What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (13 page)

TALENT

ike the tides, the seasons, and the Bandera branch of |the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Texas Book Festival is coming around again, allowing us to meet authors we love, hate, or very possibly, find a little ho-hum. I always look forward to the book festival because it provides me with the spiritual soapbox to give advice to other authors, an audience that, predictably, has never learned to listen. Conversely, I've never learned to pull my lips together, so the system works. My advice to authors, and the misguided multitudes who want to be authors, is a variation on a truthful if sometimes tedious theme. "Talent," I tell them in stentorian tones, "is its own reward. If you're unlucky enough to have it, don't expect anything else." These wise words, of course, come from a man who's spent his entire professional career trying to eclipse Leon Redbone.

My theory is that in all areas of creative human endeavor, the presence of true talent is almost always the kiss of death. It's no accident that three of the people who were tragically forced into bankruptcy at the end of their lives were Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain. It's no fluke of fate that Schubert died shortly after giving the world the
Unfinished Symphony.
You probably wouldn't have finished it either if you had syphilis and twelve cents in your pocket. Or how would you like to have died at age twenty-nine in the backseat of a Cadillac? If you're Hank Williams, that's what talent got you. But what
is
talent? And why would anyone in his right mind want it? As Albert Einstein often said, "I don't know."

In fact, talent is such a difficult quality to identify or define that we frequently end up losing it in the lights, relegating it at last to the trash bin, the cheap motel, the highway, the gutter, or the cross. Indeed, if you look with an objective eye at the
New York Times
Best-Seller List, the
Billboard
music charts, and the highest-rated network TV offerings, the one thing they seem to have in common is an absence of original creative expression, i.e., talent.

My editor says I'm one of the most talented writers he knows. The problem is that even if I have talent, I don't know what it is—and if I did, I'd get rid of it immediately. Then I'd be on my way to vast commercial success. Talent, however, is a bit like God; you never see it, but there are moments when you're pretty sure it's there. So because I can't clinically isolate it, I'm stuck with all my wonderful talent, and the most practical thing I can do is start looking for a sturdy bridge to sleep under or a gutter in a good neighborhood.

If you have a little talent, you're probably all right. Let's say you're good at building bird houses or you play the bagpipes or, like my fairy godmother, Edythe Kruger, you do an almost uncanny impersonation of the duck on the AFLAC commercial. These kinds of narrow little talents have never harmed a soul, nor kept anyone from living a successful, happy life. It's when you're afflicted with that raw, shimmering, innate talent-talent with a big "T"—that you can really get into trouble. Remember that Judy Garland died broke on the toilet. Lenny Bruce also died broke on the toilet. Jim Morrison, just to be perverse, died fairly well financially fixed at the age of twenty-seven in a Paris bathtub. Elvis also died on the toilet, but definitely he wasn't broke. Along with a vast fortune, he had well over a million dollars in a checking account that drew no interest. Who cares about money, he figured, when you've got talent? I myself was a chess prodigy, playing a match with world grandmaster Samuel Reschevsky when I was only seven years old. It's been downhill from there. These days I find myself constipated most of the time and I never take a bath.

They say it takes more talent to spot talent than it does to have talent. Conversely, it's easy to know when it isn't there, although someone without talent rarely notices its absence. Some friends of mine had a band once, and they went to audition for a talent scout in his office. The talent scout said, "Okay, let's see what you can do." The leader of the band began to pick his nose while playing the French horn. Another guy started beating out the rhythm on his own buttocks while projectile vomiting on the man's desk. The other two members of the band jumped simultaneously onto the desk and began unabashedly engaging in an act too graphic to describe here. "I've seen enough," shouted the talent scout in disgust. "What do you call this act anyway?" The French horn player stopped playing the instrument and stopped picking his nose. "We call ourselves," he said, "The Aristocrats."

Another example of what might help define talent takes us back to Polyclitus, the famous sculptor in ancient Greece. Poly-clitus, it is said, once sculped two statues at the same time: one in his living room, in public view, and one in his bedroom, which he worked on privately and kept wrapped in a tarpaulin. When visitors came by, they would comment on the public work, saying, "The eyes aren't quite right," or "That thigh is too long," and Polyclitus would incorporate their suggestions into his work. All the while, however, he kept the other statue a secret. Both works were completed at about the same time and were mounted in the city square in Athens. The statue that had been designed by committee was openly mocked and ridiculed. The statue he'd done by himself was immediately proclaimed a great transcendental work of art. People asked Polyclitus, "How can one statue be so good and the other so bad?" And Polyclitus answered, "Because / did this one and
you
did that one."

So what can you do if you don't have talent? To paraphrase Claytie Williams, you can relax and enjoy it. Any no-talent fat boy can make it to the top of the charts, but it takes real talent,

"My client objects to the endless delays in this trial. Attorney fees alone, he says, are becoming increasingly painful to bear."

like that of the brilliant American composer, Stephen Foster, to die penniless in a gutter on the Bowery. But with or without talent, you might ask, how can hard work and perseverance pay off in the creative field? Why are you asking me? Who the hell knows? In this day and age, just as the tortoise is finally crossing the finish line to win the race, he'll very likely see three men in suits and ties, standing there with their briefcases. "Hello," they'll say. "We're the attorneys for the hare."

STRANGE TIMES TO BE A JEW: NOTES ON MICHAEL CHABON'S LATEST NOVEL

s Meyer Landsman, Michael Chabon's detective in
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
observes early in this tome, "These are strange times to be a Jew." Not one to flail the passive horse of Judaism forever, Chabon is merely intimating that down through history the times have never been quite as strange as the Jews. And one of the strangest of them all is, of course, Michael Chabon.

I'm sixty-two years old but I read at the sixty-four-year-old level. Nevertheless, at 432 pages, the book looked to me to be the kind of thing only a mother, and I use that word loosely, could love. Maybe a spiritual invalid might have the time, inclination, or reason to read it, I thought. Was it a great existential work of art or simply a case of
Northern Exposure
meets
The Emperor Has No Clothes
? Read on, gentile reader, read on.

When someone takes a simple idea and makes it complex, that is what we call an intellectual. When someone takes a complex idea and makes it simple, that is what we call an artist. Chabon assuredly is an intellectual, but is he an artist? Sherlock Holmes, whom Chabon professes to greatly admire, once observed that the difference between the killer and the artist is that the artist knows when to stop.

Great artists, in my reckoning, have always been out-of-control forces, invariably intertwining passionately their lives with their art. Examples are van Gogh, Mozart, Charles Bukowsky, Hank Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Foster, Allen Ginsberg, etc., etc. The fact that most of them were seen as tragic figures was no accident; it is merely one of the elements of their greatness. Bob Dylan once wrote that even above life, he prized madness. Contrast this with Chabon's almost primal pursuit of a "stable writing environment." Tell that to Franz Kafka.

But I suppose that I can overlook the fact that he's a script doctor for soulless
Spiderman
sequels and that he received a Pulitzer Prize from the same kind of crazy, tall Norwouija boards who gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter. Hell, my hat's off to him for just being able to write with four kids in the house.

Okay, so I'm reading
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
at gunpoint and I'm starting to like it. Chabon, with the lush skills of an F. Stop Fitzgerald, describing the deserted lobby of the flophouse hotel, the sad, old sofas and "ashtray charm," where Landsman has been living since his marriage went to hell. There's a "dead yid in 208," murdered during what appears to be a party-of-one chess match. So Chabon has his detective talk to the night manager about chess, Landsman admitting to having "no feel for the middle game." "In my experience, Detective," said the night manager, "it's all middle game." In spite of Chabon's unspoken, possibly unwitting, kinship with Flaubert, who claimed he lived to pour a few more buckets of shit upon mankind, this is great stuff.

If the slivovitz-swilling Landsman lives in a strange time, it is playing out in an even stranger place—the fictional Yiddish frontier district of Sitka, a Jewish homeland carved from Alaska after World War II. (Chabon borrowed the idea from a long-forgotten but real wartime proposal of FDR's.) The Palestine experiment failed early, in Chabon's telling, so in place of Sabras in the Jewish iconography, he offers "Polar Bears." Even lobs a sly dig at Israelis when he writes of the Sitkans, "By now they were all staunch Alaskan Jews, which meant they were Utopians, which meant they saw imperfections everywhere they looked." Their temporary nation is nearing its sixty-year expiration date, and a new Jewish expulsion looms as the story opens.

In true noir fashion, "rogue cop" Landsman finds himself drawn irresistibly into pursuing whoever killed his chess-whiz neighbor, who turns out to have been a junkie and the son of a separatist Hasid rebbe. Also in true noir fashion, the higher-ups want him off the case. Landsman's investigation—in the company of his half-Tlingit, half-Jew partner—wraps him in the tassels of orthodox gangsters, international conspiracies about the impending "Reversion" of Sitka, and the allure of his sexy boss, who happens to be his ex-wife.

It's the easiest thing in the world to poke fun or parodize the field of detective fiction. Many highly successful mystery writers do it every day without even being aware of it. I respect Chabon for respecting the genre. Mysteries and mystery writers seem to have always been regarded by the critics as the stepchildren of literature. Yet here, in
The Yiddish Policemen's Union,
the timeless, glorious game is afoot: the reader ten steps ahead of the detective; the author ten steps ahead of the reader. On a truly seminal level, whether the critics notice it or not,
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
works as a mystery novel. There's a bit of John D. MacDonald here, a lingering hint of Dorothy Sayers. But in many ways the book is an homage to Raymond Chandler, who believed that plots were merely excuses for the characters to go places and say things.

Chabon clearly believes in the genre, as well he should. After all, mysteries afford us resolution; life itself rarely does. There's an obscure quote of Chandler's from one of his letters that I'm sure hasn't escaped detection by Chabon's micro-meticulous, mental hospital research. Chandler says, "The business of fiction is to recreate the illusion of life." Chabon does this as well as anybody.

Finally, J. D. Salinger once obliged a character to say, "Cleverness is my wooden leg." This may indeed be true of many writers and many Jews, but it's especially true of Chabon, who wears his yellow star on his wooden leg. This is not a bad thing.

It means Chabon is not an impotent, neurotic Woody Allen-Seinfeld-type of Jew, but a crazy Jew with all the elements of greatness who's never afraid to take a crack at the big dream. His Landsman is a brawler, a union man, toughing it out a continent and a world away from the skinny, self-loathing intellectuals who, when not writing, are busy in therapy sessions with Woody Allen's shrink.

Jackie Mason, whom I admire intensely, reports that older Jewish ladies come up to him after almost every show. Like reform harpies, they whisper in his ear, "Too Jewish. Too Jewish." Mason never listens to them. I hope Chabon doesn't either.

Oh, yeah. The more I read
The Yiddish Policemen's Union,
the more I believe I might finish it some day. Right now I'm reading it at almost a remedial pace, savoring it like an unfinished symphony. I'm even starting to like Chabon. If I ever run into him I'll have to tell him to take some of my critical comments with a pillar of salt. But then again, as Raymond Chandler himself once said, "If you like the book, never meet the author."