Picked-Up Pieces (2 page)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s
oeuvre
or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Easier said than done, of course. Here and there filial affection for an older writer has pulled my punch. Fear of reprisal may have forced a grin or two. In a few reprehensible cases I may have dreamed of sleeping with the authoress. In other cases irritations of the moment added their personal pepper. A reviewer, unlike an ideal reader, is committed to finish the book; I read slower than I write, and sheer exasperation over time expended may have shortened my patience with the Cozzens novel and, even,
Ada
. The little Dostoevsky review was done for
Life
during a mysterious attack of tendonitis; I could not sleep, and sat up all one night, watching dawn infiltrate Menemsha Bight, my throbbing left wrist held above my head while my right hand confidently advised Dostoevsky to keep trying. “The Crunch of Happiness” was composed shortly after my leg had been broken, making me perhaps unduly sensitive to the hugs and crunches in Nabokov’s
Glory
. One of the oldest pieces here, on Sylvia Townsend Warner (who deserves, ten years later, an extended tribute to her vigorously continuing production), was hilariously fractured and mis-assembled when printed in
The New Republic;
this collection holds for me no greater satisfaction than that of getting its hexed text at last correct.

The fabled care
The New Yorker
takes with the texts it prints presides like Providence over most of these reviews. Many the untruth quietly curbed, the misspelling invisibly mended. My habit of ample quotation compels the “checkers” virtually to read the book through, a scrupulousness that amounts to sanctity. My editor for the “Books” pieces has been Mr. Rogers Whitaker (telephone operators, take note of the
s
). Gruff wise bear of a man, he has given most of these contents a lick and a spank, and in gratitude for his collaboration I dedicate this book to him. May he edit
ad infinitum
.

The “Views” section (which ends with a review) salvages some of the debris of a writer’s life. One is invited to do this and that, and one doesn’t always refuse. My year in London (1968–1969) was especially prolific of accepted invitations. Also while there I composed my decade’s one precious parody, and a necrotic meditation (“Cemeteries”) that didn’t quite make it into fiction. My four speeches, delivered on as many continents, serve as index of the itinerary that even a reluctantly public man can find himself undergoing. I have restrained myself from including a talk in Venezuela comparing
Doña Barbara
with movie Westerns, and a weighty speech on the American writer’s cultural situation that I kept giving as I moved across central Africa, shedding large chunks of it as I went. If there’s one thing the Third World does
not
want to hear about, it’s parallelisms with the United States. Henry Bech should write a story.

And I, no doubt, should write, in the decades left to me, in the highest forms I can reach, matter of my own devising. There was an educational value, for a man with lazy eyes, in accepting some review assignments; but my laziness is now such that I can scarcely read a book without a pencil in my hand, and without the expectation of being paid for a verdict. Innocence deserts one’s tryst with a printed page when a review has been promised and begins writing itself in the margin. Meanwhile, the classics languish, and even blank pages begin to look suspect. Let us hope, for the sakes of artistic purity and paper conservation, that ten years from now the pieces to be picked up will make a smaller heap.

There could have been a third section, “Interviews.” They are a form to be loathed, a half-form like maggots, but in some cases (notably my
Paris Review
travail with Charles Samuels) have benefitted from written revisions; and one is forced to say things sometimes true and not always
said elsewhere. The only topic upon which my offhand opinions carry authority is, of course, my own works; so I have excerpted a few self-centered quotations from the six or so interviews I have saved, and closeted them in an appendix, where none but the morbidly curious, or academically compelled, need peek.

And, speaking of half-forms: hard-pressed magazine editors perpetually bombard a writer’s tenuous vicinity with questions, questionnaires, and quizzes. Most of these meteors from outer space burn up in the ionosphere of unanswered mail, but a few get through, coinciding with a moment of euphoria or efficiency in the inscrutable authorial rhythms, and receive an answer. Here are two Answers to Hard Questions that turned up in my files, which are hereby, as of October 25, 1974, exhausted.

M
ADEMOISELLE
:
What is female sexuality?

You ask me about this most wordless of subjects. I know nothing; but the “nothing” stirs, breathes, takes on a vague and vaguely inviting form. To begin, I would understand “sexuality” to be the subject and “male” and “female” to be adjectives, not polar opposites. In infancy both sexes enjoy an identical introduction to erotic sensation, so that fondling, sucking, teasing, cradling, crooning, tickling, rocking, stroking, and murmuring form a common base of amorous vocabulary. Somewhere before adolescence the male, that little hunter, tips his sexual curiosity with an optical point, whereas the female remains a blind snuggler, impervious to photo-pornography, dependent to some extent upon brute
duration
of contact. When the sexual functions ripen, the male assignment becomes penetration and distribution, the female duty acceptance and retention. Yet our insatiable minds, with their unique gift for empathy, seek to broaden sexual experience into the domain of the opposite (
en face
rather than inimical) number; the rapacious female and passive male are delightful variations. Harmlessly, insofar as any human transaction is harmless, they seek to appropriate sensations biology has only diffidently made possible for them. Again, our aspiring spirits drive erotic sensitivity outward from the monstrous and gummy organs of sex, which look like wounds, to the ethereal fringes of the body; the hands, the skull, the soles of the feet, the backs of the knees are where perhaps you,
mademoiselle
, begin to quicken. There is a poetry in sexual convolution that
would bring the scattered centers of our being—the brain, the heart, the genitals—into a unity of juxtaposition. The sexual unpredictability of females must be, in part, an attempt to subordinate to the angelic prerogatives of choice and will the sexual function still bewilderingly mired in the ancient ooze of the involuntary. Perversion, like continence, would reclaim from our animal ore the gold of the purely human. In females, if anatomy is an adequate metaphor, sexuality is more central and more buried than in males. Love, then, becomes an exploration toward a muffled center, a quest whose terrain is the woman and the grail her deep self. The man who advances this exploration bestows a totality meagerly paid for with anything less than enslavement. The man who does not fails disastrously. Hence the extremes of fastidiousness and wantonness that perennially astound men, and the strange sharp note of bitter disappointment we hear whenever women offer to throw light into these warm shadows.

P
LAYBOY
:
What is creativity?

For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist, and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. Out of my own slim experience, I would venture the opinion that the artistic impulse is a mix, in varying proportions, of childhood habits of fantasizing brought on by not necessarily unhappy periods of solitude; a certain hard wish to perpetuate and propagate the self; a craftsmanly affection for the materials and process; a perhaps superstitious receptivity to moods of wonder; and a not-often-enough-mentioned ability, within the microcosm of the art, to organize, predict, and persevere.

THE LITERARY LIFE

T
HE LUST
to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. The county where I and my literary ambitions were conceived held only one writer, whose pen name, Mildred Jordan, masked her true identity as an unmeetably rich industrialist’s wife. At Harvard I stood with crowds of other students to hear, and to glimpse in the mysterious flesh, anthology presences like Eliot, Sandburg, Frost, and Wilder. After his lecture in Sanders Theater, Eliot, a gem of composure within a crater of applause, inserted his feet into his rubbers, first the right, then the left, as we poured down upon him a grateful tumult that had less to do with his rather sleepy-making discourse on poetic drama than with the fabulous descent of his vast name into an actual, visible, and mortal body. Whereas Sandburg, playing ballads in New Lecture Hall, rambled on into our dinner hour; as the audience noisily diminished he told us, his white bangs glowing in the gloom, that it was all right, that often in his life he had sat in hotel rooms with only his guitar for company.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. It was in England’s Oxford. Someone kindly had us to tea, and into the stiff little party bounced a well-knit sandy man with light quick eyes and an intensely handsome chin; unhesitatingly he assumed his right to dominate the conversation. He was full of a tender excitement, the excitement of those certain they are loved, and anxious to share, before it spills over and is wasted, the bubbling treasure of themselves. He described to us his sitting
in Paris writing at an outdoor table while around him in the Tuileries little boys were going pee-pee; he read us, with an excessive Irish accent, the opening and then the closing words of
Finnegans Wake
, to show that they interlocked.

Now I had never read Cary, but had myself recently tasted the emboldening black blood of print. When he stated that Joyce’s influence was enormous, I churlishly grunted disagreement; he cited e. e. cummings, and I absurdly shook my head No. His eyebrows lifted, and for a second I lived within the curiosity of those very quick eyes. They flicked away, and somewhat later I began to read him, and found him to be—above all in his two African novels—a splendid writer, peculiarly alive to nuances of power and competition such as my jealous rudeness that afternoon. For years the incident embarrassed me in memory, and in 1957 Cary heroically suffered his prolonged death, and I lost forever my chance to apologize.

Quite different was my preparation for meeting James Thurber, in London later that year. As a boy I had hoarded pennies to buy Thurber’s books, and owned them all; he was for me the brightest star in that galaxy of New York wits I yearned to emulate, however dimly. A college acquaintance who knew of my adoration arranged the meeting: into her flat Thurber was led by his wife Helen. He was taller than I had expected, not Walter Mitty but a big-boned blind giant, and his upstanding hair was snowier than photographs had led me to expect, and there could have been no anticipating the alarming way his eyes caromed around under the refracting magnification of his glasses.

He sat, talking and drinking tea until I wondered why his bladder didn’t burst. We listened, I raptly at first and finally becoming, to my own amazement, bored. Though Thurber cocked his head alertly at my poor fawning attempts to make conversation, these attempts did not appreciably distract him from the anecdotes of Columbus, Ohio, he had told a thousand times before, and that I had read ten years before, in their definitive, printed versions. Pages of
The Thurber Album
and
My Life and Hard Times
issued from his lips virtually intact.

His performance, though remarkable, was, alas, a performance; I had been privileged to join an auditory audience slightly less anonymous than readership, and there was no question of living for even a second in his curiosity. Fifteen years later, with another adored writer, Jorge Luis Borges, I was to reëxperience the disappointing revelation that blindness
and fame and years do island a man, do isolate him within a monologue that, if he is a literary man, he had delivered to you already, in finer and grander form—“grander” because literary obsessions appear to have been selected from an infinite field, whereas personal obsessions seem to betray a mere narrowness. Sad to say, my love of Thurber’s works was slightly stunted ever after his generous teatime monologue.