PERHAPS THE MOST SEVERE DRAWBACK TO A LONG CAREER in writing is that one is forced to read the same author every day for a great many years.
The author, of course, is oneself.
Great scholars may spend a lifetime in daily investigation of Shakespeare or Dante, but few novelists are much like great scholars, and even fewer are Shakespeare or Dante.
To read oneself every morning and afternoon for more than a quarter of a century, as I have now done, is at best a strange chore. As thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of one’s own sentences cross the page in front of one, they seem, each year, to move more predictably. They may plod, or they may rush, but whatever pleasure one may once have taken in their lilting rhythms or their little graces has long since vanished.
At least, mine has. I rather enjoyed the daily tramp of my sentences up until about the time that I wrote Terms of Endearment. Midway through that book the endless parade of these sentences began to lose its fascination for me; it was as if they were parading in a circle. I began to have the distinct impression that sentences which ought to have been embedded in earlier books had somehow wiggled free and were circling around again.
And not just sentences, either: paragraphs, characters, relationships and motifs all seemed deadeningly familiar.
I have always had a horror of self-repetition, the quicksand that swallows so many middle-aged novelists, and was not cheered to find it swallowing me. I had no interest in recycling my own oeuvre a few sentences at a time. And yet it seemed to me that that was more or less what I was doing.
Cadillac Jack is a response to this dilemma. The book’s beginning was simple. I was standing on a street corner in Washington, D.C., one day, waiting for the light to change. A black man was waiting, too. Just as the light changed a Cadillac drew up in front of us, and a jolly gentleman waved at the black man, who immediately brightened. “Ho, ho, Cadillac Jack,” he said, waving. The car passed on, and I crossed the street a happier man. Life had just handed me a title; all I had to do was find a book for it.
I decided to seek it in the world of the swap meets, flea markets, junk dealers and small-time auctions, which I had haunted for many years as a bookscout—it had always seemed to me an interesting and somewhat neglected subculture. Maybe it could be made to yield some fresh-seeming sentences, at least.
In the event, my sentences didn’t hasten to reform, but I wrote the book anyway, determined to hang in there, if only because I really had no place else to hang.
The book that resulted seems a little odd. A friend remarked that it reminded her of certain Diane Arbus photographs of people with their love objects, which were sometimes, but not always, other people. The friend thought the novel particularly resembled an Arbus photograph of a woman who had dressed her monkey in a snow suit.
I am easily convinced by almost any description of one of my books, and immediately began to think of Cadillac Jack as the sort of book in which someone would dress a monkey in a snowsuit. Early in the narrative someone does put two pugs on a dinner table, which is just as bizarre.
I rarely think of my own books, once I finish them, and don’t welcome the opportunity, much less the necessity, of thinking about them. The moving finger writes, and keeps moving; thinking about them while I’m writing them is often hard enough. Writing a book that holds one’s own interest until it can be finished is, for the middle-aged and reasonably prolific novelist, a heavier challenge than many would like to admit. I wrote two drafts of this one, burdened the whole way by a sense that something was lacking. I remain uncertain whether the lack was in the tale, or merely in the main character, Cadillac Jack.
What’s certain is that Jack is a very detached man. I might have called the book Portrait of the Artist as a Detached Man, except that Jack isn’t an artist. He’s a scout—a man who finds things, not a man who makes things. Yet the character of mine he most reminds me of is Danny Deck, a young writer who raced across the lawn of my imagination some twelve years ago, in a book called All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. Both men are constantly being reminded that they aren’t normal, usually by women they’re in bed with. Danny Deck becomes convinced that his detachment is a by-product of the artistic vocation; he comes to resent that vocation because it seems to him it deprives him of any hope of a settled domestic life.
Jack doesn’t resent his vocation—antique scouting—and doesn’t rage at his exile from the hearth and the bassinet, as Danny does. The latter was a bruised optimist, convinced that he could love one woman forever if he could just rid himself of the alienating demands of art. Jack isn’t so sanguine. When he yearns, he yearns for individuals, not for a home. He recognizes that he is most at home when he is in motion, roaming the country in his search for exceptional antiques.
As an antique scout, Jack is a student, and a fairly acute one, of the way in which people relate to their objects. He would like to hope, at first, that people are better at loving other people than they are at loving objects, but his bleak conclusion is that human love is unstable, whether directed at another human or at a Sung vase. The people he meets are as fickle in regard to their objets as they are with one another; they cling to a fine thing for years and then get rid of it in an hour, much as they might a fine person. They become indifferent alike to hall clocks and spouses. In Jack’s world, only obsession seems to generate tenacity; moderate love, whether between people and people or people and things, seldom seems to last very long.
These dark pessimistic meats are stuffed in a light pastry of social satire, most of it directed at the ways of Washington, D.C. I had been reading Pope and Waugh in the year I wrote the book; I had also been pondering my twelve years in Washington. The city, as the old nest collector observed, is a graveyard of styles. It is also a city of museums, and its defining attitudes are curatorial. Indeed, its ponderous social life is not unlike a museum exhibit, in which a good many of the major canvases have long needed dusting. The book became a kind of exhibit of capitol portraits, done, in so far as I was able, as Alexander Pope might have done them.
To the portraits in my capitol exhibit I added a parallel sequence of Jack’s women, done with perhaps a bit more charity.
The textures of the book are sometimes appealing, but what of the aftertaste? Is detachment of the sort Jack manifests a workable subject for fiction? Boringness, for example, is not a workable subject; it only leaves the reader bored. Will Jack’s detachment frustrate the reader as much as Jack himself frustrates the various women he escapes? Do readers, many of whom are women, resent detachment as much as women do?
Having raised that question, the teller is happy to take refuge behind the tale.
Larry McMurtry
October 1984