The Spooky Art (25 page)

B
ack in 1959, Ralph Ellison and I were out at the University of Iowa on a literary symposium gotten together by
Esquire.
We had a lively audience, and the show went on for several intense days. At the end, it seemed a little strange to me that we had really worked that hard, gotten into so many discussions with students and attendant academics, and even argued with each other as lively as hell. When it was over, there was even a bit of sadness. Something that had become just a bit exceptional was done. So I said to Ellison, “Why the hell do we do it? Why did we work so hard?” He said, “Man, we’re expendable.” I’ve always liked that remark.

One’s work is just that—expendable. If any of my ideas can succeed in changing the mind of someone who’s more intelligent than myself, fine. If you advance a thought as far as you can and it’s overtaken and improved by someone who will argue on the opposite side, then in effect you have improved your adversary’s mind. We can, however, feel the confidence that someone will come along who will take your opponent’s improvement of your idea and lift it higher on your side. Democracy is the throbbing embodiment of the dialectic—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis ready to become the new thesis.

You cannot have a great democracy without great writers. If
great novels disappear, as they are in danger of doing, and our storytelling is co-opted by television and journalism, then I think we will be that much farther away from a free society. Novels that reinvigorate our view of the subtlety of moral judgments are essential to a democracy. Americans were affected for decades by
The Grapes of Wrath.
Some good Southerners even developed a sense of the tragic by reading Faulkner.

I don’t like to say to myself, “I want to get this idea across.” Rather, I try to arouse a state of consciousness in the reader that will accommodate the material I am presenting. My hope is that my work will change their minds. Be it understood! I don’t want to change everybody’s mind in one direction—that’s equal to propaganda. Rather than move all my readers ten degrees to the left, I would be happier if I nudged some there while others were swinging to the right. My fundamental belief about a good society is that the cops get better and so do the crooks.

I feel that the final purpose of art is to intensify—even, if necessary, to exacerbate—the moral consciousness of people. In particular, I think the novel at its best is the most moral of the art forms. You are exploring the interstices of human behavior—which is the first approach to religious experience for many of us, especially since the organized religions don’t begin to offer sufficient account of the terrible complexities of moral experience and its dark sibling, moral ambiguity. The wisest rule of thumb for the would-be moralist is: There are no answers. There are only questions.

The logic of reincarnation, it seems to me, is that it may enable God to go back to certain projects, just as an artist sometimes wishes to improve his or her first attempt, work it further, go to the point where he can do better, or, if not, know at least that he has failed and can abandon a particular notion. Some human souls may represent some of the more poignant notions of God. You see, there’s an extraordinary beauty in the potential of most human relations if we’re willing to assume that under all the absurdities, the spleen, the waste, the brutality, there was, indeed, a blocked aesthetic conception.

Speaking at the MacDowell Colony once, I found myself saying, “There is no reason to believe the novelist is not better equipped
to deal with the possibilities of a mysterious and difficult situation than anyone else, since he or she is always trying to discover what the nature of reality might be. It’s as if the novelist is out there, sprung early, with something most people never contemplate—which is ‘How and what is the nature of this little reality before me?’ The novelist is the first to ask, ‘Do I love my wife? Does she love me? What is the nature of love? Do we love our child? How do we love? Would we die for our child? Or do we let the child die for us?’ The novelist has to deal with these questions because living with them is the only way to improve his or her brain. Without improving that brain, without refining the edge of one’s perception, it’s almost impossible to continue to work as a writer. Because if there is one fell rule in art, it is that uninspired repetition kills the soul. So the novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all. It is to deal with life not as something given us as eternal and immutable but rather as half-worked, because it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given, to forge (I might have said to
clarify)
a world which was always before us in a manner different from the way we had seen it the day before.”

I’m right and I’m wrong so often that I have no interest in convincing others to think the way I do. I’m interested, rather, that we all get better at thinking. If a book is good enough, you cannot predict how your readers are going to react. You shouldn’t be able to. If it is that good, it is not manipulative, and everyone, therefore, can voyage off in a different direction.

Yes, it is no ordinary human business to say you are going to write a novel. You are planning to create a world. This God-like presumption may be intoxicating, but it can never be comfortable. Nor should it be. To come up with a vision that can give us some notion of the Lord’s mind—that partakes of beauty.
When we read Proust or Stendhal or Joyce, any, indeed, of the great novelists, Tolstoy, Mann, or Faulkner, or on occasion Hemingway, they do give us the idea that one special side of God’s mind is not alien to the
style
of their mind.

I go back again and again to Dostoyevsky dying in despair because he could not write the novel about the great saint he envisioned.

To us, now, it seems, “Why despair? Look at the great books you did write.” But Dostoyevsky, given his unique intuitions, may have sensed that Russia was heading toward a prodigious catastrophe that he could not quite name. Nonetheless, he felt he could help avert this oncoming disaster if he could create in his pages a saint who would be believable enough to the Russian people to inspire them.

This is not as impossible a mission as it seems today. In Russia, in that time, a few novelists were revered like gods—or, if not a god, Tolstoy certainly was regarded by his readers as a major, virile, powerful saint. In turn, Dostoyevsky may have been looked upon as a mad genius, but absolutely a genius. It was taken for granted that you could learn more about life by reading their novels than from your own personal experience. The Russians paid just this exceptional attention to their novelists. So from Dostoyevsky’s point of view, if he could only make that marvelous saint in his mind come to life in a book, then he could help to save Russia. All right, slightly demented, as was so much of Dostoyevsky, but it was not wholly unbalanced. He had one chance in a hundred, one real chance in a hundred. That’s all a genius ever looks for—one live chance in that hundred. Geniuses, we do well to remind ourselves, are people who take those hundred-to-one shots because they see how strange is the luminescence in the flicker of the solitary candle.

Writers aren’t taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. We haven’t written the books that should have been written. We’ve spent too much time exploring ourselves. We haven’t done the imaginative work that could have helped define America, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding. We just expand all over the place, and this spread is about as attractive as collapsed and flabby dough on a stainless steel table.

If I could give one maxim to a young writer, I’d say live with your cowardice. Live with it every day. Hate it or defend it, but don’t try to slough it off. Cowardice is a prime cause; literary apathy or overt writer’s block is all too often the effect.

T
he reader will be aware by now that I have some obsession with how God exists. Is He an essential or an existential God? Is He all-powerful or is He, like us, an embattled existential presence who may succeed or fail in His vision? I think this obsession began to show itself while I was doing the last draft of
The Deer Park.
Then it continued to grow as a private theme during all the years I was smoking marijuana. One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being. One becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption. One becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness of others.

I’m not speaking now of violence or the active conflict between one being and another. That still belongs to drama. But the war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war. I’d hardly read anything by Sartre at this time and nothing by Heidegger. I’ve read a bit since and I have to admire their formidable powers, but I suspect they are no closer to the buried
continent of existentialism than were medieval cartographers near to a useful map of the world. The new continent that shows on our psychic maps as intimations of eternity is still to be discovered.

I’ve never felt close to Beckett and haven’t read his novels. Friends tell me the best of his literary substance is there. I am, however, familiar with
Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape
, and
Endgame
, and I’ve always been fascinated by how he has done something that no writer ever did before. When it comes to the presence of
being
and
nothingness
, Beckett said in effect,
“Nothing
is half of life and it is the half I know about. I am going to dwell on that.” The trouble, however, is that we have to live with the words in English, where the reverberation on the ear is not as agreeable as
être
or
néant
can be to the ear in French.

Nothingness
is, after all, anathema to most writers. We take it for granted that we will have to spend a good part of our lives accepting
nothing
as the price to pay in order to feel a resonant opposite:
being.
On days when one’s mind is not alive, one goes through hours where boredom itself can be close to dread. It is, after all, a state that offers no sensual affect and so feels vaguely sinister in ways you cannot name. It’s as if in boredom you come to the wrong kind of rest, a pause that does not restore.
Nothingness
invariably suggests
endless
nothingness.

Yet here we have Beckett, lively and witty as he travels into these subtly fetid caves of virtual non-existence. I always saw such states as the price you pay in order to command a grasp of existence, of being. So in advance, my initial reaction to Beckett was disapproval. I was bothered in those years—the late Fifties—at how people were so ready to welcome the art of the absurd.

I detest this art. When, for instance, I see a college play (and, given the number of my children, I’ve seen my share), invariably the drama department has opted for a play that celebrates the art of the absurd. Their reason is clear: You cannot judge the merit of the production too closely. Professors of drama at these schools do not rush to be measured. It’s unfailing how often they choose García Lorca, Ionesco, Artaud—name twenty difficult and talented playwrights of the absurd and then set college kids to try to do something with it. They can’t win and they can’t lose, because the actors are going to get laughs. Whenever an
audience is not able to follow a non sequitur, an automatic laugh comes up. Especially from parents, roommates, relatives, and friends. If you have an actor say, “The situation is getting kind of boborigymous,” the audience will not only roar at the fecal cacophony of the sounds but will look to cover over their ignorance of the exact meaning. A horde of fail-safes is always available in plays when they are dedicated to the absurd.