, since seminars and discussions move forward a lot more cheerily if a couple of bald statements are made, I’ll make one: You can lunge off into an interesting and true career as a writer even if you’ve read nothing but the Holy Bible and the New York
Daily News,
but that is an absolute minimum (read them slowly).

Literary criticism always ought to be of great interest to the historian, the moralist, the philosopher, which is sometimes me. Also to the reader—me again—the critic comes as a journalist. If it happens to be the right decade, he may even bring great news.

As a reader, I liked reading Wright Morris’s
The Territory Ahead.
But if I—the writer—should pay too much attention to him, I would have to think an awful lot about the Mississippi River. I’d have to get my mind off New York. I always think of New York. I often think of Chicago, San Francisco. Once in a while Atlanta. But I never think about the Mississippi, except to notice that its big, muddy foot is in New Orleans, from whence all New York singing comes. Documentaries aside, my notions of music came by plane.

As far as the artist is concerned, all the critic can ever do is make him or break him. He can slip him into new schools, waterlog him in old ones. He can discover him, ignore him, rediscover him …

Apart from having to leave the country in despair and live in exile forever—or as in milder situations, never having lunch uptown again—nothing too terrible can happen to the writer’s work. Because what the writer is interested in is life, life as he is
nearly
living it, something which takes place here or abroad, in Nebraska or New York or Capri. Some people have to live first and write later, like Proust. More writers are like Yeats, who was always being tempted from his craft of verse, but not seriously enough to cut down on production.

Now, one of the reasons writers are so much more interested in life than others who just go on living all the time is that what the writer doesn’t understand the first thing about is just what he acts like such a specialist about—and that is life. And the reason he writes is to explain it all to himself, and the less he understands to begin with, the more he probably writes. And he takes his ununderstanding, whatever it is—the face of wealth, the collapse of his father’s pride, the misuses of love, hopeless poverty—he simply never gets over it. He’s like an idealist who marries nearly the same woman over and over. He tries to write with different names and faces, using different professions and labors, other forms to travel the shortest distance to the way things really are.

In other words, the poor writer—presumably in an intellectual profession—really oughtn’t to know what he’s talking about.

When people in school take their first writing classes, it is sometimes suggested to them that they write about their own experience. Put down what you see. Put down what you know. Perhaps describe a visit you have just had with a friend.

Well, I would suggest something different. I would say, Don’t knock yourself out. You know perfectly well what happened when your friend Helen visited last Friday. This is great practice for a journalist and proper practice for a journalist. As for an inventing writer, I would say something like this:

Now, what are some of the things you don’t understand at all? You’ve probably taken all these psych courses, and you know pretty well what is happening between your mother and yourself, your father and your brother. Someone in your family has surely been analyzed, so you’ve had several earfuls as well as a lot of nasty remarks at dinner. Okay—don’t write about that, because now you understand it all. That’s what certain lessons in psychology and analytical writing effect—you have the impression that you know and understand because you own the rules of human behavior, and that is really as bad as knowing and understanding.

You might try your father and mother for a starter. You’ve seen them so closely that they ought to be absolutely mysterious. What’s kept them together these thirty years? Or why is your father’s second wife no better than his first?

If, before you sit down with paper and pencil to deal with them, it all comes suddenly clear and you find yourself mumbling, Of course, he’s a sadist and she’s a masochist, and you think you have the answer—
drop the subject.

If, in casting about for suitable areas of ignorance, you fail because you understand yourself (and too well), your school friends, as well as the global balance of terror, and you can also see your last Saturday-night date blistery in the hot light of truth—but you still love books and the idea of writing—you might make a first-class critic.

What I’m saying is that in areas in which you are very smart you might try writing history or criticism, and then you can know and tell how all the mystery of America flows out from under Huck Finn’s raft; where you are kind of dumb, write a story or a novel, depending on the depth and breadth of your dumbness. Some people can do both. Edmund Wilson, for instance—but he’s so much more smart than dumb that he has written very little fiction.

When you have invented all the facts to make a story and get somehow to the truth of the mystery and you can’t dig up another question—change the subject.

Let me give you a very personal example: I have published a small book of short stories. They are on several themes, at least half of them Jewish. One of the reasons for that is that I was an outsider in our particular neighborhood—at least I thought I was—I took long rides on Saturday, the Sabbath. My family spoke Russian, but the street spoke Yiddish. There were families of experience I was cut off from. You know, it seemed to me that an entire world was whispering in the other room. In order to get to the core of it all, I used all those sibilant clues. I made fiction.

As often happens when you write something else, a couple of magazines asked to hear from me. They wanted a certain kind of story—which I’d already done—

But the truth of the matter is, I have probably shot my Jewish bolt, and I had better recognize that fact and remember it. It’s taken me a long time, but I have finally begun to understand that part of my life. I am inside it. I could write an article, I imagine, on life in the thirties and forties in Jewish New York, but the tension and the mystery and the question are gone. Except to deceive my readers and myself, in honor I could never make fiction of that life again. The writer is not some kind of phony historian who runs around answering everyone’s questions with made-up characters tying up loose ends. She is nothing but a questioner.

Luckily for my craft—for my love of writing—I have come up against a number of other inexplicable social arrangements. There are things about men and women and their relations to each other, also the way in which they relate to the almost immediate destruction of the world, that I can’t figure out. And nothing in critical or historical literature will abate my ignorance a tittle or a jot. I will have to do it all by myself, marshal the evidence. In the end, probably all I’ll have to show is more mystery—a certain juggled translation from life, that foreign tongue, into fiction, the jargon of man.

—mid-1960s

Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken

A woman invented fire and called it

                                        
the wheel

Was it because the sun is round

            
I saw the round sun bleeding to sky

And fire rolls across the field

            
from forest to treetop

It leaps like a bike with a wild boy riding it

Oh
     
she said

                        
see the orange wheel of heat

light
     
that turned me from the