Step Across This Line (7 page)

Accused by lazy pens of political correctness, she was the most individual, independent, and idiosyncratic of writers; dismissed by many in her lifetime as a marginal, cultish figure, an exotic hothouse flower, she has become the contemporary writer most studied at British universities—a victory over the mainstream she would have enjoyed.

She hadn’t finished. Like Italo Calvino, like Bruce Chatwin, like Raymond Carver, she died at the height of her powers. For writers, these are the cruelest deaths: in mid-sentence, so to speak. The stories in this volume are the measure of our loss. But they are also our treasure, to savor and to hoard. Raymond Carver is said to have told his wife before he died (also of lung cancer), “We’re out there now. We’re out there in Literature.” Carver was the most modest of men, but this is the remark of a man who knew, and who had often been told, how much his work was worth. Angela received less confirmation, in her lifetime, of the value of her unique oeuvre; but she, too, is out there now, out there in Literature, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day.

April 1995

Beirut Blues

At one point in Hanan al-Shaykh’s new novel,
Beirut Blues,
the narrator, Asmahan, learns that her grandfather, a dirty old man who likes to bruise women’s breasts, has taken up with a young Lolita. The nymphet, Juhayna, is suspected by various family members of having designs on their inheritance, but Asmahan is moved to a more generous, and stranger, judgment. “In choosing him she was merely choosing the past which had proved its authenticity compared to the bearded leaders, the conflicting voices, the clash of arms.”

The past is mourned throughout
Beirut Blues,
mourned without sentimentality. The past is the place in which Asmahan’s grandmother had to fight for the right to literacy, but it is also the lost village land, occupied first by Palestinians and then by local thugs; it is Beirut, that once-beautiful, brilliant, cosmopolitan city, transformed now into the barbarity of ruins in which perch snipers picking off women in blue dresses and other fighters who are afraid of the hooting of owls. The young Asmahan grew addicted to the voice of Billie Holiday. Now she writes letters to departed friends, to her lost land, to her lover, to her city, to the war itself, letters with the quality of slow, sensuous, sad music. Now the strange fruit is hanging from the trees outside Asmahan’s own windows, and she has become the lady singing the blues.

“In Lebanon,” Edward Said has said, “the novel exists largely as a form recording its own impossibility, shading off or breaking into autobiography (as in the remarkable proliferation of Lebanese women’s writing), reportage, pastiche.” How to create literature—how to preserve its fragilities, and also its tough-minded individuality—in the middle of an explosion? Elias Khoury, in his brilliant short novel
Little Mountain
(1977), created an amalgam of fable, surrealism, reportage, low comedy, and memoir that provided one response to this question. Hanan al-Shaykh, perhaps the finest of the women writers to whom Said referred—author of the acclaimed
The Story of Zahra
and
Women of Sand and Myrrh
—offers a new solution. What unifies her novel’s shattered universe is the presence, everywhere in her prose, of the low, unabated fever of human desire. It is the melancholy, luscious portrait of letter-writing Asmahan, a true sensualist of Beirut, a woman given to spending long afternoons oiling her hair, who acts with a sexual freedom and writes with an explicitness of erotic feeling and description that makes this novel pretty daring by the puritanical, censorious standards of the mosque- and militia-ridden present.

Asmahan begins and ends her epistolary narrative with letters to an old friend, Hayat, now living abroad; and the question of exile is one of the book’s recurring motifs. (Modern Arabic literature is, more and more, a literature not only of exile but by exiles; the men of violence and God are making sure of that.) Asmahan feels sorry for her old friend, living away from home and missing Lebanese food; she feels almost contemptuous of the returning writer Jawad, with his smart questions, his appointments, his arrival as a voyeur of her lived reality. “Then one day he opened his eyes . . . the newspapers no longer provided him with a hunting-ground for his sarcastic jokes; it almost seemed to cause him physical pain to read of the senselessness of what was happening.” At this moment, he and Asmahan begin their affair; and so she must choose between new love and old home, for Jawad will leave Beirut. She, too, must contemplate exile. Perhaps, in the name of love, she must become like Hayat, her friend and mirror-soul, for whom she has felt such pity, even scorn.

It would be wrong to reveal Asmahan’s final choice, but it is not easily made. Her attachment to Beirut is very deep, even though, in a letter to Jill Morrell, she compares herself to the hostages. “My mind is no longer my own. . . . I possess my body but not, even temporarily, the ground I walk on. What does it mean to be kidnapped? Being separated forcibly from your environment, family, friends, home, bed. So in some strange way I can persuade myself that I’m worse off than them. . . . For I’m still in my own place, but separated from it in a painful way: this is my city and I don’t recognize it.” Al-Shaykh brings to this transformed Beirut a passion of description. Here are cows that have become addicted to cannabis, and Iranian signs on shopfronts, and plastic-bottle trees. Old place-names have lost meaning and new ones have sprung up. There are Palestinians who speak a Beckettian language: “I’ll have to kill myself. No, I must keep going,” and there are militias and terrorists, and there is the War. “People have a desperate need to enter any conflict which has become familiar . . . to save them searching further afield and investigating the mysteries of life and death,” Asmahan writes. “You [the War] give them confidence and a kind of serenity; people make this precious discovery and play your game.”

What shall I do with these ideas? agonizes Asmahan, and perhaps the best answer lies in her indomitable grandmother’s advice. “Remember who we are. Make sure the larder and the fridge are never empty.” In this, her finest novel, fluently translated by Catherine Cobham, Hanan al-Shaykh makes that act of remembrance, joining it to an unforgettable portrait of a broken city. It should be read by everyone who cares about the truths behind the clichéd Beirut of the TV news; and by everyone who cares about the more enduring, and universal, truths of the heart.

March 1995

Arthur Miller at Eighty

[
Originally delivered as part of a birthday celebration for and of Arthur Miller at the University of East Anglia
]

Arthur Miller’s is not only a great life; it is also a great book,
Timebends,
an autobiography that reads like a great American novel—as if Bellow’s Augie March had grown up to be a tall Jewish playwright and had, in Bellow’s famous words, “made the record in his own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

In an age when much literature and even more literary criticism has turned inward, losing itself in halls of mirrors, Arthur Miller’s double insistence on the reality of the real, and on the moral function of writing, sounds once again as radical as it did in his youth. “The effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization,” he calls it, adding, “But, as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.”

When a great writer reaches a great age, the temptation to turn him into an institution, into a statue of himself, is easily succumbed to. But to read Miller is to discover, on every page, the enduring relevance of his thought: “The ultimate human mystery,” he writes, “may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.” The sharpness of such perceptions makes Miller very much our contemporary, a man for this season as well as all his others. Willy Loman’s line “I still feel kind of temporary about myself” is also the way Arthur Miller says he has always felt. “This desire to move on, to metamorphose—or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary—was given me as life’s inevitable condition.” In Miller, the temporary and the contemporary are united, and shown to be the same thing.

Miller’s genius has always been to reveal what the opening stage directions to
Death of a Salesman
call the “dream rising out of reality.” By paying attention, he discovers the miraculous within the real. His is a life dedicated as passionately to the remembrance, and the enlivening through art, of the small and the unconsidered as it is to the articulation of the great moral issues of the day. Here, in his autobiography, is an endless sequence of men and women caught in wonderful cameos: the great-grandfather who was “an orchestra of scents—each of his gestures smelled different”; and the rabbi who stole the dying patriarch’s diamonds, and had to be beaten up by the dying man before he returned them; and Mr. Dozick the pharmacist, who sewed up Miller’s brother’s ear on his drugstore table; and the Polish school bully who taught Miller some early lessons in anti-Semitism; and Lucky Luciano in Palermo, nostalgic for America, and scarily over-generous, so that Miller began to fear being lost in the Bunyanesque “swamp of Something for Nothing, from which there is no return.”

Moral stature is a rare quality in these degraded days. Very few writers possess it. Miller’s seems innate but was much increased because he was able to learn from his mistakes. Like Günter Grass, who was brought up in a Nazi household and had the dizzying experience, after the war, of learning that everything he had believed to be true was a lie, Arthur Miller has had—more than once—to discard his worldviews. Coming from a family of profit-minded men, and discovering Marxism at sixteen, he learned that “the true condition of men was the complete opposite of the competitive system I had assumed was normal, with all its mutual hatreds and conniving. Life could be a comradely embrace, people helping one another rather than looking for ways to trip each other up.” Later, Marxism came to seem less idealistic. “Deep down in the comradely world of the Marxist promise is parricide,” he wrote, and, when he and Lillian Hellman were faced with a Yugoslav man’s testimony of the horrors of Soviet domination, he says, unsparingly: “We seemed history’s fools.”

But he has not remained history’s fool. Through his stand against McCarthyism, in his presidency of PEN, his fight against censorship, and his defense of persecuted writers around the world, he has grown into the giant figure we are gathered here to honor. When I needed help, I am proud that Arthur Miller’s was one of the first and loudest voices raised on my behalf, and it is a privilege to be able to speak here and thank him tonight.

When Arthur Miller says, “We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it,” his words carry the weight of lived experience, of his own profound re-imaginings. Most of all, however, they carry the weight of his genius. Arthur, we celebrate the genius, and the man. Happy birthday.

October 1995

In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again

At the centenary conference of the British Publishers’ Association recently, Professor George Steiner said a mouthful:

We are getting very tired in our novels. . . . Genres rise, genres fall, the epic, the verse epic, the formal verse tragedy. Great moments, then they ebb. Novels will continue to be written for quite a while but, increasingly, the search is on for hybrid forms, what we will call rather crassly fact/fiction. . . . What novel can today quite compete with the best of reportage, with the very best of immediate narrative? . . .

Pindar [was] the first man on record to say,
this poem will be sung when the city which commissioned it has ceased to exist.
Literature’s immense boast against death. To say this today even the greatest poet, I dare venture, would be profoundly embarrassed. . . . The great classical vainglory—but what a wonderful vainglory—of literature.
“I am stronger than death. I can speak about death in poetry, drama, the novel, because I have overcome it, because I am more or less permanent.”
That is no longer available.

So here it is once more, wrapped up in the finest, shiniest rhetoric: I mean, of course, that tasty old chestnut, the death of the Novel. To which Professor Steiner adds, for good measure, the death (or at least the radical transformation) of the Reader, into some sort of computer whiz-kid, some sort of super-nerd; and the death (or at least the radical transformation, into electronic form) of the Book itself. The death of the Author having been announced several years ago in France—and the death of Tragedy by Professor Steiner himself in an earlier obituary—that leaves the stage strewn with more bodies than the end of
Hamlet.

Still standing in the midst of the carnage, however, is a lone, commanding figure, a veritable Fortinbras, before whom all of us, writers of authorless texts, post-literate readers, the House of Usher that is the publishing industry—the
Denmark,
with something rotten in it, that is the publishing industry—and indeed books themselves, must bow our heads: viz., naturally, the Critic.

One prominent writer has also in recent weeks announced the demise of the form of which he has been so celebrated a practitioner. Not only has V. S. Naipaul ceased to write novels: the word “novel” itself, he tells us, now makes him feel ill. Like Professor Steiner, the author of
A House for Mr. Biswas
feels that the novel has outlived its historical moment, no longer fulfills any useful role, and will be replaced by factual writing. Mr. Naipaul, it will surprise no one to learn, is presently to be found at the leading edge of history, creating this new post-fictional literature.
*6

Another major British writer has this to say. “It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels,’ which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology, are now
always
uttered in a tone of pride . . . the novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised, and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tomb-stones, or the Punch and Judy Show.”

That is George Orwell, writing in 1936. It would appear—as Professor Steiner in fact concedes—that literature has never had a future. Even the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
received bad early reviews. Good writing has always been attacked, notably by other good writers. The most cursory glance at literary history reveals that no masterpiece has been safe from assault at the time of its publication, no writer’s reputation unassailed by his contemporaries: Aristophanes called Euripides “a cliché anthologist . . . and maker of ragamuffin manikins”; Samuel Pepys thought
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“insipid and ridiculous”; Charlotte Brontë dismissed the work of Jane Austen; Zola pooh-poohed
Les Fleurs du Mal;
Henry James trashed
Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights,
and
Our Mutual Friend.
Everybody sneered at
Moby-Dick. Le Figaro
announced, when
Madame Bovary
was published, that “M. Flaubert is not a writer”; Virginia Woolf called
Ulysses
“underbred”; and the
Odessa Courier
wrote of
Anna Karenina,
“Sentimental rubbish. . . . Show me one page that contains an idea.”

So, when today’s German critics attack Günter Grass, when today’s Italian literati are “surprised,” as the French novelist and critic Guy Scarpetta tells us, to learn of Italo Calvino’s and Leonardo Scascia’s high international reputations, when the cannons of American political correctness are turned on Saul Bellow, when Anthony Burgess belittles Graham Greene moments after Greene’s death, and when Professor Steiner, ambitious as ever, takes on not just a few individual writers but the whole literary output of post-war Europe, they may all be suffering from culturally endemic golden-ageism: that recurring, bilious nostalgia for a literary past which never, at the time, seemed that much better than the present does now.

Professor Steiner says, “It is almost axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America,” and some will find it surprising that I should take issue with this vision of an exhausted center and vital periphery. If I do so, it is in part because it is such a very Eurocentric lament. Only a Western European intellectual would compose a lament for an entire art form on the basis that the literatures of, say, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy were no longer the most interesting on earth. (It is unclear whether Professor Steiner considers the United States to be in the center or on the far rim; the geography of this flat-earther vision of literature is a little hard to follow. From where I sit, American literature looks to be in good shape.) What does it matter where the great novels come from, as long as they keep coming? What is this flat earth on which the good professor lives, with jaded Romans at the center and frightfully gifted Hottentots and Anthropophagi lurking at the edges? The map in Professor Steiner’s head is an imperial map, and Europe’s empires are long gone. The half century whose literary output proves, for Steiner and Naipaul, the novel’s decline is also the first half century of the post-colonial period. Might it not simply be that a new novel is emerging, a post-colonial novel, a de-centered, transnational, interlingual, cross-cultural novel; and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation of the contemporary novel’s health than Professor Steiner’s somewhat patronizingly Hegelian view that the reason for the creativity of the “far rim” is that these are areas “which are in an earlier stage of the bourgeois culture, which are in an earlier, rougher, more problematic form.”

It was, after all, the Franco regime’s success in stifling decade after decade of Spanish literature that shifted the spotlight to the fine writers working in Latin America. The so-called Latin American boom was, accordingly, as much the result of the corruption of the old bourgeois world as of the allegedly primitive creativity of the new. And the description of India’s ancient, sophisticated culture as existing in an “earlier, rougher” state than the West is bizarre. India, with its great mercantile classes, its sprawling bureaucracies, its exploding economy, possesses one of the largest and most dynamic bourgeoisies in the world, and has done so for at least as long as Europe. Great literature and a class of literate readers are nothing new in India. What is new is the emergence of a gifted generation of Indian writers
working in English.
What is new is that the “center” has deigned to notice the “rim,” because the “rim” has begun to speak in its myriad versions of a language the West can more easily understand.

Even Professor Steiner’s portrait of an exhausted Europe is, in my view, simply and demonstrably false. The last fifty years have given us the oeuvres of, to name just a few, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Günter Grass, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Yourcenar. We can all make our own lists. If we include writers from beyond the frontiers of Europe, it becomes clear that the world has rarely seen so rich a crop of great novelists living and working at the same time—that the easy gloom of the Steiner-Naipaul position is not just depressing but unjustified. If V. S. Naipaul no longer wishes, or is no longer able, to write novels, it is our loss. But the art of the novel will undoubtedly survive without him.

There is, in my view, no crisis in the art of the novel. The novel is precisely that “hybrid form” for which Professor Steiner yearns. It is part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional. It crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries. He is right, however, that many good writers have blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. Ryszard Kapuscinski’s magnificent book about Haile Selassie,
The Emperor,
is an example of this creative blurring. The so-called New Journalism developed in America by Tom Wolfe and others was a straightforward attempt to steal the novel’s clothes, and in the case of Wolfe’s own
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,
or
The Right Stuff,
the attempt was persuasively successful. The category of “travel writing” has expanded to include works of profound cultural meditation: Claudio Magris’s
Danube,
say, or Neal Ascherson’s
Black Sea.
And in the face of a brilliant non-fictional tour de force such as Roberto Calasso’s
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,
in which a re-examination of the Greek myths achieves all the tension and intellectual excitement of the best fiction, one can only applaud the arrival of a new kind of imaginative essay writing—or, better, the return of the encyclopedic playfulness of Diderot or Montaigne. The novel can welcome these developments without feeling threatened. There’s room for all of us in here.

A few years ago the British novelist Will Self published a funny short story called “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” which suggested that the sum total of sanity available to the human race might be fixed, might be a constant; so that the attempt to cure the insane was useless, as the effect of one individual regaining his sanity would inevitably be that someone somewhere else would lose theirs, as if we were all sleeping in a bed covered by a blanket—of sanity—that wasn’t quite big enough to cover us all. One of us pulls the blanket toward us; another’s toes are instantly exposed. It is a richly comic idea, and it recurs in Professor Steiner’s zaniest argument, which he offers with a perfectly straight face—that at any given moment, there exists a total quantum of creative talent, and at present the lure of the cinema, television, and even of advertising is pulling the blanket of genius away from the novel, which consequently lies exposed, shivering in its pajamas in the depths of our cultural winter.

The trouble with the theory is that it supposes all creative talent to be of the same kind. Apply this notion to athletics and its absurdity becomes apparent. The supply of marathon runners is not diminished by the popularity of sprint events. The quality of high jumpers is unrelated to the number of great exponents of the pole vault.

It is more likely that the advent of new art forms allows new groups of people to enter the creative arena. I know of very few great filmmakers who might have been good novelists—Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, and that’s about it. How many pages of Quentin Tarantino’s snappy material, his gangsters’ riffs about eating Big Macs in Paris, could you read if you didn’t have Samuel Jackson or John Travolta speaking them for you? The best screenwriters are the best precisely because they think not novelistically but pictorially.

I am, in short, much less worried than Steiner about the threat posed to the novel by these newer, high-tech forms. It is perhaps the low-tech nature of the act of writing that will save it. Means of artistic expression that require large quantities of finance and sophisticated technology—films, plays, records—become, by virtue of that dependence, easy to censor and to control. But what one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

I agree with Professor Steiner’s celebration of modern science—“today that is where the joy is, that is where the hope is, the energy, the formidable sense of world upon world opening up,” but this burst of scientific creativity is, ironically, the best riposte to his “quantity theory of creativity.” The idea that potential great novelists have been lost to the study of sub-atomic physics or black holes is as implausible as its opposite: that the great writers of history—Jane Austen, say, or James Joyce—might easily, had they but taken a different turning, have been the Newtons and Einsteins of their day.

In questioning the quality of creativity to be found in the modern novel, Professor Steiner points us in the wrong direction. If there is a crisis in present-day literature, it is of a somewhat different kind.

The novelist Paul Auster recently told me that all American writers had to accept that they were involved in an activity which was, in the United States, no more than a minority interest, like, say, soccer. This observation chimes with Milan Kundera’s complaint, in his new volume of essays,
Testaments Betrayed,
of “Europe’s incapacity to defend and explain (explain patiently to itself and to others) that most European of arts, the art of the novel; in other words, to explain and defend its own culture. The ‘children of the novel,’ ” Kundera argues, “have abandoned the art that shaped them. Europe, the society of the novel, has abandoned its own self.” Auster is talking about the death of the American reader’s interest in this kind of reading matter; Kundera, about the death of the European reader’s sense of cultural connection with this kind of cultural product. Add these to Steiner’s illiterate, computer-obsessed child of tomorrow, and perhaps we are talking about something like the death of reading itself.