The Moon In Its Flight (18 page)

IT’S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY

Whatever remnants of stylistic eccentricity peculiar and unique to Clifford’s fiction had long since been leached out of it by a dogged series of accommodations, emendations, compromises, and authorial, shall I say, understandings. His current editor was a reasonable man, so Clifford believed, and the suggestions that he made substantive and intelligent. And he had stuck by Clifford, despite the disappointment of his last book, patiently waiting for “his” writer to achieve that perfect blend of the conventionally literary and the cannily specious that would announce a
breakthrough.

Now, reading the proofs of his fourth novel, Clifford saw, not with anything so dramatic as a shock, but saw with a kind of sudden, pleased candor, that not only had he, at last, quite thoroughly assassinated the prose that was once his, with its errors and tics and flourishes, its obsessions and syntactical aberrations; but that the staid, clean, undemanding—he thought of it as functional—prose within which his characters now suffered their warm and imperfect, their wonderfully human, oh so human! travails, was not only not his, but was, quite remarkably, nobody’s. It was an excruciatingly polished, forward-march prose, with suitable, occasional filigrees of clever simile and analogy, and splashes of the contemporary demotic; a prose that seemed happily familiar, as if it had been there all the time, waiting to be read, but just once. And, too, his characters, his flawed and fascinating
people
, were deployed as neat packages, their histories and quirks economically posited well before their thrust-and-parry colloquies. They looked, so Clifford thought, as if they had decided on things
by themselves
, sans authorial interference. “They more or less started doing what they wanted to do,” he could imagine himself saying to an interviewer.

This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually
read
a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers—well-written, with fully developed characters, a nicely turned plot, and
something important to say.
It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were—as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.

How did all this bad luck befall Clifford? He’d begun his dim career as a poet, one of minor, limited gifts. At unexpected moments, there had appeared to him (although “appeared” may be dramatizing such occasions) the notion of the poem that would invite him to venture beyond his given odds and ends of “talent,” that would invite him to give up his conception of the poem as a vector of sensitive thought concerning his own highly edited but sensitive life. But since he had a small reputation, a fear of the untried, and, most importantly, a terror of writing a poem that would not
look like
his poems (he had, he believed, a style), these realities conspired to keep him writing a constipated verse that was, at its best, as some friend cruelly said behind his back, “like Sylvia Plath
without
the rag on.” What to do?

Clifford wanted, not fame, he knew better than that, but some sort of recognition and respect, some applause, a little money! He wanted to know that his books of poems would be regularly reviewed in the
Times Book Review,
even if such reviews were by the Winchell Tremaines, Brooke Van Dolans, Samantha Gundersons, and the other haughty corporals of the racket. On a number of occasions, Clifford tried to write the poem that was, if you please, just out of his reach, a poem that refused his carefully “crafted” images (“blue gardenias, slices of a summer sky”), but by the second stanza or the twelfth line, he’d be nervously lost; the language that he read, in a nausea of dislocation, was one that he neither recognized nor had control over. He could not, to put it perhaps too simply, tolerate the evidence of his obliterated opinions. And so he “retired” from versifying, as one might quit a boring job, and decided to try his hand at fiction.

His first novel, rigorously and repeatedly reworked, was, nevertheless, somewhat shaggy and juvenile; yet it had phrases and even scenes in which Clifford seemed to overcome his minuscule talents, if I may be permitted a mystical turn. Perhaps it’s better to say that he surprised himself in that he permitted his prose to forgo, on occasion, its rigid professionalism, permitted it to break loose, a little, from the everyday world and its everyday people that the narrative drove relentlessly onward: A died, but B lived; C had a terrible accident, but D, her friend, had a baby by E, C’s former husband; and F’s son came home, addicted to heroin and suffering from AIDS, sullen and despairing, yet seeking love from G, his father, who, although compassionate, was emotionally distant, even from his second wife, the weaver, and her autistic daughter. And I’s alcoholism was destroying his sister, J’s life, even though she would not recognize this fact. These exhausted problems did not, I hope it goes without saying, present themselves as banalities of “mere” pop fiction, for Clifford, like any
littérateur
you can think of, knew how to disguise the sentimental as the poignant, even the tragic. Life! his novel said. Life! It was, of course, baloney.

Clifford’s editor at the time, who would be disappointed by Clifford, worried about the eruptions of, well,
writing
in the manuscript, and worked with Clifford to temper if not excise them. The book needed to be
friendlier,
more
coherent,
retaining its
toughness
and
quirky insights,
but not at the expense of a
driving narrative.
The book was about, was it not,
the way we are now?
Without a clear respect and compassion for the characters and their messy lives, just what is a novel? What, indeed? Look at Dickens, look at Hardy, look at Trollope, look at Bellow and Updike, look at them! The novel was published, got nine reviews, one of which called it “… carefully written and enjoyably quirky … somewhat difficult at times .. rich with compassion … characters who, by the book’s end, we feel we’ve … suffered with.” The book disappeared so completely that it never showed up on remainder tables or in catalogues.

There’s not much left to say. Clifford’s next two books were like dozens of others, literate if vulgar, “better than” kill-and-fuck trash, and of no account. They were much like the miles of thin, clankingly inadequate independent films that one can spend a lifetime watching blend into one another with an inevitability as depressing as it is foreseeable. Clifford, it must be said, did not “sell out,” for he had, as the old phrase puts it, “nothing that anybody wanted.” He wasn’t bad enough or smart enough to be a successful commercial hack, and he had absolutely none of the luck that would have enabled him to emerge from the slough of writhing literary hacks. Had he, when a poet, followed his Muse, as they say, into the brambles of language that were too formidable for him to contemplate, there is little doubt that he would have written bad poems; and it also seems clear that had he insisted on elaborating on the small eruptions of—art, let’s say, for want of a less generous word—in his first novel, it would have done nothing to ameliorate the zombielike qualities of the whole.

It’s a guess, one that pleases me, that as Clifford read the proofs of this fourth novel, as he battered his way through its dreary lines of prose, a prose that seemed manufactured by a language contraption with decorative abilities, he was relieved, even pleased. This is the McCoy! I’ll have him say, or something like it, Oh boy! perhaps. Maybe
this
book would do it. “Scintillating,” even “wise.” And with a pronounced “attention to scenes and their riveting details, not to mention their dialogue, that is almost cinematic.” You never know.

LIFE AND LETTERS

Some three or four years ago, Edward Krefitz published a story that, as is the case with many stories, contained elements of his past life, elements, of course, disguised, twisted, corrupted, embellished, romanticized, and wholly fanciful. A few people recognized themselves as models for characters in the story, and were, predictably, chagrined or flattered, depending on the quality of the fiction’s distortion of their being. They all wished, surely, to be
accurately portrayed,
certainly; but there is accuracy and then there is meanspiritedness. So they muttered.

Edward wasn’t interested in their scattered responses to his story when and if he got wind of them. However, the one person whom he had used as a model for a major character in the story, the one person he dearly wanted to read the story and be hurt by it, never acknowledged it, even though it had been published in a literary magazine that Edward knew this person deeply, even somewhat ridiculously admired—at least he had, years before. Edward was disappointed, since his fictional creation—vapid, obtuse, childishly cruel—was easily recognizable, and he so wanted him to
be
recognized by his ex-friend, if “friend” is not too exotic a word to use. Because of this disappointment, which he chafed into a kind of full-blown irritation, he made a mistake; that is, he sent the model a photocopy of the story, insincerely inscribed, and followed this, soon after, with a letter, thereby, quite perfectly, compounding his original error.

The story, entitled, rather obscurely, “The Birds Are Singing,” was a bitter, if frail, comedy of manners (bad manners, as Edward liked to think of it), driven by the wheezing engine of the “adulterous tale,” one that was neither particularly comic nor particularly sordid. Its hero, if you will, a young husband whose authorial aspirations are at best halfhearted, has a wife, pretty and possessed of a kind of floundering hedonism. She is content to be “his” because of his aspirations and the spidery talents he owns, as well as by the fact that his literary vocation has thrown the couple into contact with other young literary people, jittery, amoral, indifferently talented, if talented at all. These companions are drawn as rapt in a cheap and shabby, vaguely hysterical delusion, and too selfish or stupid to recognize it as such. At the center of this overdone clique of the pathetic, is the major character already mentioned. This man is presented, in the most patronizing as well as nastiest prose that Edward could knock together, as a vapid dilettante; a poet, of sorts, who is hard at work on a novel that will justify the shameful fact that he is the owner of a successful messenger service for which the husband works as a bookkeeper. The boss/novelist is given to the reader as a tedious lout who confuses his sociopolitical right-thinking with artistic talent, and he is stuffed with cretinous dialogue that even Wyndham Lewis might hesitate to put into his most contemptible characters’ mouths. The boss seduces the husband’s wife in an ugly scene that boils with loathing for the pair. The husband is aware of this, but has no clear proof, and so ignores it, much as if his wife’s probable seducer is no more than a living dildo and she a disembodied vagina. He is sure, however, that this amorous clod may one day be able to help him along in his career, or what he thinks of as his career. This was, then, the bones of Edward’s story, one that he came to admire more as it aged, so to speak. The notion that the cuckolded husband finds his betrayer pitifully absurd, and his wife a virtual specter, while he emerges as a genuine if eccentric and as-yet unrealized artist pleased him, even though the story had, he knew, a somewhat manufactured air about it.