Final Fridays (18 page)

Part of my pleasure in reading publicly from my fiction (or from other folks' fiction, as I've done in homages to Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and other of my heroes) has nothing to do with the pros and cons of readings as an art-form but rather with the biographical circumstance that I happen to be a once-upon-a-time jazz drummer and orchestrator who still enjoys the opportunity of trying selected riffs on a
live
audience instead of a merely living one, as is the normal case with writers and their readers. What's more, aside from affording me the occasional change of scene and a modest supplement to what for most of my academic history was a fairly modest teaching salary and what remains, in the nature of my literary case, a blushingly modest royalty income, these reading/lecture sorties have brought me quite unexpected other boons as well, of which I will mention only the most blessed and life-altering one: On a snowy night in February 30 years ago, after a hairy flight from my Buffalo campus to Boston to do an evening gig at Boston College—a reading that I started at least half an hour late, on an empty stomach, because of snow delays at the airports and on the streets of Boston—it was my extraordinary good fortune to re-meet and renew my acquaintance with a former student from Penn State days who had loyally shlepped across town through the snowstorm to hear her old teach's spiel, and who subsequently became and to this hour remains my bride, my keenest-eyed reader, and my editor of first resort.

 

BUT THAT'S ANOTHER story, which—like the circumstance of one's happening to be a good, bad, or middling public reader—has nothing
to do with the pros and cons of “readings” themselves as a form of art and entertainment. Let me quickly review those pros and cons, offer my own opinions themupon, then read my reading, and then, I hope, respond to your questions or comments on this or any other reasonably pertinent subject.

First, the Cons: The printed word can reasonably be argued to be meant for the silent eye, not for the ear: a private, “privileged” transaction between author and individual readers, not a communal experience like theater, or like the oral tale-telling tradition out of which written and eventually printed fiction evolved. The reader of print proceeds at his/her own pace—lingering, considering; perhaps rereading a particularly striking or puzzling passage before going on; perhaps skimming a bit to cut to the chase, so to speak, or to cut
out
the chase if one so chooses; perhaps peeking ahead to check the distance to the next space-break or chapter-division (what might be called “chasing to the cut”); perhaps leafing back to remind oneself where a particular character or image last appeared, and reading neither more nor fewer minutesworth of pages than one has the time and motivation to ingest at a given sitting. In short, the medium of print is
interruptible
,
referable
, and
pace-adjustable
by the individual reader, as theater and film are not (setting aside the function-buttons on videocassette players), and as the oral tale-telling tradition was not (unless you were the king ordering Homer to do a high-speed encore of his Catalogue of Ships, I suppose, or a grandkid begging Grandma to do the wolf-in-the-bed scene one more time). Interruptibility, Referability, and Pace-Adjustability: three terrific virtues of the print medium, and of course they're lost in public readings.

Lost too is the absence of the possibly distracting physical presence of the Author, along with our imagination of the narrative
“voice” and the voices of the several characters. We often speak of a writer's having a distinctive
voice
—languid, eloquent, restrained, jazzed-up, tender, forceful, whatever—but the voice we're speaking of is a figurative, not a literal one. And the narrative voice that so moved and/or entertained us on the silent page may turn out in authorial person to be bothersomely lisping, or hesitant, or strident, or perhaps female baritone or male soprano when it's doing dialogue. In the same way, we may have an agreeable image of the author of our pleasure and then find ourselves disappointed if not altogether turned off by his/her actual speaking presence. And finally, of course, we
can
go read the thing for ourselves, if not immediately then whenever it hits the stands, in the medium for which it was presumably designed; so why bother hauling out to watch and hear its perpetrator perp a portion of it in person?

The answer, of course, is that there is no reason at all, if that's the way one feels. And it goes without saying (but let's get it said anyhow) that some reasons for going to hear a writer read have little or nothing to do with the art of literature, however defensible they may be otherwise: innocent curiosity about the live performing presence of a literary celebrity, or of a non-celebrity whom we happen to admire or be merely curious about; curiosity about an author's work in progress, if we've enjoyed earlier fruits from the same tree; the opportunity, perhaps, to ask or anyhow attend a question or two or three (as I much hope you'll do in Part Three of our time together); to turn the monologue of printed fiction into a dialogue.

 

ET CETERA. BUT none of these considerations has to do with public readings as an art form. They may justify, even partially vindicate, my presence here onstage this evening and yours in the audience, or
my presence in the audience some other evening to hear some other writer onstage. But is it art, or art of other than the lowest order?

 

IN THE CASE of a great many fine poets, it unquestionably
is
art, of a very high order. The utterance of lyric poetry is no doubt more intimately bound to speech than is the recitation of prose; one remembers somebody-or-other's definition of poetry as “memorable speech,” and any of us fortunate enough to have heard the likes of Dylan Thomas or Robert Frost or Anne Sexton speak their poems has experienced an unforgettable dimension of that verbal art beyond its silent presence on the printed page. But what about poor old fiction? Here are three things that I believe:

1. That the art of reading it publicly is different from the art of writing it. The well-written story and the well-spoken story are two different entities, although a given text may happen to be suitable for both.

2. Or it may not be, since a gifted reader may breathe life into an indifferent text, and an ineffective reader can make humdrum-mery out of a passage that might quite move us on the silent page. And there are passages of world-class fiction that one would be ill-advised to choose for “performance”: the exhaustive and exhausting catalogues in Francois Rabelais' great
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, for example, or those deliberately grueling, unparagraphed, relentless stretches in some of the late Thomas Bernhard's first-rate novels.

3. That an excellent reading need not at all be histrionic or “dramatic” in the popular sense of that adjective. The art of theater is not the same as the art of public reading, and indeed some of the most memorable author-readings of my experience—the late Donald Barthelme's, for instance—were delivered in a downright
anti-histrionic, even deadpan style perfectly appropriate to the material and wonderfully effective. I have heard John Updike read memorably despite his occasional, fleeting, and actually quite endearing stammer, which only served to remind us that his extraordinary eloquence is after all human. I have heard Joseph Heller read the scene of Snowden's dying in
Catch-22
in the author's unreconstructed Coney Island accent, which at once became for me the voice of that novel, the way Grace Paley's New York Jewish intonations, once heard live, spring pleasurably thereafter from her pages to my ear. And my (alas!) also-late friend John Hawkes:
³
Who of us who've relished his sonorous cadences in the flesh, so to speak, does not hear them with a smile and a wistful headshake whenever our eyes fall upon any of his pages?

Oscar Wilde once mischievously declared that anyone who can read the death of Little Nell (from Dickens's
Old Curiosity Shop
) without laughing must have a heart of stone. I understand what he means, but all the same I wish I could have heard the great Charles read that passage, and I'll bet I'd have been moved if not to tears (as were the Victorian audiences of that most famous of author/readers) then at least to the exhilaration that comes from virtuoso instances of the oldest of narrative arts: the art of Homer and Scheherazade, of Uncle Remus and Garrison Keillor; the art not only of
story
telling but of story-
telling.

A follow-up to “The State of the Art,” delivered here and there on the lecture/reading circuit back at the turn of the millennium.

 

 

N
OW THAT WE seem to have made the transition more or less safely into the new century and millennium, it may require some effort of memory to recall that back in the late Nineteen Hundreds—especially in the year we called “1999”—the word “TEOTWAWKI” was a popular acronym for the most apocalyptic of “Y2K” scenarios: TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It. Difficult as it may be to believe from this historical distance (a full twelvemonth later), chronicles of the period tell us that in certain precincts of Planet Earth it was seriously believed that either widespread critical computer failures or the Second Coming of Christ, perhaps both, would precipitate the collapse of our technology-dependent society, followed very possibly by literal or anyhow figurative Armageddon. The End Time!
Eschaton!
The end of the world as we'd known it! Convinced TEOTWAWKIs went so far in some instances as to build well-stocked refuges out in the boondocks and to arm themselves against the expected desperate hordes of
a no longer civilized civilization. A few, of the Christian-apocalyptic persuasion, put everything behind them and followed their leaders or went on their own to Jerusalem or some comparably appropriate venue to await the Rapture and its
sequelae
. Even among the skeptical and conservative, we're told, many withdrew a wad of extra cash and laid in some daysworth of nonperishable food and jugged water, as their government's Y2K advisors recommended. For such as those (my wife and me among them) these precautions amounted to a scaled-down secular version of Pascal's famous Wager concerning the existence of God: The world as we knew it wasn't
likely
to end, we figured, but at least the weekend might be messed up; no harm in hedging our bets a bit. And so we did.

TEOTWAWKI: In my tidewater-Chesapeake ears, the word sounds like a large, rather ungainly waterfowl taking flight. Great Blue Herons, for example, make a sound like that when they take off or flap in for a landing: TEO
TWA W-
KI! Characteristically too, on lift-off they emit, along with the squawk but from their other end, a copious white jet of birdlime. And there was certainly no shortage of
that
back in '99, associated with what in our house was known as TEOTCAMATTGCACM: The End Of The Century And Millennium According To The Gregorian Calendar As Commonly Misconstrued.

 

ENOUGH, HOWEVER, OF all that. My advertised topic here is not TEOT
World
AWKI, but TEOT
Word
AWKI (with a question-mark after it): the here-and-there-speculated end of the Word—specifically the printed and bookbound fictive word—as we've known it. But I can't resist wondering for another paragraph or two how red-faced (or whatever) those folks must have been, must indeed still be, who really believed back in '99 that the show was
over, the end truly at hand. The rest of us could more or less sheepishly redeposit our excess cash, draw down our hoard of trail mix and bottled water, and go on with our lives, feeling that we had after all merely been being prudent. But what of those (so my novelist's imagination wonders) who truly burned their bridges; who put behind them, perhaps irretrievably,
everything
once dear in order to follow—perhaps even to lead—a gaggle of like-minded TEOTWAWKIs to wherever in preparation for The End, and then saw Y2K-night embarrassingly come and go with no other fireworks than the jim-dandy ones televised from Sydney and London, Times Square and the D.C. Mall?

One can hazard a few educated guesses about those folks. Apocalypticism was not invented in 1999; indeed, what the novelist Salman Rushdie once called “endism”—the conviction that the world's clock has just about run—has such a long and busy history that back in 1956 a team of sociologists published a fascinating study of what happens among dead-serious TEOTWAWKIs out in their desert or up on their mountaintop the morning after, so to speak, and the morning after that, as the world mortifyingly persists much as before.
¹
What they found—as one might have guessed—is that while some disillusioned and disaffected disciples give their prophet the finger and make their way back home to pick up what pieces they can, the more common reaction is rationalization, followed by even more radical commitment or coercion—for these folks are, after all,
way
out on a limb, their entire self-respect at stake, their “belief structure” in crisis. So okay, they're likely to say, or to be told by their leader: The
timetable
may require a bit of tweaking, but the essential prophecy remains valid. Curtains-time is coming soon, don't you doubt it; what may appear to our merely mortal eyes and minds
to be delays and postponements are simply errors in our human reckoning, perhaps even tests to weed out the weak of faith. We did not pray hard enough; we did not burn
every
bridge behind us, purge ourselves of
every
reservation. Here's our chance to show the world (and our Leader, and our fellow followers) what
real
commitment is! Et cetera.

The pressures in that line must be tremendous. Back in November of 1978, when 914 disciples of the guru Jim Jones more or less voluntarily drank poisoned purple Kool-Aid in their Jonestown Guyana commune, the novelist James Michener happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and was asked by someone in his audience what he thought of that prodigious autodestruction. Michener's reply—a quite sage reply, in my opinion—was that the first 50-or-so “victims” didn't surprise him; it was at that enormous remainder that he shook his head in sad amazement. But after all, their world
had
ended: not only the world of their previous lives and the life-connections put behind them, but also the isolated world of voluntary submission and exploitation that they had seen fit to commit themselves to under their charismatic leader's spell, which seemed about to be dispelled by congressional investigators of the Rev. Mr. Jones's reported abuses of his position.