Picked-Up Pieces (79 page)

OGLE
:
In recent years, there has been a lot of controversy about Presidential powers and how they are used. Are there any similarities or dissimilarities between Buchanan’s Presidency and Nixon’s that strike you?

Both men were on surest ground in foreign affairs, both were surrounded by subordinates who committed dubious acts, neither projected much moral authority or personal charisma. The Covode Investigation of 1860 bears some resemblance to the Watergate inquiry of today; and the shadow of impeachment hung over Buchanan also, as the letters of the youthful Henry Adams jubilantly confirm—though why Adams would have wanted John C. Breckinridge in the Presidential chair instead, I can’t imagine. But for me the parallels run out there: Nixon is decried for riding roughshod (and blindly) over the Constitution; the main criticism of Buchanan was that he took the Constitution too seriously, and too circumspectly argued the exact limits of his powers and of such legalities as slaveholders’ property rights and the federal government’s right of coercion. He was too much the lawyer and conciliator, Nixon is too much the loner. Buchanan’s White House was the most socially brilliant and active it had been since the days of Madison; contrast that with today’s Kremlin on Pennsylvania Avenue. Most crucially, Buchanan’s crisis, whatever he made of it, was a mighty and genuine one, it was the divergence between North and South that had been growing upon the nation since 1820; whereas this Watergate mess is thoroughly petty, comic opera with some sinister bass notes. It is a crisis strikingly devoid of tragic inevitability. A more worthy analogy to Buchanan’s travail would be Johnson’s Vietnam. But the correct spirit of historical inquiry and dramatization, surely, is one that seeks out, not facile analogies or contrasts, but what was unique to this moment, this predicament, this set of decisions, this man. My play is not about the Presidency but about a man who was President for four of his seventy-seven years. In attempting to understand him sympathetically, to a degree I attempted sympathetic understanding of every President, including the present beleaguered specimen.

OGLE
:
Buchanan seems to have gotten a raw deal from at least some historians. Would you say that Lincoln has been correspondingly overrated?

Not overrated, but deified. The accident of his assassination, and the happy chance of his literary genius, ennobles him beyond appraisal, at least in the popular impression. We are taught that he freed the slaves, without being reminded that the Emancipation Proclamation was a military maneuver, or that the slaveholding states on the Union side were exempted. And we are invited to invest the cause of the “Union” with the mysticism of war propaganda, without inspecting the legal case for
secession, or weighing how much cosmic virtue resides in the determination to keep a big country big. In the crucial four months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, while Buchanan desperately sought to prevent war, Lincoln himself said nothing, either in the way of reassurance to the border states or by way of warning to the seceding states. Demagoguery and fear went their way unchallenged, and while the Lincoln administration, once in office, heaped blame upon its predecessor, it initially pursued identical policies. But my purpose, insofar as it is historical, is not to bury the immortal Lincoln, but to revive the forgotten Buchanan.

OGLE
:
Do you think the Civil War might have been avoided if Buchanan had followed a different course in 1860 and early in 1861?

Allan Nevins, by no means pro-Buchanan, in his history of this period says that a show of force or punitive threat against South Carolina would have precipitated civil war, rather than cow the Palmetto State as Jackson did in 1833. Earlier in 1860, Buchanan possibly might have exerted his leverage as titular head of the Democratic Party to urge a single nominee (Douglas?) upon the Charlestown Convention. But, even if this unlikely work of compromise were achieved, an analysis of the voting in that fall’s election suggests that Lincoln would have won even had his opposition been one united party instead of three splinters. And would another Democratic President have succeeded, more than Pierce and Buchanan, in reconciling irreconcilables, in solving the unsolvable question of fugitive slaves and making sense of the nonsensical question of the territories? It’s hard to imagine how. Would the North, growing in power and population, have indefinitely accepted a Washington controlled by Southerners and doughfaces? My point (which I make in the play, and giving it a human context I cannot give here in these answers) is that time was on the side of the North, and that by buying time Buchanan did all that the Union could ask.

OGLE
:
Some passages in the play suggest that Buchanan, despite charges of rakery, might be called
The Virgin President.
Was he?

In my play I say he was. I would bow to contrary evidence if there were any. The availability of sex in the 19th century is a mysterious variable. Since no rumors of his rakery ever developed substance, his enemies developed the opposite line, that of impotence, of an androgynous fussiness. He was surely not a rake; he was a gallant, very fond of female company in the ballroom and parlor.

OGLE
:
Buchanan is a great quoter of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims in the original French. Is this historically correct or are you just very fond of La Rochefoucauld yourself?

Buchanan learned French for his mission to the court of St. Petersburg as American ambassador (1832–1833), and he kept up a reading acquaintance with French the rest of his life. In a letter to Harriet from London, on January 25th, 1856, as strong indications of his nomination as President were coming to him, he wrote, “… I feel quite indifferent. There is profound wisdom in a remark of Rochefoucauld with which I met the other day:—
‘Les choses que nous desirons n’arrivent pas, ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est, ni dans le temps, ni de la manière que nous auraient fait le plus de plaisir.’ ”

Strange to say, in the edition of
Maximes
out of which I supplied other aphorisms to put into the mouth of Buchanan’s stage persona, I was not able to locate this particular saying. If any reader of
Harper’s Bazaar
can help me here, I would be grateful.

[Stranger to say, the readers of
Harper’s Bazaar
never saw any of these painstakingly composed answers. However, Ms. Ogle herself supplied the correct source of the quotation—La Bruyère (1645–1696). I feel adequately recompensed.]

SAMUELS
:
I wonder why, with few exceptions, you only write light verse
.

I began with light verse, a kind of cartooning in print, and except for one stretch of a few years, in which I wrote most of the serious poems in
Telephone Poles
, I feel uncertain away from rhyme, to which something comic adheres. Bergson’s mechanical encrusted upon the organic. But the light verse poems putting into rhyme and jaunty metrics some scientific discovery have a serious point—the universe science discloses to us is farcically unrelated to what our primitive senses report—and I have, when such poems go well, a pleasure and satisfaction not lower than in any other form of literary activity. Indeed my old poems give me more rereading pleasure than anything I have written. Especially the little ones—“Nutcracker,” with the word “nut” in boldface, seems to me as good as George Herbert’s angel-wings.

GADO
:
Who are your contemporaries in terms of fiction?

It’s in Salinger that I first heard, as a college student in the early Fifties, the tone that spoke to my condition. I had a writing teacher, Kenneth Kempton, who read aloud to us some of Salinger’s stories as they
appeared in
The New Yorker
. They seemed to me to say something about the energies of people and the ways they encounter each other that I did not find in the short stories of Hemingway or John O’Hara or Dorothy Parker or any of that “wised-up” style of short-story writing. Salinger’s stories were not wised up. They were very open to tender invasions. Also they possessed a refreshing formlessness which, of course, he came to push to an extreme, as real artists tend to do. However, in those early short stories there’s a marvellous tension between rather random, “soft” little events which pulls the whole story together into the final image of, say, a dead Easter chick in a wastebasket.

GADO
:
Are there others you regard as contemporaries?

Some, about my age, are not very well known: Harold Brodkey, a writer who is a little more than a year older than I, is a contemporary. His writing seems to go deeper into certain kinds of emotional interplay than the things written by older writers. Were I to try to make all this into an essay, I’m sure that I could find more ways in which writers now in their thirties and forties resemble each other.

Kerouac I would also claim as a contemporary. Clearly, he is not a man of Salinger’s intelligence, but there is something benign, sentimentally benign, in his work. He attempted to grab it all; somehow, to grab it all. I like him.

GADO
:
That’s strange. Kerouac and Updike! I couldn’t propose two writers who I thought were more unalike in their approach to literary art. Kerouac, with his binges at the typewriter, dumping the words down onto a continuous roll of teletype paper and leaving the cutting of it into pages to a more sombre moment.… That’s not the picture I had of you at work at all
.

No, I don’t agree. I don’t use teletype paper, but there isn’t an awful lot of revision when I’m writing—things either grind to a halt or they keep on moving. I think he was right. Kerouac was right in emphasizing a certain flow, a certain ease. Wasn’t he saying, after all, what the surrealists said? That if you do it very fast without thinking, something will get in that wouldn’t ordinarily. I think one tends to spoil not only the thing at hand, but the whole art form, by taking too much thought, by trying to assert too much control.

SAMUELS
:
What is it that you think gets into sloppy writing that eludes more careful prose?

It comes down to, What is language? Up to now, until this age of mass literacy, language has been something spoken. In utterance there’s a
minimum of slowness. In trying to treat words as chisel strokes you run the risk of losing the quality of utterance, the rhythm of utterance, the happiness. A phrase out of Mark Twain—he describes a raft hitting a bridge and says that it “went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.” The beauty of “scatteration” could only have occurred to a talkative man, a man who had been brought up among people who were talking and who loved to talk himself. I’m aware myself of a certain dryness of this reservoir, this backlog of spoken talk. A Rumanian once said to me that Americans are always telling stories. I’m not sure this is as true as it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the TV and receive pictures. I’m not sure the younger generation even knows how to gossip. But, as for a writer, if he has something to tell, he should perhaps type it almost as fast as he could talk it. We must look to the organic world, not the inorganic world, for models; and just as the organic world has periods of repose and periods of great speed and exercise, so I think the writer’s process should be organically varied. But there’s a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you’re spinning out the reel.

SAMUELS
:
I’d like to ask a bit about your work habits if I may. What sort of schedule do you follow?

I write every weekday morning. I try to vary what I am doing, and my verse, or poetry, is a help here. Embarked on a long project, I try to stay with it even on dull days. For every novel, however, that I have published, there has been one unfinished or scrapped. Some short stories—I think offhand of “Lifeguard,” “The Taste of Metal,” “My Grandmother’s Thimble”—are fragments salvaged and reshaped. Most came right the first time—rode on their own melting, as Frost said of his poems. If there is no melting, if the story keeps sticking, better stop and look around. In the execution there has to be a “happiness” that can’t be willed or foreordained. It has to sing, click, something. I try instantly to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story or novel to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.

SAMUELS
:
As a technician, how unconventional would you say you were?

As unconventional as I need to be. An absolute freedom exists on the blank page, so let’s use it. I have from the start been wary of the fake, the automatic. I tried not to subdue my sense of life as many-layered and ambiguous, while keeping in mind some sense of transaction, of a bargain
struck, between me and the ideal reader. Domestic fierceness within the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind of evolution—these are some of the themes. My work is meditation, not pontification.

SAMUELS
:
Are you bothered by having to write for a living?

No, I always wanted to draw or write for a living. Teaching, the customary alternative, seemed truly depleting and confusing. I have been able to support myself by and large with the more respectable forms—poetry, short stories, novels—but what journalism I have done has been useful. I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me; the technical aspects of bookmaking, from type font to binding glue, all interest me. The distinction between a thing well done and a thing done ill obtains everywhere—in all circles of Paradise and Inferno.

SAMUELS
:
In “The Sea’s Green Sameness” you deny that characterization and psychology are primary goals of fiction. What do you think is more important?