The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (26 page)

This strikes me as a subtle and wise reading of the world—no, not
a
world but
the
world; and quite the equal of James or Hardy.

Whether or not this sort of careful social reading is still of interest to the few people who read novels voluntarily is not really relevant. But then today's “serious” novel, when it is not reinventing itself as an artifact of words and signs, seldom deals with the world at all. One is no longer shown a businessman making money or his wife climbing up or down the social ladder. As most of our novelists now teach school, they tend to tell us what it is like to be a schoolteacher, and since schoolteachers have been taught to teach others to write only about what they know, they tell us what they know about, too, which is next to nothing about the way the rest of the population of the Republic lives.

In a sense, if they are realists, they are acting in good faith. If you don't know something about the paint business you had better not choose a protagonist who manufactures paint. Today, if the son of an Ohio newspaper editor would like to be a novelist, he would not quit school at fifteen to become a printer, and then learn six languages and do his best to read all the great literary figures of the present as well as of the past so that he could introduce, say, Barthes or Gadda to the American public while writing his own novels based on a close scrutiny of as many classes of society as he can get to know. Rather, he would graduate from high school; go on to a university and take a creative writing course; get an M.A. for having submitted a novel (about the son of an Ohio editor who grew up in a small town
and found out about sex
and wants to be a writer and so goes to a university where he submits, etc.).

Then, if he is truly serious about a truly serious literary career, he will become a teacher. With luck, he will obtain tenure. In the summers and on sabbatical, he will write novels that others like himself will want to teach just as he, obligingly, teaches their novels. He will visit other campuses as a lecturer and he will talk about his books and about those books written by other teachers to an audience made up of ambitious young people who intend to write novels to be taught by one another to the rising generation and so on and on. What tends to be left out of these works is the world. World gone, no voluntary readers. No voluntary readers, no literature—only creative writing courses and English studies, activities marginal (to put it tactfully) to civilization.

3

Civilization was very much on Howells's mind when he came to write
Indian Summer
(1886). He deals, once more, with Americans in Italy. But this time there are no Don Ippolitos. The principals are all Americans in Florence. A middle-aged man, Theodore Colville, meets, again, Mrs. Bowen, a lady who once did not marry him when he wanted to marry her. She married a congressman. She has a young daughter, Effie. She is a widow.

Colville started life as an architect, a suitable occupation for a Howells character; then he shifted to newspaper publishing, an equally suitable profession. In Des Vaches, Indiana, he published, successfully, the
Democrat-Republican
newspaper. Although he lost a race for Congress, he has received from former political opponents “fulsome” praise. Like most American writers Howells never learned the meaning of the word
fulsome
. Colville then sold his newspaper and went to Europe because “he wanted to get away, to get far away, and with the abrupt and total change in his humor he reverted to a period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition of Congress were things undreamed of.” He had been young in Italy, with a Ruskinian interest in architecture; he had loved and been rejected by Evelina—now the widow Bowen. He looks at Florence: “It is a city superficially so well known that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself: they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examined them before, and is disposed to be critical of them.” The same goes for people one has known when young.

Mrs. Bowen has a beautiful young friend named Imogene. Colville decides that he is in love with Imogene, and they drift toward marriage. There are numerous misunderstandings. Finally, it is Mrs. Bowen not Imogene who is in love with Colville. The drama of the three of them (a shadowy young clergyman named Morton is an undelineated fourth) is rendered beautifully. There are many unanticipated turns to what could easily have been a simpleminded romantic novella.

When Colville is confronted with the thought of his own great age (forty-one), he is told by a very old American expatriate:

At forty, one has still a great part of youth before him—perhaps the richest and sweetest part. By that time the turmoil of ideas and sensations is over; we see clearly and feel consciously. We are in a sort of quiet in which we peacefully enjoy. We have enlarged our perspective sufficiently to perceive things in their true proportion and relation; we are no longer tormented with the lurking fear of death, which darkens and imbitters our earlier years; we have got into the habit of life; we have often been ailing and we have not died…

Finally, “we are put into the world to be of it.” Thus, Howells strikes the Tolstoian note. Yes, he is also smiling. But even as
Indian Summer
was being published, its author was attacking the state of Illinois for the murder of four workmen. He also sends himself up in the pages of his own novel. A Mrs. Amsden finds Colville and Imogene and Effie together after an emotional storm. Mrs. Amsden remarks that they form an interesting, even dramatic group:

“Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel,” suggested Colville, “if you're in a romantic mood. One of Mr. James's.”

“Don't you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case.”

For this beguiling modesty Howells no doubt dug even deeper the grave for his reputation. How can an American novelist who is ironic about himself ever be great? In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling. Actually, Howells is fascinated with the interior drama of his characters, and quite a lot happens—to the reader as well as to the characters who are, finally, suitably paired: Imogene and Mr. Morton, Colville and Mrs. Bowen.

The Library of America has served William Dean Howells well. Although the spiritual father of the library, Edmund Wilson, did not want this project ever to fall into the hands of the Modern Language Association, all four of the novels in the present volume bear the proud emblem of that association. One can only assume that there are now fewer scholars outside Academe's groves than within. I found no misprints; but there are eccentricities.

In
A Modern Instance
(p. 474) we read of “the presidential canvas of the summer” then (p. 485) we read “But the political canvass…” Now a tent is made of canvas and an election is a canvass of votes. It is true that the secondary spelling of “canvass” is “canvas” and so allowable; nevertheless, it is disturbing to find the same word spelled two ways within eleven pages. On page 3 the variant spelling “ancles” is used for “ankles.” On page 747 Howells writes “party-colored statues” when, surely, “parti-colored” was nineteenth-century common usage as opposed to the Chaucerian English “party.” Of course, as the editors tell us, “In nineteenth-century writings, for example, a word might be spelled in more than one way, even in the same work, and such variations might be carried into print.”

Anyway, none of this is serious. There are no disfiguring footnotes. The notes at the back are for the most part helpful translations of foreign phrases in the text. The chronology of Howells's life is faultless but, perhaps, skimpy. For those who are obliged for career reasons to read Howells, this is a useful book. For those who are still able to read novels for pleasure, this is a marvelous book.

         

For some years I have been haunted by a story of Howells and that most civilized of all our presidents, James A. Garfield. In the early 1870s Howells and his father paid a call on Garfield. As they sat on Garfield's veranda, young Howells began to talk about poetry and about the poets that he had met in Boston and New York. Suddenly, Garfield told him to stop. Then Garfield went to the edge of the veranda and shouted to his Ohio neighbors. “Come over here! He's telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!” So the neighbors gathered around in the dusk; then Garfield said to Howells, “Now go on.”

Today we take it for granted that no living president will ever have heard the name of any living poet. This is not, necessarily, an unbearable loss. But it is unbearable to have lost those Ohio neighbors who actually read books of poetry and wanted to know about the poets.

For thirty years book-chat writers have accused me of having written that the novel is dead. I wrote no such thing but book-chat writers have the same difficulty extracting meaning from writing as presidents do. What I wrote was, “After some three hundred years the novel in English has lost the general reader (or rather the general reader has lost the novel), and I propose that he will not again recover his old enthusiasm.” Since 1956, the audience for the serious (or whatever this year's adjective is) novel has continued to shrink. Arguably, the readers that are left are for the most part involuntary ones, obliged by the schools to read novels that they often have little taste for. The fact that a novelist like Howells—or even Bellow—is probably no longer accessible to much of anyone would be bearable if one felt that the sense of alternative worlds or visions or—all right, Leslie—nightmares, fantasies, fears could be obtained in some other way. But movies are no substitute while television is, literally, narcotizing: The human eye was not designed to stare at a light for any length of time. Popular prose fictions are still marketed with TV and movie tie-ins, but even the writers or word-processors of these books find it harder and harder to write simply enough for people who don't really know how to read.

Obviously, there is a great deal wrong with our educational system, as President Reagan recently, and rather gratuitously, noted. After all, an educated electorate would not have elected him president. It is generally agreed that things started to go wrong with the schools after the First World War. The past was taught less and less, and Latin and Greek ceased to be compulsory. Languages were either not taught or taught so badly that they might just as well not have been taught at all, while American history books grew more and more mendacious, as Frances FitzGerald so nicely described (
America Revised
, 1979), and even basic geography is now a nonsubject. Yet the average “educated” American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.

         

Edmund Wilson's practical response was to come up with the idea of making readily available the better part of American literature; hence, the Library of America. It is a step in the right direction. But will this library attract voluntary readers? Ultimately—and paradoxically—that will depend on the schools.

Since no one quite knows what a university ought to do, perhaps
that
should be the subject of our educational system. What variety of things should
all
educated people know? What is it that we don't know that we need to know? Naturally, there is a certain risk in holding up a mirror to the system itself (something the realistic novelist always used to do) because one is apt to see, glaring back, the face of Caliban or, worse, plain glass reflecting glass. But something must now be done because Herzen's terrible truth is absolutely true: “The end of each generation is itself.”

The New York Review of Books
October 27, 1983

DAWN POWELL: THE AMERICAN WRITER

1

Once upon a time, New York City was as delightful a place to live in as to visit. There were many amenities, as they say in brochures. One was something called Broadway, where dozens of plays opened each season, and thousands of people came to see them in an area which today resembles downtown Calcutta without, alas, that subcontinental city's deltine charm and intellectual rigor.

One evening back there in once upon a time (February 7, 1957, to be exact) my first play opened at the Booth Theatre. Traditionally, the playwright was invisible to the audience: One hid out in a nearby bar, listening to the sweet nasalities of Pat Boone's rendering of “Love Letters in the Sand” from a glowing jukebox. But when the curtain fell on this particular night, I went into the crowded lobby to collect someone. Overcoat collar high about my face, I moved invisibly through the crowd, or so I thought. Suddenly a voice boomed-tolled across the lobby. “
Gore!
” I stopped; everyone stopped. From the cloakroom a small round figure, rather like a Civil War cannon ball, hurtled toward me and collided. As I looked down into that familiar round face with its snub nose and shining bloodshot eyes, I heard, the entire crowded lobby heard: “
How could you do this?
How could you
sell out
like this? To
Broadway
! To
Commercialism
! How could you give up
The Novel
? Give up the
security
? The security of knowing that every two years there will be—like clockwork—
that five-hundred-dollar advance
!” Thirty years later, the voice still echoes in my mind, and I think fondly of its owner, our best comic novelist. “The field,” I can hear Dawn Powell snarl, “is not exactly overcrowded.”

         

On the night that
Visit to a Small Planet
opened, Dawn Powell was fifty-nine years old. She had published fourteen novels, evenly divided between accounts of her native Midwest (and how the hell to get out of there and make it to New York) and the highly comic New York novels, centered on Greenwich Village, where she lived most of her adult life. Some twenty-three years earlier, the Theatre Guild had produced Powell's comedy
Jig Saw
(one of
her
many unsuccessful attempts to sell out to commercialism), but there was third-act trouble and, despite Spring Byington and Ernest Truex, the play closed after forty-nine performances.

For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. But despite the work of such dedicated cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular. Today, of course, “popular” means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts. She needs no interpretation and in her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O'Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.

In the few interviews that Powell gave, she often mentions as her favorite novel, surprisingly for an American, much less for a woman of her time and place, the
Satyricon
. This sort of thing was not acceptable then any more than it is now. Descriptions of warm, mature, heterosexual love were—and are—woman's writerly task, and the truly serious writers really, heartbreakingly, flunk the course while the pop ones pass with bright honors.

Although Powell received very little serious critical attention (to the extent that there has ever been much in our heavily moralizing culture), when she did get reviewed by a really serious person like Diana Trilling (
The Nation
, May 29, 1948),
la
Trilling warns us that the book at hand is no good because of “the discrepancy between the power of mind revealed on every page of her novel [
The Locusts Have No King
] and the insignificance of the human beings upon which she directs her excellent intelligence.” Trilling does acknowledge the formidable intelligence but because Powell does not deal with morally complex people (full professors at Columbia in mid journey?), “the novel as a whole…fails to sustain the excitement promised by its best moments.”

Apparently, a novel to be serious must be about very serious—even solemn—people rendered in a very solemn—even serious—manner. Wit? What is that? But then we all know that power of mind and intelligence count for as little in the American novel as they do in American life. Fortunately neither appears with sufficient regularity to distress our solemn middle-class middlebrows as they trudge ever onward to some Scarsdale of the mind, where the red light blinks and blinks at pier's end and the fields of the republic rush forward ever faster like a rug rolling up.

         

Powell herself occasionally betrays bewilderment at the misreading of her work. She is aware, of course, that the American novel is a middle-brow middle-class affair and that the reader/writer must be as one in pompous self-regard. “There is so great a premium on dullness,” she wrote sadly (Robert Van Gelder,
Writers and Writing
, New York: Scribner's, 1946), “that it seems stupid to pass it up.” She also remarks that

it is considered jolly and good-humored to point out the oddities of the poor or of the rich. The frailties of millionaires or garbage collectors can be made to seem amusing to persons who are not millionaires or garbage collectors. Their ways of speech, their personal habits, the peculiarities of their thinking are considered fair game. I go outside the rules with my stuff because I can't help believing that the middle class is funny, too.

Well, she was warned by four decades of book-chatterers.

My favorite was the considered judgment of one Frederic Morton (
The New York Times
, September 12, 1954):

But what appears most fundamentally lacking is the sense of outrage which serves as an engine to even the most sophisticated
[sic]
satirist. Miss Powell does not possess the pure indignation that moves Evelyn Waugh to his absurdities and forced Orwell into his haunting contortions. Her verbal equipment is probably unsurpassed among writers of her genre—but she views the antics of humanity with too surgical a calm.

It should be noted that Mr. Morton was the author of the powerful, purely indignant, and phenomenally compassionate novel,
Asphalt and Desire
. In general, Powell's books usually excited this sort of commentary. (Waugh
indignant
? Orwell hauntingly
contorted
?) The fact is that Americans have never been able to deal with wit. Wit gives away the scam. Wit blows the cool of those who are forever expressing a sense of hoked-up outrage. Wit, deployed by a woman with surgical calm, is a brutal assault upon nature—that is, Man. Attis, take arms!

Finally, as the shadows lengthened across the greensward, Edmund Wilson got around to his old friend in
The New Yorker
(November 17, 1962). One reason, he tells us, why Powell has so little appeal to those Americans who read novels is that “she does nothing to stimulate feminine day-dreams [sexist times!]. The woman reader can find no comfort in identifying herself with Miss Powell's heroines. The women who appear in her stories are likely to be as sordid and absurd as the men.” This sexual parity was—is—unusual. But now, closer to century's end than 1962, Powell's sordid, absurd ladies seem like so many Mmes. de Staël compared to our latter-day viragos.

Wilson also noted Powell's originality: “Love is not Miss Powell's theme. Her real theme is the provincial in New York who has come on from the Middle West and acclimatized himself (or herself) to the city and made himself a permanent place there, without ever, however, losing his fascinated sense of an alien and anarchic society.” This is very much to the (very badly written) point. Wilson finds her novels “among the most amusing being written, and in this respect quite on a level with those of Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark.” Wilson's review was of her last book,
The Golden Spur
; three years later she was dead of breast cancer. “Thanks a lot, Bunny,” one can hear her mutter as this belated floral wreath came flying through her transom.

         

Summer. Sunday afternoon. Circa 1950. Dawn Powell's duplex living room at 35 East Ninth Street. The hostess presides over an elliptical aquarium filled with gin: a popular drink of the period known as the martini. In attendance, Coby—just Coby to me for years, her
cavaliere servente
; he is neatly turned out in a blue blazer, rosy faced, sleek silver hair combed straight back. Coby can talk with charm on any subject. The fact that he might be Dawn's lover has never crossed my mind. They are so old. A handsome, young poet lies on the floor, literally at the feet of e. e. cummings and his wife, Marion, who ignore him. Dawn casts an occasional maternal eye in the boy's direction; but the eye is more that of the mother of a cat or a dog, apt to make a nuisance. Conversation flows. Gin flows. Marion Cummings is beautiful; so indeed is her husband, his eyes a faded denim blue. Coby is in great form. Though often his own subject, he records not boring triumphs but improbable disasters. He is always broke, and a once distinguished wardrobe is now in the hands of those gay receivers, his landladies. This afternoon, at home, Dawn is demure; thoughtful. ‘Why,' she suddenly asks, eyes on the long body beside the coffee table, “do they never have floors of their own to sleep on?”

Cummings explains that as the poet lives in Philadelphia he is too far from his own floor to sleep on it. Not long after, the young poet and I paid a call on the Cummingses. We were greeted at the door by an edgy Marion. “I'm afraid you can't come in.” Behind her an unearthly high scream sounded. “Dylan Thomas just died,” she explained. “Is that Mr. Cummings screaming?” asked the poet politely, as the keening began on an even higher note. “No,” said Marion. “That is not Mr. Cummings. That is Mrs. Thomas.”

But for the moment, in my memory, the poet is forever asleep on the floor while on a balcony high up in the second story of Dawn's living room, a gray blurred figure appears and stares down at us. “Who,” I ask, “is that?”

Dawn gently, lovingly, stirs the martinis, squints her eyes, says, “My husband, I think. It is Joe, isn't it, Coby?” She turns to Coby, who beams and waves at the gray man, who withdraws. “Of course it is,” says Coby. “Looking very fit.” I realize, at last, that this is a
ménage à trois
in Greenwich Village. My martini runs over.

2

To date the only study of Dawn Powell is a doctoral dissertation by Judith Faye Pett (University of Iowa, 1981). Miss Pett has gathered together a great deal of biographical material for which one is grateful. I am happy to know, at last, that the amiable Coby's proper name was Coburn Gilman, and I am sad to learn that he survived Dawn by only two years. The husband on the balcony was Joseph Gousha, or Goushé, whom she married November 20, 1920. He was musical; she literary, with a talent for the theater. A son was born retarded. Over the years, a fortune was spent on schools and nurses. To earn the fortune, Powell did every sort of writing, from interviews in the press to stories for ladies' magazines to plays that tended not to be produced to a cycle of novels about the Midwest, followed by a cycle of New York novels, where she came into her own, dragging our drab literature screaming behind her. As doyenne of the Village, she held court in the grill of the Lafayette Hotel—for elegiasts the Lafayette was off Washington Square, at University Place and Ninth Street.

Powell also runs like a thread of purest brass through Edmund Wilson's
The Thirties
: “It was closing time in the Lafayette Grill, and Coby Gilman was being swept out from under the table. Niles Spencer had been stuttering for five minutes, and Dawn Powell gave him a crack on the jaw and said, ‘
Nuts
is the word you're groping for.'” Also, “[Peggy Bacon] told me about Joe Gousha's attacking her one night at a party and trying to tear her clothes off…. I suggested that Joe had perhaps simply thought that this was the thing to do in Dawn's set. She said, ‘Yes: he thought it was a social obligation.'” Powell also “said that Dotsy's husband was very much excited because the Prince of Wales was wearing a zipper fly, a big thing in the advertising business.” A footnote to this text says that “Dawn Powell (1897–1965)” and Wilson carried on a correspondence in which she was Mrs. Humphry Ward and he “a seedy literary man named Wigmore.” Later, there is a very muddled passage in which, for reasons not quite clear, James Thurber tells Dawn Powell that she does not
deserve
to be in the men's room. That may well be what it was all about.