The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (14 page)

Sherry is helped in her literary efforts to think up 1001 stories by a genie who is, like so many of Barth's male protagonists, a
thoroughly good person
: his policy “was to share beds with no woman who did not reciprocate his feelings.” For a United Statesman (posing as an Arabian genie), this is true heterosexual maturity. In case we missed Barth's first testimonial to the genie's niceness, we are later told that “he was no more tempted to infidelity than to incest or pederasty.” I guess this makes him about the best genie on campus. Between Genie and Sherry there is a lot of talk about the nature of fiction, which is of course the only reason for writing university fiction. There is not a glimmer of intelligence in this jaunty tale.

Barth was born and grew up a traditional cracker-barrelly sort of American writer, very much in the mainstream—a stream by no means polluted or at an end. But he chose not to continue in the vein that was most natural to him. Obviously he has read a good deal about Novel Theory. He has the standard American passion not only to be original but to be great, and this means creating one of Richard Poirier's “worlds elsewhere”: an alternative imaginative structure to the mess that we have made of our portion of the Western Hemisphere. Aware of French theories about literature (but ignorant of the culture that has produced those theories), superficially acquainted with Greek myth, deeply involved in the academic life of the American university, Barth is exactly the sort of writer our departments of English were bound, sooner or later, to produce. Since he is a writer with no great gift for language either demotic or mandarin, Barth's narratives tend to lack energy; and the currently fashionable technique of stopping to take a look at the story as it is being told simply draws attention to the meagerness of what is there.

I am obliged to remark upon the sense of suffocation one experiences reading so much bad writing. As the weary eyes flick from sentence to sentence, one starts
willing
the author to be good. Either I have become shell-shocked by overexposure to the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air or Barth has managed a decent narrative in “Perseid.” As usual, the language is jangling everyday speech: “Just then I'd've swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to dip it in….” The gods and demigods are straight from Thorne Smith, who ought to be regarded, in Harry T. Moore's
galère
, as the American Dante. But the story of the middle-aged Perseus and his problems of erection (and love) with a young girl seems at times authentic, even true…despite Barth's unremitting jocosity: “‘Were you always psychosexually weak, or is that Andromeda's doing?'”

In some ways, the writers' interviews are more revealing about the state of fiction than the books they write. The twelve writers interviewed for Joe David Bellamy's book often sound truculent; also, uneasy. For instance, John Gardner (whose
Grendel
I much admired) is very truculent, but then Mr. Barthelme is on record as not admiring him; this cannot help but hurt. Gardner is as much his own man as anyone can be who teaches school and wants to get good reviews from his fellow teachers in
The New York Times Book Review
. Yet he dares to say of
The Sot-Weed Factor
: “nothing but a big joke. It's a philosophical joke; it might even be argued that it's a philosophical advance. But it ain't like Victor Hugo.” It also ain't an advance of any kind. Although Gardner is myth-minded, he is much more intuitive and authentic than the usual academic browser in Robert Graves's compendium. Gardner also knows where proto-myths are to be found: Walt Disney's work, for one.

Gardner tells us that “most writers today are academicians: they have writing or teaching jobs with universities. In the last ten years the tone of university life and of intellectuals' responses to the world have changed. During the Cold War there was a great deal of fear and cynicism on account of the Bomb.” Gardner then makes the astonishing suggestion that when the other Americans (those somewhat unreal millions condemned to live off-campus) turned against the Vietnam war (after eight years of defeat), the mood changed in the universities as the academicians realized that “the people around you are all working hard to make the world better.” A startling observation. In any case, the writers of University or U-novels will now become more life-affirming than they were in the sad Sixties; “notable exceptions are writers who very carefully stay out of the mainstream and therefore can't be influenced by the general feeling of people around them.”

At first I thought Gardner was joking. But I was wrong. He really believes that the mainstream of the world is the American university and that a writer outside this warm and social-meliorizing ambience will fall prey to old-fashioned cynicism and hardness of heart. For instance, “Pynchon stays out of universities. He doesn't know what chemists and physicists are doing; he knows only the pedantry of chemistry and physics. When good chemists and physicists talk about, say, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, they agree that for life to be evolved beyond our stage, creators on other planets must have reached decisions we now face.” Removed from the academic mainstream and its extraterrestrial connections, Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow
is just an apocalyptic “whine.”

Fortunately, Gardner's imagination is fabulous; otherwise, he would be fully exposed in his work as being not only
not
in the mainstream of American society but perfectly irrelevant in his academic
cul de sac
. Yet if he is right that most contemporary writers are also teaching school and listening in on warm-hearted life-enhancing physicists and chemists as they talk of their peers on other planets, then literature has indeed had its day and there will be no more books except those that teachers write to teach.

Although Barthelme has mentioned Pynchon as one of the writers he admires, neither Gass nor Barth refers to him and Gardner thinks him a “whiner” because he no longer spawns in the mainstream of Academe. I daresay that it will come as news to these relatively young writers that American literature, such as it is, has never been the work of schoolteachers. Admittedly, each year it is harder and harder for a writer to make a living from writing, and many writers must find the temptation to teach overwhelming. Nevertheless, those of us who emerged in the Forties (Roosevelt's children) regarded the university (as did our predecessors) as a kind of skid row far worse than a seven-year writer's contract at Columbia (the studio, not the university). Except for Saul Bellow, I can think of no important novelist who has taught on a regular basis throughout a career.

I find it admirable that of the nonacademics Pynchon did not follow the usual lazy course of going for tenure as did so many writers—no, “writers”—of his generation. He is thirty-nine years old and attended Cornell (took a class from former Professor V. Nabokov); he is eminently
academebile
. The fact that he has got out into the world (somewhere) is to his credit. Certainly he has not, it would seem, missed a trick; and he never whines.

Pynchon's first novel,
V.
, was published in 1963. There is some similarity to other R and D works. Cute names abound. Benny Profane, Dewey Gland, Rachel Owlglass. Booze flows through scene after scene involving members of a gang known as The Whole Sick Crew. The writing is standard American. “Kilroy was possibly the only objective onlooker in Valletta that night. Common legend had it he'd been born in the U.S. right before the war, on a fence or latrine wall.” Above this passage is a reproduction of the classic Kilroy sketch; below this passage there is a broken-line Kilroy. These are the only graphics in a long book that also contains the usual quotation marks and “he saids.” All in all, a naturalistic rendering of an essentially surrealist or perhaps irrealist subject, depending on one's apprehension of the work.

Benny Profane is described as “a schlemihl and human yo-yo.” He is a former sailor. On Christmas Eve 1955 he is in Norfolk, Virginia. He goes into a bar, “his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.” People with funny names sing songs at each other (lyrics provided in full by the author) and everyone drinks a lot. There is vomiting. Scene with a girl: “What sort of Catholic was she? Profane, who was only half Catholic (mother Jewish), whose morality was fragmentary (being derived from experience and not much of it)….” Profane is “girl-shy” and fat. “‘If I was God…'” begins a fantasy. Definitely a clue to the state of mind of the creator of the three books I have been reading.

A shift from Profane to “Young Stencil, the world adventurer” and the mystery woman V. Elliptical conversation (1946) between a margravine and Stencil (whose father Sidney was in the British foreign office; he died in Malta “while investigating the June Disturbances”). They sit on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. “Perhaps they may have felt like the last two gods.” Reference to an entry in father's journal, “‘There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she.'” Stencil pursues the idea of V. A quest: “in the tradition of
The Golden Bough
or
The White Goddess
.”

From various references to Henry Adams and to physics in Pynchon's work, I take it that he has been influenced by Henry Adams's theory of history as set forth in
The Education of Henry Adams
and in the posthumously published “The Rule of Phase Applied to History.” For Adams, a given human society in time was an organism like any other in the universe and he favored Clausius's speculation that “the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum” (an early Pynchon short story is called “Entropy”).

Maximum entropy is that state at which no heat/energy enters or leaves a given system. But nothing known is constant. The Second Law of Thermodynamics appears to be absolute: everything in time loses energy to something else and, finally, drops to zero (centigrade) and dies or, perhaps, ceases to be matter as it was and becomes anti-matter. Question: to anti-matter are we anti-anti-matter or no matter at all?

I have little competence in the other of Lord Snow's celebrated two cultures. Like so many other writers I flunked physics. But I know my Adams and I can grasp general principles (without understanding how they have been arrived at); in any case, to make literature, a small amount of theory is enough to provide commanding metaphors. Pynchon's use of physics is exhilarating and as an artist he appears to be gaining more energy than he is losing. Unlike the zero writers, he is usually at the boil. From Adams he has not only appropriated the image of history as Dynamo but the attractive image of the Virgin. Now armed with these concepts he embarks in
V
. on a quest, a classic form of narrative, and the result is mixed, to say the least.

To my ear, the prose is pretty bad, full of all the rattle and buzz that were in the air when the author was growing up, an era in which only the television commercial was demonically acquiring energy, leaked to it by a declining Western civilization. Happily, Pynchon is unaffected by the French disease, except for one passage: “Let me describe the room. The room measures 17 by 11
¹
/
₂
feet by 7 feet. The walls are lathe and plaster…. The room is oriented so that its diagonals fall NNE/SSW, and NW/SE.” As another ex-seaman, I appreciate Pynchon's ability to box the compass, something no French ice-cream vendor could ever do. With this satisfying send-up, Pynchon abandons the New Novel for his own worlds and anti-worlds.

The quest for V. (the Virgin? or nothing much?) takes Stencil to Valletta, capital of Malta, a matriarchal island, we are told, where manhood must identify itself with the massive rock. There are clues. False scents. Faust is on the scene. And Profane is also in Malta. The prose is very close to that of the comic books of the Fifties:

“Thirteen of us rule the world in secret.”

“Yes, yes. Stencil went out of his way to bring Profane here. He should have been more careful; he wasn't. Is it really his own extermination he's after?”

Maijstral turned smiling to him. Gestured behind his back at the ramparts of Valletta. “Ask her,” he whispered. “Ask the rock.”

Energy nicely maintained; controlling intelligence uneven.

With
The Crying of Lot 49
(1966) Pynchon returns to the quest, to conspiracy. Cute names like Genghis Cohen, an ancient Hollywood joke. Bad grammar: “San Narcisco lay further south,” “some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin.” A lot of booze. Homophobia. Mysteries. It would appear that most of the courses Pynchon took at Cornell are being used: first-year physics, psychology, Jacobean tragedy—but then his art is no doubt derived “from experience and not much of that.”

This time the grail is an alternative postal service. Haunting the narrative is the noble house of Thurn and Taxis (the wife of a descendant was a literary agent in the United States: known to Pynchon? Also, Rilke's patroness was a princess of that house). Jokes: “‘I was in the little boys' room,' he said. ‘The men's room was full.'” There are numerous images of paranoia, the lurking “they” who dominate the phantom postal service of the Tristero (sometimes spelled Trystero), a mirror-alternative in earlier times to the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly. “While the Pony Express is defying deserts, savages and sidewinders, Tristero's giving its employees crash courses in Siouan and Athapascan dialects. Disguised as Indians their messengers mosey westward. Reach the coast every time, zero attrition rate, not a scratch on them. The entire emphasis now toward silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance.'” Well, Joyce also chose exile, cunning, silence, but eschewed allegiance's mask. Lot 49 has been cried. Who will bid?

Gravity's Rainbow
(1973) contains close to 900 densely printed pages. For a year I have been reading in and at the text. Naturally, I am impressed that a clear-cut majority of the departments of English throughout North America believe this to be the perfect teachers' novel. I am sure that they are right. Certainly no young writer's book has been so praised since Colin Wilson's
The Outsider
.