The Spooky Art (21 page)

That appealed to me. And I thought: Do I dare? Then realized: Can’t be done. The research will take a year. I’ll have to go over to Israel. Never having been in Israel before, that’ll be another book, probably, and I’ll have to find out about the Mossad. My chart was no help there. All I had was a blank area that said “Truly major intelligence organization.” Learning about the Mossad would be even more difficult than picking up on the CIA. I deliberated for all of a restless week before I was ready to tell myself, “You could wreck this book by sending Harry Hubbard to Israel. At best, you’ll lose much too much time.” Instead, I had him do something less bold. But that is the way we make such novelistic decisions. Very much as we do in life.

I
f you believe in fiction,
if you believe in the power of the novelist, then all subjects are possible. Of course, certain choices present more obstructions than others. It would be harder, as an example, for a male novelist to learn about the small irritations of a woman’s day than to imagine what her sex would be like. A novelistic element in sex, after all, is the feeling of nearness to the Other. It’s one of the compelling reasons for sex precisely because such sentiments live almost entirely outside formal sacraments and private codes. It may be indeed why pious people so often feel driven to break their own deepest sexual prohibitions. It’s because the experience of meeting the Other is incomparable. Which is why I say it’s easier—if you are going to write about those of the opposite gender—to limn them sexually than attempt to get into the nitty-gritty of their daily life.

Another word on gender. Women certainly have every right to create men at war, but I think it might be recognized that it’s likely to be less comfortable for them. War, after all, is essentially a male invention. How often have women shown the same inventiveness and hellishness that men have at war? How can they approach that near-psychotic mix of proportion and disproportion which is at the heart of mortal combat? On the other hand,
if we ask whether men and women can write equally well about bravery, I would say yes. How are we to define bravery, after all? Take a woman who is awfully timid—let’s say she was terrorized through her childhood. She has an all-too-acute awareness of how bad things can come upon you suddenly. When she’s an old lady and every bone in her body is aching, it may be an act of courage for her to cross a busy street all by herself. She doesn’t know if she can make it across before the lights change, yet she has to do it. For her own honor, if you will. And she does it. That may be more brave, given the relative situation, than the bold act of a soldier who’s been trained to be courageous, who is bonded to the soldiers he is with, who lives with the idea that there’s no disgrace in life worse than not being up to the military occasion. You can’t speak of true bravery in combat for such a good soldier until he has exhausted his code to that point where he feels, Yes, I may lose—I may lose my heart, my dignity, my honor. I’m scared. I’m terrified. I can’t move. If, at this point, he still proceeds to press himself forward, then his behavior is courageous.

In a certain sense, we all know this—we know what constitutes brave action. So a woman can certainly write about brave soldiers, even though she’s not the least bit brave, not at that level. Of course, she has to have an immense talent. I’ve often thought that Joyce Carol Oates, who is a very talented woman, will often, on the basis of a small bit of experience, write a six-hundred-page novel. I think she’s an arch example of someone who does almost all of it through talent. She’s willing to dare terrible humiliation. The irony is that she is rarely attacked. I expect she arouses a fundamental if somewhat bemused respect in many a mean spirit.

The narcissist suffers from too much inner dialogue. The eye of his consciousness is forever looking at his own action. Yet—let us try to keep the notion clear. A narcissist is not only a study in vanity and self-absorption. One part of the self is always immersed in studying the other part. The narcissist is the scientist and the experiment in one. Other people exist, have value to the narcissist, because of their particular ability to arouse one role or another in himself. And are valued for that. May even be loved for that. Of course, they are loved as an actor loves his audience.

Since the amount of stimulation we can offer ourselves is, obviously,
limited, the underlying problem of the narcissist is boredom. So there are feverish, even violent attempts to shift the given. One must alter that drear context in which one half of the self is forever examining the stale presence of the other. That is one reason why narcissists are forever falling in and out of love, jobs, places, and addictions. Promiscuity is the opportunity to try a new role. The vanity gained from a one-night stand is an antidote to claustrophobia. That is, if the gamble of the one-night stand turns out well! Henry Miller complains to Anaïs Nin of his dear beloved’s lack of center, the incapacity of June to tell the truth or even recognize it. “I want the key,” he says, “the key to her lies.” Blind to himself—does not every artist have to live in partial and self-induced blindness, or he could never find a foundation for his effort?—Henry Miller does not want to recognize that the key may be simple. Every day is a scenario for June. On the best of days, she creates a life into which she can fit for a few hours. She can feel real love and real hate for strangers, and thereby leave the circle of her self-absorption. Through scenarios, she can arrive in an hour at depths of emotion that other people voyage toward for years. Of course, the scenario once concluded, so too is the love for the day. That passing actor she played with for a few hours is again a stranger to her. It is useless to speak of whether she loves or does not love Miller. It depends on where he dwells in her scenario for that day. So it is also useless to speak of her lies. They are no more real to her than yesterday’s lies. It is today’s scenario that is her truth and her life—that is liberation from the prison cell of the narcissist.

Of course, it is not all that bad. Part of Miller’s continuing literary obsession with June is due to the variety of her roles. Each, after all, offers a new role for Miller. He does play opposite the leading lady. If for one day she turns him into a detective and on the next a thief, that keeps interest in his own personality alive.

Narcissists, after all, induce emotion in each other through their minds. It is not their flesh which is aroused so much as the vibrancy of the role. Their relations are at once more electric and more empty, more perfect and more hollow. But the hollow seems never to fill. So, narcissism may be a true disease, a biological displacement of the natural impulse to develop oneself by the lessons of one’s experience—narcissism, therefore, could bear the same relation to love that onanism does to copulation or a cancer to the natural growth of tissue. Can we come a little
nearer to the recognition that there may be a base beneath all disease, an ultimate disease, a psychosomatic doom, so to speak, against which all the other illnesses, colds, fevers, infections, and deteriorations are bulwarks to protect us against a worse fate? Which is what? Perhaps an irreversible revolt of the flesh or the mind into cancer or insanity. That is psychosomatic doom—to follow the growth of the flesh or the mind into terminal anomaly. But if that is the case, how can we not suppose that for the narcissist—always so aware that something is wrong within—there is a constant unconscious terror: His or her isolation, if unrelieved, will end in one arm or the other of the ultimate disease.

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense, therefore, as the love of two narcissists for each other. So much depends on it. Each—the paradox turns upon itself—is capable of offering deliverance to the other. To the degree that they tune each other superbly well, they begin to create what before had been impossible: They begin to acquire the skills that enable them to enter the world. (For it is not love of the self but dread of the world outside the self which is the seed of narcissism.) Narcissists can end, therefore, by having a real need of each other. That is, of course, hardly the characteristic relation. The love of most narcissists tends to become comic. Seen from the outside, their suffering manages to be equaled only by the rapidity with which they recover from suffering. Is it hundreds or thousands of such examples that come to us from Hollywood?

The reality, of course, is more painful. Given the delicacy of every narcissist and the timidity that created their detachment, we can see again that the highest intensity of their personal relations is, for good cause, with themselves. For their own self-protection, they need an excess of control over external events. (Not too removed in analogy is that excess of control which technology is forever trying to exact from nature.)

To the degree, however, that narcissism is an affliction of the talented, the stakes are not small, and the victims are playing a serious game right in the midst of their scenarios. For if one can break out of the penitentiary of self-absorption, then there may be artistic wonders to achieve.

Henry Miller could have been playing, therefore, for the highest stakes. He had the energy, the vision, the talent, the outrageous individuality to have some chance of becoming the greatest writer in America’s history, a figure equal to Shakespeare.
(For Americans.) Of course, to invoke such contrasts is to mock them. A writer cannot live too seriously with the idea that (as Hemingway once boasted) he will or will not beat Tolstoy. He contains, rather, some sense of huge and not impossible literary destiny in the reverberations of his own ambition; he feels his talent as a trust, and his loves seem evil when they balk him. He is living, after all, with his own secret plot. He knows that a writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerves and marrow of a nation. No one, in fact, can measure what whole and collective loss would have come to the English people if Shakespeare had not lived to write. (Or, for that matter, conceive of how the South would be strikingly less interesting without Faulkner. It certainly is now.)

In those seven years with June, Miller was shaping the talent with which he would go out into the world. It is part of the total ambiguity of narcissism (despite the ten thousand intimate details he offers of his life) that we do not know by the end of
The Rosy Crucifixion
whether June breathed a greater life into his talent or exploited him. We do not know if Miller, if he had never met her, could have become capable of writing about tyrants and tycoons (instead, repetitively, of his own liberation) or—we are left wide open—if the contrary is the true possibility and he might never have written nearly as well if he had not met her. All we know is that after seven years of living with June, he went off to Paris alone and learned to live by himself, having come into a confluence of his life where he could extract an overpowering and unforgettable aesthetic from ogres and sewers. It is kin to the nightmare of narcissism that we are left with this question and no answer.

A corollary of narcissism is, of course, masturbation. An author is forever consulting his mind, even as the hand will query the penis. So follow a few remarks from an interview done almost forty years ago in
The Realist.
Rereading it, I find it still valid. The act of writing is so close to the psychic character of masturbation that if we are going to discuss the world of the writer, then we ought to deal with this as well. It is the unspoken subtext behind the epithet
scribbler.