Final Fridays (23 page)

 

 

S
PEAKING AT JOHNS Hopkins University back when his country was riven by
Apartheid
, the eminent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee remarked that under such sorry historical circumstances, for him to publish a novel that made no political statement would be tantamount to his making a very conspicuous—and egregious—political statement. From my seat in the audience I nodded sympathetic assent, although Coetzee's observation was by no means a pitch for sympathy. And, not for the first time, I silently thanked Apollo and all the Muses for affording me the luxury of political irrelevance.

More exactly, I felt grateful to chance and history for affording me the
option
of writing fiction that intends no political/ideological
statement; for the good fortune of living in a place and time that can regard as equally honorable the literary credos of, on the one hand, my fellow American fictionist Grace Paley, for example—a heroic protester of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, among her other good causes, who once declared to my students that “Art isn't important:
People
are important.
Politics
is important”—and on the other hand that of the late Vladimir Nabokov, himself a political refugee, who nevertheless maintained that his sole literary aim was “aesthetic bliss.” It should be noted that one can savor a Grace Paley short story on its literary merits alone (I myself do not find her excellent fiction especially “political”), and that Nabokov's virtuoso novels are by no means oblivious to the political upheavals that drove him from his native Russia. But both authors felt free—as Coetzee by his own acknowledgment did not, and as artists in any politically convulsed or oppressed place and time may well not—either to engage their art in the service of some political/moral cause or to regard that art itself as their cause: Art for Art's sake, or more specifically, in the case of fiction, art for the sake of language, form, action, character, plot, setting, narration, and theme; Story (mainly though not exclusively) for Story's sake. For the freedom to be, in my writing, politically engaged or politically irrelevant, I feel as fortunate as for the happy accident of my having been born in just the right narrow historical “window” (the year was 1930) to miss direct involvement in all the U.S.-involved wars of the Terrible Twentieth Century: not here yet for World War I, in which my father served and my uncle died; too young for World War II, in which my older brother served; exempted by student- and then marital/parental deferments from service in Korea, where many of my age-group served; too old to be conscripted for the war in Vietnam (for which my male children, luckily,
missed having their draft-lottery numbers called). May that cycle of good fortune be repeated for my children's children! Would that it could extend to all the world's children!

Which is not at all to say that I regard every one of those terrible wars as unjustified, any more than (as a citizen of my country and the world) I feel “above” engagement with political/social issues. Not at all. Although I happen to incline to the Skeptical-Pacifist persuasion, had I been born a few years earlier I would no doubt have enlisted patriotically in the 1940s, along with my brother, to oppose Nazism and its Japanese counterpart. I will even grant that if such had been the case, I might very well feel the experience to have been centrally important or at least significant to me as a writer: Most artists' work is affected in some measure by major experiences of their youth. But I do not regret having missed that particular category of convulsion. Indeed, Ernest Hemingway is the only American writer I can think of who professed a condescending
pity
for those of his countrymen who happened not to experience the trauma of warfare: I recollect his declaring somewhere or other that World War I was “the defining event of their generation, and they simply missed it.” Hemingway, however, was by notorious disposition a
macho
adventure-seeker. If his admirable fiction happened to depend upon that appetite, so be it; the no less admirable fiction of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—to name only a few of his illustrious peers—did not.

My argument is simply that for an artist to be politically concerned and even politically active as a citizen does not—anyhow
should
not, ideally—mandate politically concerned art. I quite understand J. M. Coetzee's position as aforestated, which in his case has produced writing as commendable on its literary as on its moral/
political merits. But I admire at least equally the art of the late great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, for example, who, though embarrassed and harassed by the Perón regime (at whose hands he was “promoted” from his post in the Buenos Aires municipal library to the rank of chicken-and-rabbit inspector in the public markets), was not moved thereby to write political allegories and anti-
Perónista
fables, as he quite justifiably might have been.
²
Borges admits (in “An Autobiographical Essay”) to having danced in the streets of Buenos Aires when Perón was ousted in September 1955, and also to writing a couple of pro-Israel poems at the time of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967; more typically, however, when his fiction addresses contemporary political/historical matters—as in his short story “The Secret Miracle,” for example, about a Czech playwright executed by the Nazis for the crime of being Jewish—the story is at least as much about art and metaphysics as about the Holocaust.

 

MY OWN MUSE happens to be the one with the grin rather than the one with the grimace. One of our recent collaborations, a comic-apocalyptic “Y2K” novel called
Coming Soon!!!
, coincidentally appeared just a few weeks after the Islamic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in subsequent book-tour interviews and public appearances I was more than once asked whether I thought irony, even comedy in general, was perhaps
inappropriate
, to put it mildly, in the wake of that atrocity and the subsequent national emergency. Less in my own defense than in defense of artistic liberty and therapeutic laughter, I found myself invoking two of my longtime literary stars,
The Thousand and One Nights
and Boccaccio's
Decameron
. In the former, the King's anger at his wife's adultery turns into murderous misogyny, ruinous to the state as well
as lethal to many of its female citizens: After killing his unfaithful wife and her paramour, King Shahryar “marries” a young virgin every night and has her executed the next morning lest she prove unfaithful, and after three bloodthirsty yearsworth of such misguided revenge, families with maiden daughters are fleeing the country in droves. To save her homeland, her remaining “sisters,” and the King himself from his madness, Scheherazade volunteers herself (she has a Plan), and the 1001 suspenseful nights of her literally marvelous storytelling ensue. The
Decameron
opens with a scarifying description of the Black Death of 1348: the cataclysmic bubonic plague that in only a few years killed a third of Europe's population, just as the influenza pandemic of 1918 would claim millions more victims than the Great War itself—including that aforementioned uncle of mine, who died of it in France while serving with the American Expeditionary Force. Boccaccio's ten young Florentine lords and ladies retreat from the lawless horror of the dying city to their country estates, where they amuse themselves by swapping a hundred stories: one tale per person per day for ten days (fourteen days, actually, but they take Fridays and Saturdays off), until they deem it safe to return to Florence.

The point of my invoking these classics was that in both distinguished cases, the stories—told in horrific, indeed apocalyptic circumstances—so far from directly addressing those circumstances, are all but programmatically irrelevant to them. Scheherazade may slip in a tale or two about people unjustly threatened with death who are mercifully spared (e.g., Nights 1 and 2), but more typically she goes in for whiz-bang Special Effects like magic lanterns and bottled genies, along with erotica and even scatology: one of Goethe's favorite Arabian Nights was #410: “How Abu Hasan Farted.”
³
After
Boccaccio's detailed description of the plague in Florence, his privileged gentry never speak of it again until their idyll's conclusion: Their tales have to do with libidinous husbands and wives (and nuns and friars), narrow escapes, flirtations, witty retorts; not a word about how their less privileged
compaesani
are dying miserably by the thousands back in town. Indeed, Romantic Interest grows among several of the taletellers, and when they return to Florence and part company at the book's close, it is not to aid the victims (who anyhow could not be helped, since neither cause nor cure for bubonic plague was known at the time), but to avoid the appearance of having fallen into Vice and to go their separate ways, having judged the epidemic to have passed its peak. A proper Marxist would be appalled, I suppose; even we mere liberal Democrats may be given pause by such blithely oblivious elitism, and Boccaccio himself repudiated the book in his elder years—but on moral, not ideological grounds. His merry, ribald tales, however, along with the schedules, rules, and agendas that their tellers improvise for ordering their pleasures, have served as a therapeutic diversion for the lucky company, even as an
ad hoc
social order until the larger world recovers. Their very irrelevance to that world's crisis, like the general irrelevance of Scheherazade's tales to her being in bed with the Guinness World Record Serial Killer, may be said to be their relevance. Centuries after the horror that inspired and frames them, we read them for pleasure still.

 

NOW: AS A matter of biographical fact, I happen to be no fan of the present administration in Washington, or of U.S. unilateralism in foreign affairs: No anti-ABM or anti-landmine treaties or Kyoto protocols or International Court of Justice for us Yanks, thanks! Drill the Arctic, cut the parkland timber, bomb Saddam and
Roe v.
Wade
, torture the war-prisoners, and step on the gas! And while I quite understand the post-9/11 fever of patriotic display (as opposed to unostentatious patriotism) among my countrymen, it makes me uncomfortable, as does my government's ever more lavish military expenditure at whatever sacrifice of other deserving priorities. In my personal political opinion, the charges against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists include, along with their more serious crimes, their having rescued an insecure and, to a great many of us, lamentable American presidency by permitting it to wrap itself in the Stars and Stripes and imply that criticisms of its right-wing heavy-handedness are unpatriotic. One worries that if the terrorists should strike again, some version of our infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee of the 1950s could rise from its well-deserved grave and resume its deplorable witch-hunting. Already, one imagines, complaints like these of mine do not go unnoticed by the nation's reinvigorated agencies of domestic surveillance. . . .
⁴

In the uncertain meanwhile, however, we Americans remain among that minority of the world's population blessedly free, both as citizens and as artists, either to strive for political relevance or—in our art especially—to savor the honorable privilege of Irrelevance. Long may that treasured banner wave!

W
RITERS WHO HANG out in academia to help pay the rent are likely to find that their job description comes to include inviting other writers to visit their campus and then hosting them through their visit, introducing them to their lecture audience, and sitting in on the informal sessions with students that typically complete the visitor's tour of duty. Such visitations are, I believe, a generally worthwhile feature of any college writing program: beneficial to the visitor, obviously, who gets paid or otherwise rewarded and may possibly gain a few additional readers; potentially enlightening for the visitor's audience (even those whose curiosity may be more sociological, anthropological, or even clinical than literary); and at least marginally beneficial for the host as well, as I shall attempt to illustrate.

Most certainly, as an undergraduate and then a grad-student apprentice myself at Johns Hopkins in the latter 1940s and early '50s, I was impressed, entertained, instructed, inspired, and chastened by spectating such
eminences grises
as W. H. Auden, e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and a decidedly intoxicated Dylan Thomas, who threw up in the wastebasket of our seminar room just prior to his public reading and had to be walked by our department chairman
a few turns around the quadrangle to clear his head. After which—in a chemistry lecture-theater, with lab faucets flanking the podium and the old 92-element periodic table on the wall behind—he delivered himself flawlessly of perhaps the most eloquent, exhilarating,
intoxicating
poetry reading I've ever heard. Indeed, I can summon the cherub-faced Welshman's majestic voice yet, bidding us Yankee undergraduates
Do not go gentle into that good night . . . / Rage, rage against the dying of the light....

Farther down the academic road—on the faculties of Penn State, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Boston University, and then back at Hopkins—it devolved upon
me
to be the frequent host and introducer of visiting literary luminaries: more often than not an agreeable and even instructive chore for the glimpse it afforded of how very different from one another's and from one's own are the lives of fellow scribblers whom one respects; likewise for the obligation, in composing their introductions, to articulate in distilled form what one finds distinctive about their writing; and, not least, for their incidental remarks and advice to aspiring writers in the campus workshops.