Odd Jobs (26 page)

The story is called “The Happiest I’ve Been.” It was accepted and paid for, and has been reprinted in a few anthologies. While writing it, I had a sensation of breaking through, as if through a thin sheet of restraining glass, to material, to truth, previously locked up. I was excited, and when my wife of those years read the first draft, she said, “This is exciting.” Now, what was exciting? There is no great violence or external adventure in the story, no extraordinary characters. The abrupt purchase on lived life, I suggest, is exciting. In 1958 I was at just the right distance from the night in Shillington, Pennsylvania, when 1952 became 1953; I still remembered and cared, yet was enough distant to get a handle on the memories, to manipulate them into fiction.

That is part one of creativity: the ego and its self-expression. For part two, the genre, there was the American short story,
The New Yorker
short story indeed, of which many had been written in the decades preceding 1958, but none, my happy delusion was, quite in this way about quite this sort of material. Non-Southern small towns and teen-agers were both, my impression was, customarily treated with condescension, or satirically, in the fiction of the Fifties; the indictments of provincial life by Sinclair Lewis and Ring Lardner were still in the air. My mission was to stand up and cry, “No, here is life, to be taken as seriously as any other kind.” By this light tiny details, such as the shaved armpit gleaming like a bit of chicken skin or the two triangular punctures in an empty oil can, acquire the intensity of proclamation. Things turn symbolic; hidden meanings emerge. The blurred sexuality of this playful moment is ominous, for it is carrying the participants away from their childhoods, into the dizzying mystery of time.

As to the third part of the creative process, the audience beyond the genre, there was
The New Yorker
reader of my imagination, pampered and urban, needing a wholesome small-town change from his then-customary diet of Westchester-adultery stories and reminiscences of luxurious Indian or Polish childhoods. I believed, that is, that there was
a body of my fellow Americans to whom these modest doings in Pennsylvania would be news.

Such was the state of my imagination as I wrote this story; actually, many stories not unlike it appear in the magazine now, and perhaps always have: but in my possibly mistaken sense of things the material was fresh, fresh to me and fresh to the world, and authentic. By authentic I mean actual. For the creative imagination, as I conceive it, is wholly parasitic upon the real world—what used to be called Creation. Creative excitement, and a sense of useful work, has invariably and only come to me when I felt I was transferring, with a lively accuracy, some piece of experienced reality to the printed page. Those two triangular holes and that bit of chicken skin are pearls of great price, redeemed from the featureless sweep of bygone experience. The wish to do justice to the real world compels language into those semi-transparent layers that make a style. No style or form exists in the abstract; whatever may be true in painting or music, there is no such thing as abstract writing. Words even when shattered into nonsense struggle to communicate meanings to us; and behind the most extreme modernist experiments with the language of fiction—Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake;
the late writing of Gertrude Stein; the automatic writing of Dada—some perception about the nature of reality seeks embodiment.

The creative imagination, then, has a double interface: on the output side, with some kind of responsive audience, and on the input side, with reality itself. If either connection breaks down, the electricity ceases to flow. Both sides of the creative event demand trust: on the output side, we must hope an audience is there, or will be there. On the input, we must sit down in the expectation that the material will speak through us, that certain unforeseeable happinesses of pattern and realization will emerge out of blankness as we write.

We began with Melville. His audience, in that England-oriented, romance-minded America of a hundred forty years ago, was wandering away, but something was frazzling as well in his relation with his raw material. Melville was interested—turned on, we might say—by the sea, and by male interchange, and toward the end of his long-silent life wrote in his obscurity one more masterpiece,
Billy Budd
, along the lines of these concerns. The vast land of America and the complexities of family life depressed rather than fired his imagination. So, his attempts to abandon his oceanic material rebuked, he abdicated the professional writer’s struggle and has probably made a stronger impression on posterity for
it. He seems, at this distance, unencumbered by facile prolixity or mere professionalism; the lack of public means spared him public manners. In his professional defeat his imagination remained his own.

In this present age of excessive information and of cheerful inaccuracy, where six shrewd or at least intimidatingly verbal critics exist for every creative spirit, the writer has no clearer moral duty than to keep his imagination his own. In doing so, he risks becoming offensive. Listen, if you will, to the tone of this contemporary review of
Moby-Dick:

“O generation of vipers” runs through the mind. All generations, each in their time, are viperish, and how the artist survives and makes his way in his own lifetime is fundamentally a personal problem, with many solutions, none of them ideal. But this much seems certain: what we end by treasuring in the creative imagination is the freedom it manages to keep, regardless of contemporary response. Or, rather, the degree to which it, imagining an ideal audience, succeeds in creating an audience with an enhanced capacity for response.

T
HE VERY FIRST PEOPLE
whom we consider authors—the minds and voices behind the tribal epics, the Bible and Homer, the Vedas and the sagas—were, it would seem, public performers, for whom publication
took the form of recitation, of incantation, of (we might say) lecturing. The circumstances wherein these primal literary works were promulgated are not perfectly clear, nor are all examples of oral literature identical in purpose and texture; but we could risk generalizing that the bard’s function was, in the Horatian formulation, to entertain and to instruct, and that the instruction concerned the great matter of tribal identity. The poet and his songs served as a memory bank, supplying the outlines of the determinative tribal struggles and instances of warrior valor. Who we are, who our heroic fathers were, how we got where we are, why we believe what we believe and act the way we do—the bard illuminates these essential questions, as the firelight flickers and the mead flows and the listeners in their hearts renew their pact with the past. The author is delivering not his own words but his own version of a story told to him, a story handed down in an evolving form and, at a certain point, fixed into print by the written version of a scribe. The author is not only himself but his predecessors, and simultaneously he is part of the living tribal fabric, the part that voices what all know, or should know, and need to hear again.

The mnemonic function of poetry weakly persists: American schoolchildren remember a certain epic date with the rhyme “In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and verses exist that enable one to recall the Kings of England and which months of the year contain thirty days or, in the case of February, even fewer. The nineteenth century abounded in ballad versions of such historical events as the midnight ride of Paul Revere and the bravery, in the midst of the Civil War, of a certain elderly Barbara Frietchie, who brandished the Union flag at rebel soldiers and inspired this famous couplet:

As recently as a decade ago, consumers of popular music were startled by a hit that rousingly set forth the facts of the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought in 1814.

And the traditional, even sacred centrality of the bard at the tribal conference is remembered, I think, by the widely held notion that authors can “speak”—that their vocation includes an ability and a willingness to entertain and instruct, orally, any gathering where the mead
flows and ring-gold forthcomes in sufficient quantities. The assumption is flattering but in truth the modernist literary tradition, of which we are all, for lack of another, late and laggard heirs, ill prepares a writer for such a performance. James Joyce, evidently, had a fine tenor voice and loved to sing, and he also, inspired by enough mead, could kick as high as the lintel of a doorway; but Proust was of a thoroughly retiring and unathletic nature, and murmured mostly to himself. “Authentic art has no use for proclamations, it accomplishes its work in silence,” he wrote, in that massive meditation upon the writer’s task which concludes
Remembrance of Things Past
. “To be altogether true to his spiritual life an artist must remain alone and not be prodigal of himself even to disciples” is another of Proust’s strictures. The artist, he repeatedly insists, is not another citizen, a social creature with social duties; he is a solitary explorer, a pure egotist. In a great parenthesis he explains that “when human altruism is not egotistic it is sterile, as for instance in the writer who interrupts his work to visit an unfortunate friend, to accept a public function, or to write propaganda articles.”

In almost the exact middle of
Time Regained
, Marcel contemplates his task—the huge novel we have at this point almost read through—and quails at a prospect so grand and exalted. He has stumbled upon the uneven paving stones that have recalled Venice to him, has heard the clink of the spoon upon glass that has reminded him of the train journey in which he had observed the steeples of Martinsville, has felt the texture of the stiff napkin that has reminded him of Balbec and its beach and ocean; he has tasted the madeleine out of which bloomed all Combray, and sees that these fragments involuntarily recovered from the abyss of Time compose the truth he must deliver:

This extraction of meaning from hieroglyphs becomes on the next page an underwater groping: