Writing on the Wall (24 page)

That it is a life-and-death struggle is evident from the metaphors used in literary journalism. “I murdered it,” says a reviewer complacently of the latest novel. “Lethal,” say his admiring friends. “Slaughter. A massacre.” “Vitriolic.” An author, reading over a passage he has finished, sighs to himself: “Dead. Dead. Dead.” That in fact is the sole criterion an author employs to judge his own work, as though he was holding a mirror up to the mouth of an unconscious patient. “Fine result,” comments the alter ego of Mme. Sarraute’s writer-hero. “It’s dead. Not a breath of life.” “How do you mean, no life?” cries the anguished hero, who imagines he has given his best, all his treasures, to this text. “Why?” “Oh, you know me,” the other replies. “I’m quite simple. Very primitive...between ourselves two words suffice. As coarse as these two: it’s dead. It’s alive. And it’s dead. Nothing comes through.”

For the writer it is not a mere question of success or failure. He hangs by a thread over nothingness, annihilation. He has put, as they say, so much of himself into his book. And there is no one he can rely on entirely, not the public, his publisher, his literary sponsors, not even his alter ego, that faithful companion who is called into consultation whenever a chapter or a passage is “ready to show.” He cannot be totally sure of the objectivity of the
fidus Achates.
Maybe there is not enough distance between them. The other may be partial to him on account of their old relationship. Or he may be infected by his masochism, his sickly doubts, and be over-severe with him. Maybe there is too much distance. What if the other is too conscious of the reviewers out there, lying in wait? The interior critic has to keep a foot in that camp as well; otherwise he would be of no use to him. But wholly trust him or not, this friend, second self, arbiter, is all he has in the world, and he clings to him, damp and trembling, readying himself for the verdict. It is what he feared, “knew all along” was coming. A death sentence. Can there be no reprieve? At first the other is final—no hope. Junk it. But at length he is persuaded to take a second look. Together they assess the damage. Right here is where it goes wrong; back there, yes, possibly, there is a part that can be saved. Reanimated, resurrected by these crumbs of comfort, the writer thinks he has the strength to start over. But first he sends the other out of the room. He has to be alone. The other knows him too well. He cannot have him always bending over his shoulder, trying to be helpful.

Before he was able to divide himself into two and establish this “working relationship,” his judge was out there, unfathomable, unpredictable, promoting him and demoting him according to some grading system which he himself can never get the hang of. We return, like a team of journalists, to those who knew him when. His mother, his teachers, his schoolmates spotted him from way back as one of “those.” They recognized the signs: brooding in corners, taking an undue interest in words, having bizarre aversions to some of the most harmless ones, talking to himself, “awkwardness, shyness, the feeling of being different, superiority.” Back then, though they forget it, these were black marks against him in the Book of Life, pointing to a misfit. How can he say such a thing? Now that he is a literary discovery, what he ignorantly thought were black marks turn out to have been gold stars, and claims to have been his original discoverer are inserted in the record. His mother “knew” from birth, when they brought him in to her: “your high forehead, your look of concentration.” His teacher has never forgotten his school composition—“My First Sorrow”—on the death of his little dog, run over by a train. An amazing sense of language for a child.

When his first book is taken, the editor employed to “handle” him is familiar with the signs: arrogance, false humility, childishness, unwillingness to rewrite. They are all alike, authors; he knows them like the inside of his pocket. The more in fact the neophyte-hero inches forward in achieving recognition, the more he is treated as a specimen of an already familiar category of persons, as though there were nothing special about him except his having entered that category, whose laws are now found to govern his slightest movement, even his movements of rebellion, whether he is conscious of it or not.

Readers are sure they know where he got this or that detail in his book. These are Mme. Jacquet’s fingers. “Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to tell her.” It’s no use trying to fool them. They have heard those disclaimers before. There is nothing in the book whose sources they cannot sniff out: “Your entire childhood. I saw it...camouflaged, of course.” And his secret motivations for writing, all plain as a pikestaff: “a defense reaction,” “an unconscious need for revenge.”

If he serves tea to visitors, an ordinary tea-kettle turns in the telling and retelling into a samovar, the tea turns into a rare sophisticated blend, and his nervous gestures are “slow, almost solemn,” like a priest lifting a chalice. “You seemed to be officiating,” reports his mother. His father is confident that he has his number too. When the hero bursts happily in to tell him that his book has been accepted, the father, barely looking up from something he is writing: “How much did they take to publish that?”

Being neither “somebody” nor nobody, like a defective syllogism, the debutant novelist is reduced to an absurdity. His struggles against claims to know him, pin a label on him, file him, are the purest comedy. What is involved is possession, property, the little tickets that are stuck on his work: “Symbolism. Surrealism. Impressionism...Comic. Tragic. Ontological. Drama. Psychodrama.” One of the funniest passages, a little masterpiece written by an angel on the head of a pin (found in Chapter 12), has to do with a false claim check. An elder pontifical critic has discovered what he calls the main axis of the book, “the point around which the whole work is organized...That scene is the empty railway station...It’s a pause. A destroyed center.” But there is no scene in a railway station. The efforts of the hero to retrieve the horrible situation caused by this blunder (which of course nullifies in a flash the critic’s very valuable endorsement) amount to a sort of negotiated surrender. They compromise on a room full of empty benches, in fact a ministry. In an early short story there was a railway station...

Yet the hero, though outnumbered, is still a force to reckon with. The others fear him as a spy concealed among them, pretending to be minding his own business while covertly taking notes. Nor is their surmise mistaken, even if they are usually barking up the wrong tree, as with Mme. Jacquet’s fingers, which really belonged to a friend of his grandmother’s. Knowledge, they think, is power, and in their view, this note-taking is a power play: he has got them where he wants them, in a book, appropriated them for his own purposes. And the criminal may actually be paid royalties for the stolen property he vends. That is why his attempts to hide must be foiled. He must be brought out into the open, expelled from the circle into the middle. A woman pounces: “You know he too is one.” That is also why he must be enrolled in the regiment of his fellow-writers, who can keep a watch on him if he tries to desert.

All this belongs to the social comedy of the literary life, recognizable to anybody who has ever taken part in it. The humiliations and vicissitudes of the hero are not very important in the final analysis, except as furnishing merriment. They are just occupational hazards the little fellows have to put up with—at least in outward appearance the great are not subject to them.

But
Between Life and Death
has another dimension, beyond the social, always the cruel playground of comedy: the games people play. In Chapter 8, a book finally begins to write itself, and at once we are on another scale, an immense staircase, as the hero, conquering his fear, ascends from life toward death, and as usual in death he is alone. He is going into the temple, like the child Virgin Mary, climbing the steep steps in Titian’s famous
Presentation,
leaving behind the street crowd and the old woman selling eggs on the bottom stair. For the duration of this chapter, we have left the circle; we no longer hear the desperate pitter-patter of running feet, the thud of ignominious falls on banana peels. Instead, we are in a realm of music. It is a ballet of words, which, as force gathers, turns into a march, a triumphal march, with brass winds blowing in the orchestra. Then, suddenly, at the height of exultation, there is silence. Total. The tragic hero is dividing into two, to face his alter ego.

Nothing of the sort—a rending of the veil—has been attempted before, and one would have said in advance that it was impossible, short of demonstration, to show how an author composes, that is, to create with words a sort of program music imitating the action of other words as they assemble on a page. It is all very well for a piano to imitate raindrops or paint to imitate foliage, but how can a medium imitate itself? Mme. Sarraute has done it; she does it twice in the novel—again and even more tremendously in the desperate final chapter, where the writer, older, is uncertain of his music, which often sounds to him now like a player piano with him pumping the pedals but which nevertheless swells out with a greater resonance and more complex harmony until it breaks off.

Of course he is writing
Between Life and Death.
“Take this one to start with, this tiny fragment...that arm like the arm of a jointed puppet, which stretches out, folds, drops, that fist that opens...”

This device, of the novel enclosed within the novel (the Quaker Oats box), might have seemed a mere form, not new either, of literary Op art, if the force of it here at the finale did not close on us like Nemesis. We had half felt it coming, we were “prepared,” yet we were not sure. So there is only one author, as we suspected, one book, which they all were writing:
this
book, fabricated in solitude, imperfect, conscious of its blemishes, modest, gigantically boastful, daring to enter the arena, expose itself, and contest its right to survival. Just as the encircled hero stands or falls, finally, by his work, his salient into the world and his redoubt, his last point of retreat, so his creator elects to stand
by
him, taking him by the hand, ready to fall
with
him, naked both, saying “We.”

The infinite regress of the Quaker Oats box expresses also the “mystery” of creation, for the nearer you draw to that process, the less you understand it. “Mystery” in ironic quotation marks, yet it
is
a mystery, despite the fact that ignorant people are content to call it that, knowledgeably—as though in pronouncing the word they had somehow taken possession of the thing itself and were jumping all over it shouting its name—“It’s a mystery, that’s all there is to it. We’re in the presence of a mystery.” The force of repetition kills eternal truths; that conviction obsessed Flaubert, whose
taedium vitae
took the form of a horror of banality. In this literally double-faced novel, facing inward and outward, like the year god, mischievous, sly, glinting occasionally with malice, but also somber, tragic, heart-shaking in its directness, Mme. Sarraute has undertaken something very bold—the rescue of banality from itself.

Every bromide uttered by her hero and his sycophants proves to be true—specious but true. Whether you feel it as truth or imposture depends a good deal on the tone of voice. Is he preening himself on tearing out and crumpling or is he confessing it, confiding it, mentioning it? There is a whole slithery gamut of nuances. “I have to admit I’m a perfectionist”—what is false about that sentence? Working very carefully, with a pair of tweezers, we may be able to detach the inverted commas from that “confession.” It is rare that we find a direct lie when they have been removed—
i.e.,
that the speaker is a shiftless loafer. Usually the inverted commas have sprung up there as the result of mirror-rehearsal or repetition.

In the next-to-the-last chapter, the self-important novelist of the first chapter is back again, older and more munificent with his clichés and precepts. With a shudder, the reader recognizes that voice. “‘We should pay attention to no one. To no one. And to nothing. Except to this.’ He lays his hand flat on his chest.” Of course he is right, insofar as what he recommends is possible. Everyone would agree. But, more than being right, this old whore has somehow become rather sympathetic. He too has a deflating, puncturing double, though you would never have imagined it, to hear him talk.
She
knows that he is finished as a writer, ready for the funeral parlor. He sees her sitting out there in the circle, who all know it too. She may even be his self-effacing consort. They think he has not guessed it himself but they are wrong. How could he not guess when he senses her
here,
in his plump chest, where he has just reverently laid his hand?

Having kept company with a succession of other, shyer novelists, we are no longer deceived by the façade he showed us when we first met him. At present we see how it is for him, inside, and there no differences exist: all are alike.

In fact for Mme. Sarraute’s hero banality is the irritant that gives rise to the work of art, whose worst enemy, by the way (as we saw in
The Golden Fruits),
is good taste. The banal, the “common,” which offend the connoisseur, excite in the artist a morbid sort of itch that fatally asks to be scratched. A vulgar, drawling pronunciation. Such overheard sentences as “If you keep on like that, your father will like your sister better than you.” Tiny parcels of living substance around which words begin to dance their ballet or mobilize like iron filings in the presence of a magnet. With a little guidance from the author, a current is made to run from the living substance (which may first appear as an effluvium oozing from a crack in the wall that separates each of us from others) through the dancing, wheeling words, which come out faster and faster, in a jet. He watches them perform, moves them about slightly, withdraws one very gently, like somebody playing jackstraws, so as not to upset the structure, and substitutes another. By preference they should be ordinary words (farewell
héros, héraut, erre haut),
in working clothes; an unfamiliar word in Mme. Sarraute’s own novels is likely to be found in the dictionary marked
“Fam.”
(familiar). A local irritation caused by vulgarity produces an excretion, as with the oyster and the pearl, but the stream or spray of words that come from it (the metaphors keep changing) must retain some of the insipidity, flatness, of the original sickly substance.