The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (15 page)

The first section of
Gravity's Rainbow
is called “Beyond the Zero.” Plainly a challenge not only to
l'écriture blanche
but to proud entropy itself. Pynchon has now aimed himself at anti-matter, at what takes place beyond, beneath the zero of freezing, and death. This is superbly ambitious and throughout the text energy hums like a…well, dynamo.

The narrative begins during the Second War, in London. Although Pynchon works hard for verisimilitude and fills his pages with period jabber, anachronisms occasionally jar (there were no “Skinnerites” in that happy time of mass death). The controlling image is that of the V-2, a guided missile developed by the Germans and used toward the end of the war (has Pynchon finally found V.? and is she a bomb?). There is an interesting epigraph from Werner von Braun: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.” Braun believes “in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.” So much then for zero degree. This quasi-Hindu sentiment is beguiling and comforting and, no doubt, as concerns matter, true: in time or phases, energy is always lost but matter continues in new arrangements. Personally, I find it somber indeed to think that individual personality goes on and on beyond zero, time. But I am in a minority: this generation of Americans is god-hungry and craves reassurance of personal immortality. If Pynchon can provide it, he will be as a god—rather his intention, I would guess.

It is curious to read a work that excites the imagination but disturbs the aesthetic sense. A British critic no longer in fashion recently made the entirely unfashionable observation that prose has everywhere declined in quality as a result of mass education. To compare Pynchon with Joyce, say, is to compare a kindergartener to a graduate student (the permanent majority of the culturally inadequate will promptly respond that the kindergartener
sees
more clearly than the graduate student and that his incompetence with language is a sign of innocence not ignorance and hence grace). Pynchon's prose rattles on and on, broken by occasional lengthy songs every bit as bad, lyrically, as those of Bob Dylan.

Light-up, and-shine, you—in-candescent Bulb Ba-bies!

Looks-like ya got ra-bies

Just lay there foamin' and a-screamin' like a buncha little demons,

I'm deliv'rin' unto you a king-dom of roa-ches….

England. Germany. Past. Present. War. Science. Telltale images of approaching…deity? Two characters with hangovers “are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier.” Of sandbags at a door, “provisional pyramids erected to gratify curious gods' offspring.” And “slicks of nighttime vomit, pale yellow, clear as the fluids of gods.” Under deity, sex is central to this work of transformation. A character's erections achieve a mysterious symbiosis with the V-2
S
. A sadist abuses a young man and woman. “Every true god must be both organizer and destroyer.” A character declaims: “‘If only S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the state would wither away.'” This is a nice joke (although I thought S and M was already universal at the family level). “‘Submit, Gottfried. Give it all up. See where she takes you. Think of the first time I fucked you…. Your little rosebud bloomed.'” Hard to believe that it is close to a decade since that pretty moss tea-rose was first forced, as it were, in my greenhouse.

Eventually, the text exhausts patience and energy. In fact, I suspect that the energy expended in reading
Gravity's Rainbow
is, for anyone, rather greater than that expended by Pynchon in the actual writing. This is entropy with a vengeance. The writer's text is ablaze with the heat/ energy that his readers have lost to him. Yet the result of this exchange is neither a readerly nor a writerly text but an uneasy combination of both. Energy and intelligence are not in balance, and the writer fails in his ambition to be a god of creation. Yet his ambition and his failure are very much in the cranky, solipsistic American vein, and though I doubt if anyone will ever want to read all of this book, it will certainly be taught for a very long (delta) time: “approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes nearer….” Everything is running down. We shall freeze. Then what? A film by Stanley Kubrick?

Richard Poirier is more satisfied than I with Pynchon's latest work. For one thing, he is awed by the use of science. Approvingly, he quotes Wordsworth's hope that the poet would one day “be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of science itself.” Pynchon would appear to fulfill Wordsworth's reverie. He is as immersed in contemporary physics and cybernetics as Henry Adams was in the scientific theories of
his
day. But the scientific aspects of Pynchon's work will eventually become as out-of-date as those of Henry Adams. Science changes: one day we are monists, the next day pluralists. Proofs are always being disproven by other proofs. At the end, there are only words and their arrangement.

Poirier compares Pynchon to the Faulkner of
Absalom, Absalom
and finds both likeness and a significant difference, for “this genius of our day is shaped by thermodynamics and the media, by Captain Marvel rather than by Colonel Sartoris.” This is no doubt a true description, but is the result as good? or good? What I find to be tedious and random in Pynchon's list-making, Poirier sees as so many

Dreiserian catalogues of the waste materials of our world that only by remaining resolutely on the periphery, without ever intruding himself into the plotting that emanates from his material, only then can he see what most humanly matters.

“Matter,” a verb. “Matter,” a noun. The matter of fiction has been expanded by Pynchon's ascent from zero degree (writing as well as centigrade); nevertheless, entropy is sovereign. That which gains energy/heat does so at the expense of that which is losing energy/heat to it. At the end there is only the cold and no sublunary creatures will ever know what songs the quasars sing in their dark pits of anti-matter.

I cannot help but feel a certain depression after reading Mr. Barthelme's chosen writers. I realize that language changes from generation to generation. But it does not, necessarily, improve. The meager rattling prose of all these writers, excepting Gass, depresses me. Beautiful sentences are not easy to write, despite Mr. Barthelme's demur. Since beauty is relative only to intention, there are doubtless those who find beauty in the pages of books where I find “a flocculent appearance, something opaque, creamy and curdled, something powerless ever to achieve the triumphant smoothness of Nature. But what best reveals it for what it is is the sound it gives, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colors, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality….” What is “it”? The work of the new American formalists? No, “it” is plastic, as described by Barthes in
Mythologies
.

The division between what I have elsewhere called the Public-novel and the University-novel is now too great to be bridged by any but the occasional writer who is able to appeal, first to one side, then to the other, fulfilling the expectations (more or less) of each. I find it hard to take seriously the novel that is written to be taught, nor can I see how the American university can provide a base for the making of “new” writing when the American university is, at best, culturally and intellectually conservative and, at worst, reactionary.

Academics tell me that I am wrong. They assure me that if it were not for them, the young would never read the Public-novels of even the recent past (Faulkner, Fitzgerald). If this is true, then I would prefer for these works decently to die rather than to become teaching-tools, artifacts stinking of formaldehyde in a classroom (original annotated text with six essays by the author and eight critical articles examining the parameters of the author's vision). But the academic bureaucracy, unlike the novel, will not wither away, and the future is dark for literature. Certainly the young in general are not going to take up reading when they have such easy alternatives as television, movies, rock. The occasional student who might have an interest in reading will not survive a course in English, unless of course he himself intends to become an academic bureaucrat.

As for Thomas Pynchon, one can applaud his deliberate ascent from Academe into that dangerous rainbow sky in which he will make his parabola and fall as gravity pulls him back to where he started, to Academe, to zero, or to (my first graphic, ever)
.

The New York Review of Books
July 15, 1974

CALVINO'S NOVELS

Between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, there was a burst of creative activity throughout the American empire as well as in our client states of Western Europe. From Auden's
Age of Anxiety
to Carson McCuller's
Reflections in a Golden Eye
to Paul Bowles's
The Sheltering Sky
to Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire
to Tudor's ballets and to Bernstein's enthusiasms, it was an exciting time. The cold war was no more than a nip in the air while the junior senator from Wisconsin was just another genial pol with a drinking problem and an eye for the boys. In that happy time the young American writer was able to reel in triumph through the old cities of Europe—the exchange rate entirely in his favor.

Twenty-six years ago this spring I arrived in Rome. First impressions: Acid-yellow forsythia on the Janiculum. Purple wisteria in the Forum. Chunks of goat on a plate in a trattoria. Samuel Barber at the American Academy, talking Italian accurately. Harold Acton politely deploring our barbarous presence in
his
Europe. Frederic Prokosch at Doney's, eating cakes. Streets empty of cars. Had there been traffic of any kind, Tennessee Williams would have been planted long since in the Protestant cemetery, for he drove a jeep although “I am practically
blind
in one eye,” he would say proudly, going through the occasional red light, treating sidewalk and street as one.

I visited George Santayana in his hospital cell at the Convent of the Blue Nuns. He wore a dressing gown; Lord Byron collar open at the withered neck; faded mauve waistcoat. He was genial; made a virtue of his deafness. “
I
will talk. You will listen.” A sly smile; black glittering eyes—he looked exactly like my grandmother gone dramatically bald.

“Have you met my young
new
friend Robert Lowell?” I said no. “He will have a difficult life. To be a Lowell. From Boston. A Catholic
convert
.” The black eyes shone with a lovely malice. “And a poet, too! Oh, dear. Now tell me who is a Mr. Edmund Wilson? He came to see me. I think that he must be very important. In fact, I believe he
said
that he was very important. You sent me a book, he said. I said that I had not. He said but you did, and got very angry. I tried to tell him that I do not
send
books. But later I recalled that when we were rescued by the American army—and how
glad
we were to see you!” A fond glance at me (one still wore khakis, frayed army belt). “A major, a very forceful man, came to see me, with a number of my books. He stood over me and
made
me sign them…for this one, for that one. I was terrified and did as he requested. Perhaps one of those books was for Mr. Wilson.”

The only books in Santayana's cell were his own—and a set of Toynbee's recently published history, which he was reading characteristically; that is, he first broke (or foxed) the spine of the book and undid the sections; then, as he finished reading each section, he would throw it in the wastebasket. “Some sort of preacher, I should think,” he said of Toynbee. “But the footnotes are not entirely worthless.”

Santayana signed a copy of
The Middle Span
for me; he wrote “from” before his name. “I almost never do that,” he said. An appraising look. “You look younger than you are because your head is somewhat small in proportion to your body.” That was in 1948, when the conquering Americans lived in Rome and Paris and strolled streets as yet uncrowded with automobiles or with the billion or so human beings who have since joined us.

In that far-off time, the people one met talked about novels and novelists the way they now talk of movies and directors. Young people today think that I am exaggerating. But novelists mattered then and the Italian novel, in particular, was having a fine flowering. Yet the American writers in Rome and Paris saw little of their counterparts. For one thing, the Italians were just getting around to reading Dos Passos and Steinbeck—the generation that had gone untranslated during the Fascist era. Also, few Italian writers then (or now) spoke or read English with any ease while the American writers then (though not so much now) proudly spoke no language but English.

I do remember in 1948 coming across a book by Italo Calvino. An Italian Calvin, I said to myself, fixing permanently his name in my memory. Idly, I wondered what a man called Italo Calvino would write about. I glanced at his first novel,
Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno
(1947). Something about partisans in Liguria. A fellow war novelist. No, I thought; and put it down. I did note that he was two years older than I, worked for the publisher Einaudi, lived in Turin.

During the last year, I have read Calvino straight through, starting with the book I only glanced at in 1948, now translated as
The Path to the Nest of Spiders
.

Calvino's first novel is a plainly told, exuberant sort of book. Although the writing is conventional, there is an odd intensity in the way Calvino sees things, a closeness of scrutiny much like that of William Golding. Like Golding he knows how and when to occupy entirely, with all senses functioning, landscape, state of mind, act. In
The Spire
Golding makes the flawed church so real that one smells the mortar, sees the motes of dust, fears for the ill-placed stones. Calvino does the same in the story of Pin, a boy living on the Ligurian coast of Italy, near San Remo (although Calvino was brought up in San Remo, he was actually born in Cuba, a detail given by none of his American publishers; no doubt in deference to our recent attempted conquest of that unfortunate island).

Pin lives with his sister, a prostitute. He spends his days at a low-life bar where he amuses with songs and taunts the grown-ups, a race of monsters as far as he is concerned, but he has no other companions, for “Pin is a boy who does not know how to play games, and cannot take part in the games either of children or grown-ups.” Pin dreams, however, of “a friend, a real friend who understands him and whom he can understand, and then to him, and only to him, will he show the place where the spiders have their lairs.”

It's on a stony little path which winds down to the torrent between earthy grassy slopes. There, in the grass, the spiders make their nests, in tunnels lined with dry grass. But the wonderful thing is that the nests have tiny doors, also made of dried grass, tiny round doors which can open and shut.

This sort of precise, quasi-scientific observation keeps Calvino from the sort of sentimentality that was prevalent in the Forties, when wise children learned compassion from a black mammy as she deep-fried chitlins and Jesus in equal parts south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Pin joins the partisans in the hills above the Ligurian coast. I have a suspicion that Calvino is dreaming all this, for he writes like a bookish, near-sighted man who has mislaid his glasses: objects held close-to are vividly described but the middle and far distances of landscape and war tend to blur. It makes no difference, however, for the dreams of a near-sighted young man at the beginning of a literary career can be more real to the reader than the busy reportage of those journalist-novelists who were so entirely there and, seeing it all, saw nothing.

Although Calvino manages to inhabit the skin of the outraged and outrageous child, his men and women are almost always shadowy. Later in his career, Calvino will eliminate men and women altogether as he re-creates the cosmos. Meanwhile, as a beginning, he is a vivid, if occasionally clumsy, writer. Two thirds of the way through the narrative he shifts the point of view from Pin to a pair of commissars who would have been more effective had he observed them from outside. Then, confusingly, he shifts again, briefly, into the mind of a traitor who is about to be shot. Finally, he returns to Pin just as the boy finds the longed-for friend, a young partisan called Cousin who takes him in hand not only literally but, presumably, for the rest of the time Pin will need to grow up. Calvino's last paragraphs are almost always jubilant—the sort of cheerful codas that only a deep pessimist about human matters could write. But then Calvino, like one of Pin's friends, Red Wolf, “belongs to the generation brought up on strip cartoons; he has taken them all seriously and life has not disproved them so far.”

In 1952 Calvino published
The Cloven Viscount
, one of the three short novels he has since collected under the title
Our Ancestors
. They are engaging works, written in a style somewhat like that of T. H. White's Arthurian novels. The narrator of
The Cloven Viscount
is, again, an orphan boy. During a war between Austria and Turkey (1716) the boy's uncle Viscount Medardo was cloven from pate to crotch by a cannonball. Saved by doctors on the battlefield, the half Viscount was sent home with one leg, one arm, one eye, half a nose, mouth, etc. En route, Calvino pays homage (ironic?) to Malaparte (“The patch of plain they were crossing was covered with horses' carcasses, some supine with hooves to the sky, others prone with muzzles dug into the earth”—a nice reprise of those dead horses in
The Skin
).

The story is cheerfully, briskly told. The half Viscount is a perfect bastard and takes pleasure in murder, fire, torture. He burns down part of his own castle, hoping to incinerate his old nurse Sebastiana; finally, he packs her off to a leper colony. He tries to poison his nephew. He never stops slashing living creatures in half. He has a thing about halfness.

“If only I could have every thing like this,” said my uncle, lying face down on the rocks, stroking the convulsive half of an octopus, “so that everyone could escape from his obtuse and ignorant wholeness. I was whole and all things were natural and confused to me, stupid as the air; I thought I was seeing all and it was only the outside rind. If you ever become a half of yourself, and I hope you do for your own sake, my boy, you'll understand things beyond the common intelligence of brains that are whole. You'll have lost half of yourself and of the world, but the remaining half will be a thousand times deeper and more precious.”

I note that the publisher's blurb would have us believe that this is “an allegory of modern man—alienated and mutilated—this novel has profound overtones. As a parody of the Christian parables of good and evil, it is both witty and refreshing.” Well, at least the book is witty and refreshing. Actually the story is less Christian than a send-up of Plato and his ideas of the whole.

In due course the other half of the Viscount hits town; this half is unbearably good and deeply boring. He, too, is given to celebrating halfness because “One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand….” A charming young girl named Pamela (homage to Richardson) is beloved by both halves of the Viscount; but she has serious reservations about each. “Doing good together is the only way to love,” intones the good half. To which the irritable girl responds, “A pity. I thought there were other ways.” When the two halves are finally united, the resulting whole Viscount is the usual not very interesting human mixture. In a happy ending, he marries Pamela. But the boy-narrator is not content. “Amid all this fervor of wholeness, [I] felt myself growing sadder and more lacking. Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”

The Cloven Viscount
is filled with many closely observed natural images like “The subsoil was so full of ants that a hand put down anywhere came up all black and swarming with them.” I don't know which was written first,
The Cloven Viscount
(1952) or “The Argentine Ant,” published in
Botteghe Oscure
(1952), but Calvino's nightmare of an ant-infested world touched on in the novel becomes the subject of “The Argentine Ant” and I fear that I must now trot out that so often misused word “masterpiece.” Or, put another way, if “The Argentine Ant” is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better. Certainly it is as minatory and strange as anything by Kafka. It is also hideously funny. In some forty pages Calvino gives us “the human condition,” as the blurb writers would say, in spades. That is, the human condition
today
. Or the dilemma of modern man. Or the disrupted environment. Or nature's revenge. Or an allegory of grace. Whatever…But a story is, finally, what it tells and no more.

Calvino's first sentence is rather better than God's “in the beginning was the word.” God (as told to Saint John) has always had a penchant for cloudy abstractions of the sort favored by American novelists, heavyweight division—unlike Calvino, who simply tells us what's what: “When we came to settle here we did not know about the ants.” No nonsense about “here” or “we.”
Here
is a place infested with ants and
we
are the nuclear family: father, mother, child. No names.