The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (12 page)

Many proper names from
real
life appear in these texts. Paul Goodman, J. B. Priestley, Julia Ward Howe, Anthony Powell, Godard. Also
Time
,
Newsweek
, the Museum of Modern Art. Curiously enough those names that are already invested with an
a priori
reality help the texts which, as usual, maunder, talking to themselves, keeping a dull eye out for the odd joke as the author tries not to be himself a maker of dreck but an arranger of dreck.

The most successful of the lot is “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” The reader brings to the story an altogether too vivid memory of the subject. We learn from the interview in Bellamy's book that, though the story “is, like, made up,” Barthelme did use a remark that he heard Kennedy make about a geometric painter (“‘Well, at least we know he has a ruler'”…high wit from Camelot). Yet the parts that are not, like, made up are shrewd and amusing and truthful (relatively, of course). Also, the see-Jane-run style is highly suited to a parody of a contemporary politician on the make as he calculates his inanities and holds back his truths (relative—and relatives, too) and rage. Mr. William Gass takes an opposite view of this story. “Here Barthelme's method fails; for the idea is to
use
dreck, not write about it.” But surely one can do both. Or neither. Or one. Or the other. But then Mr. Gass thinks that Barthelme at his best “has the art to make a treasure out of trash….”

Throughout Barthelme's work one notes various
hommages
to this writer or that (who lives at Montreux? and where will one hear the ultimate message
Trink
?); some are a bit too close. For instance, the famous opening scene of Beckett's
Molloy
in which a father is carrying his son becomes in “A Picture History of the War”: “Kellerman, gigantic with gin, runs through the park at noon with his naked father slung under one arm.”

City Life
(1970). Fourteen short stories, much as before except that now Barthelme is very deep into fiction's R and D (Research and Development) as opposed to the old-fashioned R and R (Rest and Recuperation). There are, galore, graphics. Big black squares occupy the center of white pages. Elaborate studies in perspective. Lots of funny old pictures. There are wide white margins, nice margins, too. There are pages of questions and answers (Q and A). Father returns. In fact, the first paragraph of the first story is: “An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my father.”

It must be said that America's most imitated young writer is also not only the most imitable but one of the most imitative.
Hommage
to Robbe-Grillet:

Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom—if not the bottom of this page then of some other page—where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think about the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of an embrace

and so on for eight whole pages with
not one full stop
, only a breaking off of the text, which is called “Sentence.” The only development in “Sentence” is that what looks to be Robbe-Grillet at work in the first lines turns gradually (temporarily) into something like Raymond Roussel. Not quite zero degree: at the frozen pole no sentence ever thinks or even “thinks.”

Sadness
(1972). More stories. More graphics. The pictures are getting better all the time. There is a good one of a volcano in eruption. The prose…as before. Simple sentences. “Any writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence,” Barthelme has declared. But he does not want to be like any writer in the country: “I'm very interested in awkwardness: sentences that are awkward in a particular way.” What is “beauty,” one wonders, suspicious of words. What, for that matter, is “awkward” or “particular”? But we do know all about sentences and occasionally among the various tributes to European modern masters (in translation), certain themes (or words) reoccur. One is the father. Of that more later. Also, drunkenness. In fact, alcohol runs like a torrent through most of the writers I have been reading. From Barthelme to Pynchon there is a sense of booziness, nausea, hangover.

I say: “I'm forty. I have bad eyes. An enlarged liver.”

“That's the alcohol,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

“You're very much like your father, there.”

The only pages to hold me were autobiographical. Early dust-jacket pictures of Barthelme show an amiable-looking young man upon whose full upper lip there is a slight shadow at the beginning of the lip's bow. The dust jacket of
Sadness
shows a bearded man with what appears to be a harelip. Barthelme explains that he has had an operation for a “basal-cell malignancy” on his upper lip. True graphics, ultimately, are not old drawings of volcanoes or of perspective but of the author's actual face on the various dust jackets, aging in a definitely serial way with, in Barthelme's case, the drama of an operation thrown in, very much in the R and R tradition, and interesting for the reader though no doubt traumatizing for the author.

Guilty Pleasures
(1974). This writer cannot stop making sentences. I have stopped reading a lot of them. I feel guilty. It is not pleasurable to feel guilty about not reading every one of those sentences. I do like the pictures more and more. In this volume there are more than thirty pictures. In the prose I spotted
hommages
to Calvino, Borges, early Ionesco. I am now saving myself for
The Dead Father
, the big one, as they say on Publisher's Row, the first big novel, long awaited, even heralded.

In
The Pleasure of the Text
, published just before
The Dead Father
(and by the same American publisher), Roland Barthes observes: “Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin…. As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something: to make good novels….” Apparently Barthelme took the hint. In
The Dead Father
a number of people are lugging about the huge remains of something called The Dead Father. Only this monster is not very dead because he talks quite a bit. The people want to bury him but he is not all that eager to be buried. Barthelme ends his book by deliberately burying the eponymous hero and, perhaps, fiction too. All of this is very ambitious.

Barthelme's narrative is reasonably sequential if lacking in urgency. There is, as always, Beckett: “said Julie, let us proceed. / They proceeded.” Within the book is A Manual for Sons, written in a splendid run-on style quite at odds with the most imitated imitable writing that surrounds this unexpectedly fine burst of good writing on the nature of fathers, sons. For the record: there are no quotation marks. And no pictures. There is one diagram of a
placement
; but it is not much fun.

I am not sure that my progress through all these dull little sentences has been entirely justified by A Manual for Sons, but there is no doubt that beneath the mannerisms, the infantile chic, the ill-digested culture of an alien world, Barthelme does have a talent for, of all things in this era, writing. Shall I quote an example? I think not. Meanwhile, Barthelme himself says, “I have trouble reading, in these days. I would rather drink, talk or listen to music…. I now listen to rock constantly.” Yes.

I can only assume that Grace Paley is a friend of Mr. Barthelme because she does not belong to what a certain Hack of Academe named Harry T. Moore likes, mistakenly, to call a
galère
. Paley is a plain short story writer of the R and R school, and I got a good deal of pleasure from reading her two collections of short stories,
The Little Disturbances of Man
(with the nice subtitle: “Stories of Men and Women at Love”) and
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
. She works from something very like life…I mean “life” she has an extraordinary ear for the way people sound. She do the ethnics in different voices. Although she tends, at times, to the plain-Jane or see-Jane-run kind of writing, her prose has such a natural energy that one is not distracted, a sign of good writing if not of a blissful text (she is close to boiling, in any case, and will never freeze).

With William Gass we are back in R and D country. I read Gass's first novel
Omensetter's Luck
in 1966 and found much to admire in it. Gass's essays are often eerily good. At his best, he can inhabit a subject in a way that no other critic now writing can do (see, in particular, his commentaries on Gertrude Stein). He seems not to have enjoyed being interviewed in Bellamy's collection, and his tone is unusually truculent (of New York quality lit. types: “I snub them”). It should be noted that of the writers admired by Barthelme only William Gass is an intellectual in the usual sense (I put no quotes around the words “intellectual,” “usual,” or “sense”). Gass's mind is not only first-rate but far too complex to settle for the easy effects of, say, Mr. Barthelme. But then: “As a student of philosophy, I've put in a great deal of time on the nature of language and belong, rather vaguely, to a school of linguistic philosophy which is extremely skeptical about the nature of language itself.”

Gass has a complaint about Barth, Borges, and Beckett: “occasionally their fictions, conceived as establishing a metaphorical relationship between the reader and the world they are creating, leave the reader too passive.” This is fair comment, though open to the question: just what is passive in this context? Ought the reader to be dancing about the room? blood pressure elevated? adrenaline flowing as he and the text battle one another? But then Gass shifts ground in his next sentence but one: “I have little patience with the ‘creative reader.'” In other words the ideal reader is active but not creative. Quotation marks are now in order to protect these adjectives from becoming meaningless.

“I rarely read fiction and generally don't enjoy it.” Gass is as one with the other R and D writers of fiction today. Although they do not read with any pleasure what anyone else is doing, they would like, naturally, to be themselves read with pleasure…by whom? Perhaps a college of writerly texts, grave as cardinals.

Gass himself is a curious case. Essentially, he is a traditional prose writer, capable of all sorts of virtuoso effects on the inner ear as well as on the reading eye. Yet he appears to have fallen victim to the R and D mentality. Speaking of a work in progress, “I hope that it will be really original in form and in effect, although mere originality is not what I'm after.” This is worthy of Jimmy Carter.

Fiction has traditionally and characteristically borrowed its form from letters, journals, diaries, autobiographies, histories, travelogues, news stories, backyard gossip, etc. It has simply
pretended
to be one or other of them. The history of fiction is in part a record of the efforts of its authors to create for fiction in its own forms. Poetry has its own. It didn't borrow the ode from somebody. Now the novel is imagined news, imagined psychological or sociological case studies, imagined history…feigned, I should say, not imagined. As Rilke shattered the journal form with
Malte,
and Joyce created his own for
Ulysses
and
Finnegan,
I should like to create mine.

There seems to me to be a good deal wrong not only logically but aesthetically and historically with this analysis. First, poetry has never
had
its form. The origins of the ode are ancient but it was once created if not by a single ambitious schoolteacher, then by a number of poets roving like Terence's rose down the centuries. Certainly in this century poetry has gone off in as many directions as the novel, an art form whose tutelary deity is Proteus. The more like something else the novel is, the more like its true self it is. And since we do not
have
it, we can go on making it. Finally, whether or not a work of art is feigned or imagined is irrelevant if the art is good.

Like many good books,
Omensetter's Luck
is not easy to describe. What one comes away with is the agreeable memory of a flow of language that ranges from demotic Midwest (“I just up and screams at him—thump thump thump, he'd been going, die die die—I yell…”) to incantatory (“For knowledge, for good and evil, would Eve have set her will against her Father's? Ah, Horatio…”). In his interview the author tells us that he knows nothing of the setting (an Ohio river town); that everything is made up. He also confesses, “I haven't the dramatic imagination at all. Even my characters tend to turn away from one another and talk to the void. This, along with my inability to narrate, is my most serious defect (I think) as a writer and incidentally as a person.”

The stories in
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
seem to me to be more adventurous and often more successful than the novel. “The Pedersen Kid” is beautiful work. In a curious way the look of those short sentences on pages uncluttered with quotation marks gives the text a visual purity and coldness that perfectly complements the subject of the story, and compels the reader to know the icy winter at the country's heart. In most of these stories the prevailing image is winter.

Billy closes his door and carries coal or wood to his fire and closes his eyes, and there's simply no way of knowing how lonely and empty he is or whether he's as vacant and barren and loveless as the rest of us are—here in the heart of the country.

At actual zero degree, Gass, perversely, blazes with energy.

The title story is the most interesting of the collection. Despite a sign or two that the French virus may have struck: “as I write this page, it is eleven days since I have seen the sun,” the whole of the story (told in fragments) is a satisfying description of the world the narrator finds himself in, and he makes art of the quotidian: