Odd Jobs (27 page)

Now, perhaps in this audience there have been some smiles at Proust’s enthusiasm over the still-fresh discovery of the unconscious and at his virtually religious exaltation of the private over the public—of instinct, which can be expressed only through concrete images impressed upon us by reality and re-created in works of art, over intellect, which can speak the language of men, of social commerce. Is not a bustling book fair the silliest place in the world to suggest that literature is an activity apart, an activity of the spirit as intimate as prayer, an activity for whose sake we must renounce deeds as praiseworthy and socially useful as helping sick friends, propagandizing for worthy causes, and accepting public functions such as the one I am now fulfilling? The religious tone of classic modernism, breathing austerity and fanaticism, strikes us as excessive. Its close imitation of European Catholicism seems puzzling, now that the vessel of Christianity is a century more depleted. Austerity and fanaticism are now given over to the Muslims, who alarm us each night on the televised news. What do the emanations from the ivory tower count against those from the television transmitting tower?

This phrase “ivory tower” was proposed by Flaubert, the first modernist novelist, when he wrote,

The artist’s only possible camaraderie, Flaubert elsewhere asserts, can be with other artists. “Mankind hates us: we serve none of its purposes; and we hate it, because it injures us. So let us love one another ‘in Art,’ as mystics love one another ‘in God.’ ” God much haunts his mind, as in the famous dictum “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” God does not lecture, except to the Old Testament Israelites, who did not always listen. The modernist writer does not lecture; he creates, he dreams, he deciphers his hieroglyphs, he exists in a state of conscious antagonism to the busy bourgeois world. The lecture is an instrument of the bourgeoisie, a tool in the mass education essential to modern democracies. Though Flaubert says that no bond exists between the crowd and literary artists, the crowd offers to make one and invites the writer to lecture. “Descend from your ivory tower,” the crowd cries, “and come share, O bayadere, your fabulous perfumes with us.” Godlike and savage in his purest conception of himself, the author is thus brought back into society, into the global village, and trivialized into being an educator and a celebrity.

I am thinking primarily of my own country in offering this last image. Lectures by authors go back, in the United States, to the so-called lyceum circuit, which, beginning in the 1830s, brought to the scattered American provinces inspirational and educational speakers. Ralph Waldo Emerson was such a star, hitting the road with secular sermons culled from his journals, and then collecting these oral gems into the volumes of essays that are among the classic texts of American style and thought. Mark Twain, a generation and a half later, began as a comic lecturer, a stand-up comedian without a microphone, and his best-selling novels and travel accounts retained much of his crowd-pleasing platform manner. Even writers relatively abstruse and shy followed the lecture trail; Henry James toured the States coast to coast in 1904–5 lecturing
on “The Lesson of Balzac,” and Melville for a time in the late 1850s, when he was still somewhat famous as “the man who had lived among cannibals,” sought to generate the income that his books were failing to supply by speaking, at fifty dollars a lecture, on “Statues in Rome” and “The South Seas.” Even a figure as eccentric and suspect as Whitman travelled about, evidently, with a lecture on Lincoln. Yet in its very heyday the lyceum style of bardic enterprise had its detractors among literary men: Hawthorne wrote in
The Blithedale Romance
of “that sober and pallid, or, rather, drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the Lecture,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes returned from a tour reporting that “a lecturer was a literary strumpet.”

Still, as one tries to picture those gaslit auditoriums of the last century, with the black-clad lecturer and his oaken lectern framed by velvet curtains heavy with gold tassels—curtains that the next night might part to reveal a scuffed and much-travelled opera set or the chairs of a minstrel show—one imagines an audience and a performer in sufficient agreement as to what constituted entertainment and edification; the bonds between the culture-hungry and the culture-dispensing were stretched thin but not yet broken in the innocence of the New World wilderness. One thinks of the tremendous warmth Emerson established with his auditors, to whom he entrusted, without condescension or clowning, his most profound and intimate thoughts, and who in listening found themselves discovering, with him, what it was to be American.

Like book clubs and other movements of mass uplift, the lecture circuit gradually gravitated toward the lowbrow. The famous Chautauqua Movement, which persisted into the 1920s, blended with camp meetings and tent revival meetings—each a high-minded excuse to forgather, with the usual mixed motives of human gatherings. The writers most admired in my youth did not, by and large, lecture, though some of the less admired and more personable did, such as the then-ubiquitous John Mason Brown and Franklin P. Adams. But Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck were rarely seen on stages; their advice to humanity was contained in their works, and their non-writing time seemed amply filled with marlin fishing, mule fancying, skirt chasing, and recreational drinking. They were a rather rough-hewn crew, adventurers and knockabouts who had trained for creative writing by practicing journalism. Few were college graduates, though Fitzgerald’s years at Princeton were important to him and Sinclair Lewis and Thornton Wilder did hold degrees from Yale. But doing was accepted as the main
mode of literary learning. Hemingway began as a reporter for the Kansas City
Star
at the age of eighteen, and at the age of nineteen Eugene O’Neill quit Princeton and shipped out to sea. The world of print was wider then: a major American city might have as many as eight or ten daily newspapers, and a number of popular magazines paid well for short stories. The writers of this pre-television generation, with their potentially large bourgeois audience, yet were modernist enough to shy from crowd-pleasing personal appearances; nor, in the matter of lecturing, is there much reason to suppose that they were often invited. Why would the citizens of Main Street want to hear what Sinclair Lewis thought of them? Gertrude Stein, of all people, did go on a nationwide lecture tour in 1934, speaking in her complacently repetitive and cryptic style on such topics as “What Is English Literature,” “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” and “Portraits and Repetition.” One suspects, though, that the audiences came to hear her much as they had flocked to hear Oscar Wilde in 1882—more for the spectacle than the sense, and to be titillated by the apparition of the writer as an amusing exotic.

It is true that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, such very estimable literary artists as Shaw, Eliot, and Mann did not infrequently lecture. Shaw, however, was a man of the stage, with something political—Fabian Socialism—to sell. Eliot was a critic as much as he was a poet, with an excellent formal education in his possession and a considerable financial need to urge him to the lectern. And Mann, well, was German, and in the mighty role of
Dichter
rather close to the primeval bard. By lecturing, with authority and aplomb, on Freud, Goethe, and Wagner, Mann was, besides acknowledging sources of his own inspiration, paying homage to tribal gods, to exemplary heroes of German culture. The French, too, one might observe in passing, now and then cast up literary figures whose magisterial presence consists of the sum of their work with something added from before and beyond. Figures like Valéry and Sartre even in their silences and refusals lecture, reminding their publics of the ancient glories of Gallic acumen. When one tries to think of who in recent French culture has projected the most vital images outward to the non-French world, one comes up with lecturers—Barthes, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Braudel.

But in my own country, in the four decades since the end of World War II, one sees not the elevation of analysis and thought to the animated and brightly visible level of creative art, but the reduction of literary
artists to the status of academic adjuncts. Where creation is taken as a precondition for exposition, the creator is expected to be, in Proust’s phrase, “prodigal of himself.” It is not merely that poets out of economic necessity teach in colleges and read their works in other colleges and in time understandably take as a standard of excellence a poem’s impact upon a basically adolescent audience, or that short-story writers move from college writing program to summer workshop and back again and consider actual publication as a kind of supplementary academic credential, while a karmic turnover of writing students into graduate writing students into writing teachers takes place within an academic universe sustained by grants and tax money and isolated from the marketplace. It is not merely that contemporary novels are studied for course credit and thus given the onus of the compulsory and, as it were, the textbook-flavored—a modernization of the literary curriculum, one might remark, that displaces the classics and gives the present a kind of instant fustiness. It is that American society, generously trying to find a place for this functionary, inherited from other epochs, called a writer, can only think to place him as a teacher and, in a lesser way, as a celebrity.

He is invited to come onto television and have his say, as if his book, his poor thick unread book, were
not
his say. He is invited to come into the classroom and, the meagrest kind of expert, teach himself. Last century’s lyceum circuit has moved indoors, from the open air of a hopeful rural democracy to the cloistered auditoriums of the country’s fifteen hundred accredited colleges and universities; the circuit has been, as it were, miniaturized. Though the market for actual short stories is down, in the vastness of the United States, to a half-dozen or so paying magazines, the market for fiction writers, as adornment to banquets and conferences and corporate self-celebrations, is booming. Kurt Vonnegut has observed that an American writer gets paid more for delivering a speech at a third-rate bankrupt college than he does for writing a short-story masterpiece.

I do not wish to complain or to exaggerate. Sociological situations have causes that are not altered by satire or nostalgia. The university and the printshop, literature and scholarship have been ever close, and the erratic ways in which writers support themselves and their books seek readers have changed a number of times since the Renaissance days when poets sought with fulsome dedications to win the support of noble patrons. The academization of writing in America is but an aspect, after all, of the academization of America. The typical writer of my generation
is college-educated; in fact I am rather a maverick in having avoided graduate school. Academically equipped and habituated, it is natural for, say, John Barth and Joyce Carol Oates to teach and to lecture. They know a lot, and the prestige of their authorship adds a magic twinkle, a raffish spin, to their knowledge. Writers such as they stand ready to participate in the discourse of civilized men and women, just as, in pre-war Europe, writers like Mann and Valéry and Eliot could creditably perform in the company of scholarly gentlemen. Until the arising, not so many centuries ago, of a large middle-class audience for printed material and with it the possibility of professional writers supported by the sales of their works, writers had to be gentlemen or daughters of clergymen or courtiers of a kind; like jesters, writers peeked from behind the elbow of power. If, in a democracy without a nobility or much of a landed gentry, the well-endowed universities step in and act the part of patron, where is the blame? Who longs for the absinthe-soaked bohemia that offered along with its freedom and excitement derangement and despair, or for the barren cultural landscape that so grudgingly fed the classic American artists? Is not even the greatest American writing, from Hawthorne and Dickinson to Hemingway and Faulkner, and not excluding Whitman and Mark Twain, maimed by the oddity of the native artist’s position and the limits of self-education? Perhaps so; but we suspect in each of the cases named that the oddity is inextricable from the intensity and veracity, and that when the writer becomes a lecturer, a certain intensity is lost.

Why should this be? To prepare and give a lecture, and to observe the attendant courtesies, takes time; but time is given abundantly to the writer, especially in this day of antibiotics and health-consciousness, more time than he or she needs to be struck by his or her particular lightning. There was time enough, in the life of Wallace Stevens, to put in eight-hour days at his insurance company in Hartford; time enough, in the life of Rimbaud, to quit poetry at the age of nineteen; time enough, in the life of Tolstoy, to spurn art entirely and to try to educate the peasants and reinvent religion. We feel, in fact, that if a writer’s life does not have in it time to waste—time for a binge or a walk in the woods or a hectic affair or a year of silence—he can’t be much of a writer. In a sense none of his time is wasted except that in which he turns his back on nature, shuts down his osmotic function, and tries to lecture. Mann, in his lecture on Freud—given at the celebration of Freud’s eightieth birthday, in Vienna in 1936—warned his audience, “An author, my friends, is a man essentially not bent
upon science, upon knowing, distinguishing, and analysing; he stands for simple creation, for doing and making, and thus may be the object of useful cognition, without, by his very nature, having any competence in it as subject.” The artist, in his experiences, passions, prejudices, and ignorances, is a delegate from reality, a distillation or an outgrowth of it, and in all humility offers himself as an object of study rather than as an expert, even on the topic of himself. Decipherment of the inner hieroglyphics that reality has stamped upon him, to use Proust’s metaphor, is his business, and he should undertake no task that might impair his deciphering. Asking a writer to lecture is like asking a knife to turn a screw. Screws are necessary to hold the world together, the tighter the better, and a screwdriver is an admirable tool, more rugged and less dangerous than a knife; but a knife with a broken tip and a dulled or twisted edge serves all purposes poorly. Of course, if a knife is repeatedly used as a screwdriver, it will get worn into the shape of one; but then don’t expect it to slice any more apples.