Odd Jobs (155 page)

I
N RESPONSE
to a query from
The Michigan Quarterly Review
for its Winter 1987 issue as to my preferences in contemporary American fiction
.

Though the alleged minimalists—Carver, Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barthelme the Younger—get all the publicity these days, my heart still belongs to the old-guard maximalists, those who risk the onus of overdoing: Ozick, who lets her metaphors and fancy mind take her as far as they wantonly will; Barth, who pushed through on his impossibly tricky scheme in
Letters
and tested the will of even his most faithful readers; Roth, who in the face of all friendly advice runs his sexy, conscience-stricken, vociferous all-purpose hero through ever more ornate and obsessive paces; Salinger, who has taken non-publishing to new heights of expressiveness; Oates, who publishes like crazy and can’t ever get enough of fear and loathing in familiar surroundings; Brodkey and Pynchon and (not to overdo) other hopeful and earnest intellectual children of the Fifties, raised on
The Faerie Queene
and the Fisher King, on brinkmanship by John Foster Dulles and big, big fins out of Detroit.

R
EMARKS
in acceptance of the National Arts Club Award, in New York City on February 29, 1984
.

One does not have to be a member of an Arts Club to observe that great art comes in clumps, that there seem times when a culture conspires to produce artists. Greek drama in the Periclean era, Dutch painting in the seventeenth century, Elizabethan poetry, nineteenth-century Russian fiction, German music from Bach to Brahms—such episodes seem waves that lift to sublime heights the individuals lucky enough to be born in the right place and time. The energy and interest of a society
focus upon certain forms, and the single, sometimes anonymous artist conducts the gathered heat and light into a completed work. A thousand years ago, crucifixes were foci of fervent attention, and for centuries what men knew of the nude male form and of human agony and dignity sought expression through the crucifix carver’s hands. Something of the same concentration attaches to representations of Lenin in the Communist world; and a visitor to the Soviet Union must admit that its official painters and sculptors do wonderfully well with the expressive possibilities latent in the image of a short bald man wearing a three-piece suit and a goatee—though this visitor’s rapture was slightly dulled, twenty years ago, when he was taken through a Lenin factory, a clattering place where identical busts of the sacred agitator came down an assembly line and where bins were filled with items of this manufacture that had failed, because of a chip or skin blemish, to meet quality controls.

In our own American culture, it seems clear enough where the highest pitch of artistic energy is presently focussed. After trying to watch the heavily hyped Winter Olympics, I have no doubt that the aesthetic marvels of our age, for intensity and lavishness of effort and subtlety of both overt and subliminal effect, are television commercials. With the fanatic care with which Irish monks once ornamented the Book of Kells, glowing images of youthful beauty and athletic prowess, of racial harmony and exalted fellowship are herein fluidly marshalled and shuffled to persuade us that a certain beer or candy bar, or insurance company or oil-based conglomerate, is, like the crucified Christ or the defiant Lenin in other times and places, the gateway to the good life. Skills and techniques developed in nearly a century of filmmaking are here brought to a culmination of artistry that spares no expense or trouble. For a split-second thirst-inducing image, herds of Bedouins are assembled and directed; to convey a thirst-quenching coolness, Antarctica is visited by the film crew. Miraculously, bulls tread lightly through china shops; immaculate dives and heart-stopping car crashes colorfully knife across our screens. Our entire earthly existence—our eating, our drinking, our whole magnificent cradle-to-grave
consumption
, in short—is here compressed upon an ideal iconic plane; one can only marvel, and be grateful, and regret that, except within narrow professional circles, the artists involved, like Anglo-Saxon poets and Paleocene cave-painters, are unknown by name.

Now, what of the rest of us, who huddle with our known names on the sidelines, practicing relatively retrograde and impoverished art forms
while this great glowing pillar of polychrome flickering rotates at the hot center of our culture? Well, there are some consolations to being in the shade. It is cooler there, and people can’t always see what you are doing. As Aldous Huxley pointed out, freedom thrives upon the inattention of the powerful. Those of us who are riding the inky old print media into its sunset have, like the last threadbare cowboys, a certain grimly jaunty independence. We
may
do what we
can
do, and in our friendly limbo are under no obligation to assert that Coca-Cola is beneficial for not only the physical but the spiritual health of the nation, or that Mobil is watching out for our best interests night and day. We are free in our obscurity to try to tell the impure truth. We are free from committee meetings, from story conferences; no banker invades our sound stage in his anxiety to protect his investment, no character will refuse to speak the lines we give him. We are free to explore and transmit complex sensations, to attempt that permeation of the ego’s cell walls which empathy and love and altruism as well as art achieve. In a world where virtue and even the word “virtue” are hard to find, the hand-woven fictional or poetic text offers a boundless field for striving toward the excellent and the exact. Quite wonderfully, it can always be better, and only its end effect matters. There is a fair amount of folderol in a writer’s life, but the proof, finally and deliciously, is nowhere but in the pudding. So, to be brief, I am well content at my desk, and grateful that the world has allowed me to stay at it. This kind award comes as something extra, which I take as a symbol of society’s wish to cheer the imaginative writer on in his private task, as a caretaker of sorts, these last few centuries, of all of our cherished and threatened privacies.

P
REFACE
to the catalogue of an exhibit of my own papers in Houghton Library at Harvard University in the spring of 1987
.

Coming into Cambridge last November to view the proposed contents of this exhibit, I had expected to greet old friends—yellowed manuscripts and elaborated proofsheets the sight of which, like so many retasted madeleines, would cause to well up fond memories of bygone moments and outgrown selves and faded sites, towns and houses and rooms, where I had once labored. Instead, I found myself facing a shuffled multitude of hostile strangers—aborted stories I had totally forgotten, tortuous changes that had utterly slipped my mind, old editorial
tussles mercifully quite erased from recollection. Who was this writer? And what did he have to do with me? I was overswept by a panicky sense of the fundamental unseemliness of such an exhibition, such a display of the bedraggled gray underwear that literary enterprise wears beneath the plumage and silks in which it fancies itself trotting forth. The false starts, the misspellings, the factual errors, the repetitions, the downright ungrammar, the marginal chastisements severe and gentle, the craven thrift and cunning with which a pitifully slender store of inspirations is hoarded and recycled—all set out in cases, like the mummified bits gathering dust in Egyptian museums, crumbs of bandage and skin and bone and once-magical embalming honey proclaiming in their abject confusion and hapless desiccation the scarcely believable fact that once life, human life, had passed this way and striven for perpetuation.

Some writers, like the late Vladimir Nabokov, have made a point of destroying all manuscripts and intermediate stages of their works of art, thus presenting to posterity an implacably clean face. Others, like Theodore Dreiser, have been so solicitous of their remnants as to keep carbons of even their love letters. In a less self-conscious time than ours, before authorship was seen as a means of generating academic treasure, the accidents of the printshop and the attic were allowed to carry away the smudged and frayed by-products of the making of books; combustion and careless housemaids also relieved the world of much that might now be regarded as precious. Now, in an age unprecedented in its ability to generate “papers,” an indeterminate potential value attaches itself to every scrap, and prodigies of storage and cataloguing are achieved. The egoistic fantasy that everything one does is, like the sparrow’s fall, worth observing has been, in my case, rather wickedly encouraged by the Houghton Library, which twenty years ago suggested that I deposit in the library’s meticulous, humidified care the refuse of my profession.

My gratitude goes to Rodney Dennis for proffering this suggestion and putting up with its messy aftermath, and my admiration goes to Elizabeth Falsey for selecting points of interest and making coherent cases of them. I myself find other writers’ drafts and worksheets fascinating; one draws closer, bending over (say) Keats’s initial draft of “Ode to a Nightingale” in the British Museum, to the sacred flame, the furnace of mental concentration wherein a masterpiece was still ductile and yielding to blows of the pen. But inspecting such material is (like most science) a form of prying; we should not forget that what we glimpse here is the long and winding middle of a human process whose end is a
published thing
—shiny, fragrant, infinitely distributable—and whose beginning is the belief on the author’s part that he or she has something to say, something to deliver. The creative process is lit from two directions—by the remembered flash of the first innocent and thrilling vision, and by the anticipated steady glow of the perfected, delivered result, in its crisp trimmings of manufacture. It takes strong light and high hope to bring the writer through the dreary maze of writing. Most of writing is reading—reading again, to regrasp what is there. As writers go, I am not much of a reviser, but, seeing these numerous papers spread out, I quailed at how multiple and fallible are the procedures that work toward the straightforwardest of texts, which then when published is still not safe, as long as the author lives, from further revision. And after the author has died, in instances as worthy as those of Faulkner and Joyce, zealous scholars go on, removing alleged typos and restoring squeamishly deleted passages until no such thing as a final text seems to exist, and the very books on the shelf, though bound in thick leather with marbled endpapers, have a somewhat tentative air.

My pleasure in this exhibit depends upon my sensation of detachment; its items were typed and scribbled by a series of ever-older young men whom I no longer know well, but with whom I once evidently enjoyed a close relation. On the basis of that relation I have been invited to say a word in this catalogue, which I here do, and now have done. A parable: More than once, walking on a soft and nearly unpopulated beach, I have been frightened by my own footprints behind me. They seemed left by feet much bigger than mine, and there was no escaping them. Nevertheless, I kept walking forward, the fright built into the experience along with the sun, the sand, the lapping milky-green sea, and the pink cliffs ahead, where the pelicans were dive-bombing, their own bodies the bombs.

A “S
PECIAL
M
ESSAGE
”
for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of
The Witches of Eastwick
(1984)
.

Next to the small Pennsylvania town in which I grew up there was an even smaller town called Grille, and in the middle of Grille, so I was told, a “witch doctor” practiced his mysterious arts. No shingle advertised the office, but the building was in plain sight; the sex of the supposed
practitioner has been exorcised from my mind, but pow-wow doctors—makers of spells and animistic little cures—were an undoubted fact in Berks County not many decades ago, and may be yet.
^†
It is a land of gloomy hilltop forests and abandoned quarries and barns bearing hex signs; my grandmother was a great one for observing the minor superstitions, involving cats and salt, ladders and umbrellas. The supernatural never seemed far off, especially after the sun had set, and the friendly
street I walked to school on every day yet had its quota of mysterious old women peeking out from behind their curtains, ready to pounce upon the child so careless as to set a foot on their little carpets of front lawn. I wonder, now, if the famous German discipline—for the presiding spirit of the land was certainly German, though its language was English and many of the place-names were Welsh—isn’t maintained in large part by threats from the spirit world. At any rate, as a boy I ran scared.

New England, land of clear thinking, welcomed me to college. One of the very few books I bought and read on my own, in my four years at Harvard, was a translation of the French historian Jules Michelet’s
La Sorcière
, entitled
Satanism and Witchcraft
. Michelet’s romantic vision of the witch as the persecuted perpetuator of pagan nature-worship and a gentle rebel against the medieval church’s tyranny stayed with me. To Michelet the decades since have added the reading of Huysmans’s
À rebours
and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
Lolly Willowes
and those several novels by Muriel Spark that confidently touch upon the demonic. The 1960s saw witchcraft hit the media and go political. War protesters chanted and “tripped” and tried to put a spell on the Pentagon, and self-anointed enchantresses and warlocks from London to Los Angeles advertised their satanic commitments and supernatural powers; the gruesome climax came with the Manson murders of August 1969.

It is curious fact of witchcraft study that, though members of contemporary cults and covens readily pose nude for the tabloids and fill volumes with their philosophy (in which astrology and health diets dance hand-in-hand with worship of a Satan hard to distinguish from Santa Claus), and though such relatively recent episodes as the
fin-de-siècle
black masses in Paris that Huysmans described and the affair, in the 1670s, of the Marquise de Montespan—a mistress of Louis XIV’s who attempted to secure his love with obscene rites—are undoubtedly historical, a fog of unknowing descends as the alleged Dark Age heyday of witchcraft is approached. Modern scholars like Norman Cohn (in
Europe’s Inner Demons
) strenuously argue that there were
never
any covens or organized Devil-worship, that all confessions to the contrary were the product of torture or demented delusion. His opponents in this argument include Michelet, who was carrying forward certain earlier suggestions among nineteenth-century historians that witchcraft was an underground survival of the ancient pagan religions, and Margaret Murray, the Scots anthropologist whose book of 1921,
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
, with its successor,
The God of the Witches
(1933), claimed,
by the light of Frazer’s
Golden Bough
, an extensive historical reality for the perennial rumors of witchcraft. While scholarly debates raged, modern British and American women were founding covens along the lines of Miss Murray’s anthropology, and by 1970 (roughly the time of my novel), a Witches’ International Craft Association had come into existence, along with a Witches’ News Service, a Witches’ Lecture Bureau, and a Witches’ Anti-Defamation League. My heroines are not members of these organizations; their witchcraft is an intuitive and fitfully articulated collusion, sprung from their discovery that husbandlessness brings power. Witchcraft is the venture, one could say, of women into the realm of power. What women in the Middle Ages besides witches and queens wielded power that men needed to fear?