William H. Gass, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo
“Literature has the function it always had: it continues to reflect the realities of its time.”
—robert coover1
In spite of the lingering horrors of Hiroshima and the growing threat of the nuclear race, the 1960s were a rich, innovative time, when writers and other artists believed in “the regenerative power” of the ongoing protests and creative avant-gardes. Yet, within the next few decades, the hope for freedom and justice generated in their works did not last, giving way to a return to ambivalence and searing doubt when it came to basic political and societal promises taking root.
Starting in 1982, we had the opportunity to welcome a number of pioneering authors from the US who experimented with the complexities of language in drama, fiction, and poetry to render the reality of these unsettling and changing times.
Julian Beck and Judith Malina
On October 2, 1982, three weeks after the official opening of our bookshop, we were thrilled to host Julian Beck and Judith Malina, two iconic personalities of the sixties. Jim Haynes,2 their good friend from the days of his experimental Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, had invited them to read with us. With some emotion, I remembered their staging of Sophocles’s Antigone at the Festival of Avignon in the summer of 1968. It was a high-powered performance, an explosive happening of protest. In fact, the vision of Beck’s sharp, eagle-like profile and Malina’s eyes devouring the world had stayed with me.
However, as they appeared at the door, the two of them looked rather subdued, not at all like the actors who had once electrified crowds in Avignon. In a quiet voice, Beck started to read an excerpt from his memoir The Life of the Theatre,3 a book that explored his dramatic techniques, principles, and politics. Then Malina chose to recite “Conversation with Julian” from a booklet of intimate poetry infused with melancholy: “You spoke in energetic time / I knew this was routed to despair / . . . If I could comprehend / the substance that is fire.”4
Some acquaintances from their 1970s performance days travelling throughout France had come to hear them. Among those present were Henry Pillsbury, the director of the American Center in Paris, spearhead of American and French avant-garde creations,5 as well as Robert Cordier, the director of the Paris drama school Acting International. Yet the joy of reuniting with friends did not dispel the palpable nostalgia for a spirited epoch seemingly long gone.
Allen Ginsberg
Several weeks later, on December 13, 1982, a crowd came to the Village Voice for a reading with Allen Ginsberg, organized by his French publisher, Christian Bourgois.6 Ginsberg arrived accompanied by four of his friends: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco poet and founder of the City Lights bookstore; Jayne Cortez, the African American jazz poet; Andrei Voznesensky, one of the rare contemporary poets allowed by the Soviet authorities to travel abroad; and Kazuko Shiraishi, the Japanese Canadian Beat lyricist known as “the Ginsberg of Japan.”7 All five of them had been invited to participate in the International Poetry Festival War on War, organized in Paris under the aegis of UNESCO.
Sporting a bushy gray beard, Ginsberg stood on the stairs connecting the two-story, open-floor bookshop filled with people. Looking like a Celtic bard, he recited his internationally acclaimed Howl, his powerful voice filling up the whole space to the beat of a gong. His words exploded into visions of desolation, shadowy figures wandering through the ravaged world of drugs and despair in postwar America, the country he called “the Moloch.”
Interpreted with passionate anger, Howl resonated with the audience, who hailed the end of his reading with thunderous applause. Off in his own corner, Ferlinghetti was lost in thought, perhaps reminiscing about Ginsberg’s first public performance of this very poem in San Francisco in 1955. Thrilled, Ferlinghetti had immediately sent Ginsberg a telegram saying, “I was in the audience, when do we get the manuscript?” This moment marked the beginning of a long literary collaboration and friendship. And here they were, almost thirty years later—Ginsberg reading Howl and Ferlinghetti reliving the San Francisco scene, this time in Paris.
In sharp contrast to this flamboyant and rhythmic performance, Ferlinghetti’s own reading was flat, even somewhat dull. Attempting to sound ironic, he recited a few lines written in French, evocative of his youth in Paris. They started with “J’ai fait mon bac dans la rue du Bac,” and then, suddenly, he blurted out “but I prefer train stations.” It was a remark out of the blue, perhaps summoned up by the presence of his friend, Andrei, who may have reminded him of his eventful trans-Siberian journey in 1967.*
Born and brought up under Stalin’s terror, Andrei Voznesensky was a young poet when he courageously defended Boris Pasternak, his mentor who was viciously attacked by the Kremlin and Soviet intelligentsia in the 1950s. With the advent of Khrushchev’s Thaw, that brief period of cultural liberalization between 1954 and 1964, Voznesensky was one of the few writers authorized to travel abroad to give poetry recitals. This is how he, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti had become friends in San Francisco. Perhaps in deference to this Anglophone public at the Village Voice, the Russian poet read his poetry in English, sadly depriving the audience of his native musical language which, as I recall, used to transport his public at home and abroad in the mid-’60s.
Next, Jayne Cortez invigorated our spirits with her rich, low voice and powerful Beat rhythms as she recited her jazz poems with great heart, powerfully asserting her identity as a Black woman. She was followed by Kazuko Shiraishi who read “Odysseus,”8 her poem about exile written in Japanese, which sounded like a meditative piece. When chanted by Ginsberg in his own English translation, it transformed into a Beat epic.
Ginsberg closed the event with a passage from “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg,” a poem he had started in Paris in the fifties upon hearing of his mother’s death. While Howl was a furious scream of anger at America, the embodiment of an evil society, these lines were a searing lament, the poet’s cry of revolt and despair facing death and horror at his own physical dissolution to come. Standing once again on the staircase, a hieratic figure addressing the crowd upstairs and downstairs, he concluded his recital on a Buddhist note, chanting the mantra “OM . . . OM . . .”
In 2014, as I was browsing through William Gaddis’s correspondence, I stumbled upon one of his letters to his daughter Sarah, describing a recent New York public performance of Ginsberg’s as “avant-garde—which is suddenly old hat.”* However, at that memorable reading at our bookshop, listening to Ginsberg and his friends, we were gladly carried back several years. Their stunning event had turned the spotlight on the Village Voice. We could not have imagined a better prelude to our soon-to-begin American Author Reading Series.
Hubert Selby Jr.
Another mythical figure of the sixties was Hubert Selby Jr., the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn,9 a scandalous novel described by Ginsberg as “exploding like a rusty hellish bombshell over America, still to be eagerly read in a hundred years.”10 Written in 1957 and published in 1964 by Grove Press, it was banned for obscenity in Great Britain. After a trial made the work an instant underground success,11 it was finally released in 1968. Two decades later, Selby’s British publisher Marion Boyars arranged a reading of Last Exit to Brooklyn with the author at the Village Voice to mark the twentieth anniversary of its post-trial complete edition.
On October 25, 1988, the telephone rang all day with people wanting to make sure that they could be part of the evening. The crowd was overflowing into the street by the time Selby arrived, accompanied by Boyars and Philippe Manœuvre, a French jazz critic and editor of the magazine Rock & Folk, who was to introduce him. With some difficulty, the three of them managed to elbow their way through the excited throng at the door.
I had wrongly imagined Selby as a Bukowski type—a rough, macho guy from the fringes of L.A.—when, in fact, he was a small, thin, and frail-looking man who happened to write books about sex, drugs, and violence. How to explain such a large crowd? Some people in the audience may have expected a real low-lifer, but among them were also many fans of Manœuvre, a French TV celebrity.
The latter presented the author as a man following in “the great literary tradition of Melville, Poe, and Kerouac, all writers haunted by space. While Kerouac embarked on the road to discover the wide expanses of America,” he continued, “Selby went deep into the netherworlds of misery, sex, and depravity and, even more forbiddingly, into his own tortured self.”12 Alluding to the author’s epigraphs in his novel The Demon,13 Manœuvre saw his protagonists “as men caught between two extremes—surrendering to evil and crying to God to be heard.”
Selby then read the final pages of Last Exit to Brooklyn14 with its violent domestic scene described as so crudely raw, and yet poignant. While the parents fought using foul language, the children withdrew into their own world of silence. Indeed, lack of family love and the loneliness of the child still haunted the author in the 1980s, as shown in the passage he delivered from his memoir in progress, Seeds of Pain, Seeds of Love.15
Here he recalled a boy torn between his longing for love and a seething desire for revenge to be acted out with the knife he had struggled to acquire. Selby cleared his throat and announced that “today . . . I am that boy I have chosen to remember, but that boy is not me, for that boy knows nothing of the person I have become and I am today.” He read for a full hour at the request of his audience, clearly fascinated by the paradoxes of this humble man who could not conceal his inner torment. Later, sitting at the small table piled up with his books, he signed them with special attention to each one of his readers, appreciative of their warm welcome.
While these protest writers relied on expressive words and rhythms in order to be heard, the next three novelists—William H. Gass, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo—were more concerned with inventing new forms of language that brought out the complexities and ambiguities of the disenchanted contemporary world.
William H. Gass
On February 6, 2007, William H. Gass was at the Village Voice to discuss The Tunnel,16 a novel he had published in 1995, more than ten years prior. Claro, a French experimental novelist and outstanding translator, introduced him, admitting that it had taken him six years of hard work to translate this text, “though, much less than the twenty years it took the author to construe this six-hundred-fifty-page novel—a literary monster of scribbles, reflections, and meandering thoughts.” He further stressed the point that “among his prolific production of fiction and nonfiction, The Tunnel stood out as Gass’s most original and ambitious work, his literary testament, crowning a life of prize-winning fictions and essays.”
Gass introduced the protagonist of his labyrinthine novel as a historian teaching in a small college. Having published a historical study called Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, the latter is now trying to write the introduction to his new book, “the best one,” he thinks. However, overwhelmed by writer’s block, he cannot continue. In a frenzy to move ahead, he starts covering his pages with “doodles and graffiti” which, Gass stressed, were “his own scribbles of a personal nature, and so personal that he wanted to hide them from his wife by sliding them inside the pages of his history book where, he knows, she will never look. In fact, he is mostly digging into his own past while digging a real tunnel of his own to hide his own dirt.”17
Then, the author referred to his essays on language and writers in The World Within the Word18 to show how he brought together the scattered pieces of his sprawling novel into a “musical structure, such as a fugue.” To give us an idea of the range and diversity of styles in The Tunnel, Gass read three passages, each one stylistically different, each one an example of how “the sentence structure organizes the work.” The first excerpt was an “effusive poem” he described as a “youth rhapsody,” reminiscent of “Rilke’s lyrical verses.”19 The next passage was a list of country wedding guests, mostly farmers and their families from the Dust Bowl at the time of the Great Depression. Gass then switched to limericks, “those obscene and debasing short poems he himself enjoyed so much writing.”20 These three different pieces revealed not only the author’s stylistic virtuosity, but also his remarkable taste for paradoxes.
Someone in the audience asked him: “Why such a split between ugly content and refined style?”
Gass: “This is the point: beauty is the aesthetic point from which to write about the disagreeable, whether hatred or criminal acts. World literature is all aesthetics of the form. At the beginning of the Illiad, there is nothing more powerful and beautiful or aesthetic than that massive massacre. There is a scene in one of the books of the novelist John Hawkes in which a man beats his wife to death with a wet newspaper. The reader is stunned: the beating is horrid, yet the scene is breathtakingly beautiful. This is what creates tension.”
Q: “If we follow your reasoning, can there be aesthetics without some kind of vileness?”
Gass: “This is a question that is ever present: the discrepancy that exists in the human. The most erudite, sophisticated man will massacre thousands of people. These contradictions fascinate me: All Shakespeare is in this contradiction: ‘smile and be a villain.’ A view shared by Beckett: ‘Tell me how horrific the world is, again and again.’ And the way he told it makes me euphoric. I love it.”
William Gaddis
On December 3, 1985, we welcomed William Gaddis to the Village Voice to talk about his new and third novel Carpenter’s Gothic,21 just out in the United States. He was on his way home from Moscow where he had been a member of a delegation of American writers that also included William H. Gass, Arthur Miller, and Allen Ginsberg, who had been invited to meet with Soviet writers and exchange ideas on their respective works. Now he was in the city for a brief visit with his daughter Sarah, an art student at the Parsons School of Design in Paris.
Gaddis was a name in America, but in the mid-eighties he was still little known to French readers. His first belatedly acclaimed novel The Recognitions, published in the US in 1955, had only come out in French translation in 1973, almost twenty years later.22 However, he was studied in some French universities, and while our audience was mostly American, a number of local scholars attended the reading.
Gaddis was accompanied by his French publisher, Ivan Nabokov, his translator Marc Cholodenko, and Marc Chénetier,23 the author of masterful papers on American postmodernism (including Gass and Gaddis) who was to introduce him. Compared to The Recognitions (almost a thousand pages) and J R24 (seven hundred pages), the new novel was only two hundred fifty pages, but, as Chénetier pointed out, “like the earlier ones, Carpenter’s Gothic is also a radioscopy of America at a given time.”
William Gaddis with French publisher Ivan Nabokov. September 2, 1988.
© Flavio Toma
In The Recognitions, a dense and sinuous novel, Gaddis first addressed the issue of authenticity among intellectuals and artists who, moved by greed, betray the very fundamentals of their calling. J R is the outlandish story of an eleven-year-old boy who builds his own financial empire—the ultimate American dream, reflecting its ruthless corporate world. Carpenter’s Gothic portrayed the corrupting effects of the Vietnam War on nearly everyone—veterans, businessmen, fundamentalists, and an heiress, all pushed into dodgy deals that work to their advantage. While poring over his epoch and his country with a magnifying glass, Gaddis proves to be a master of language that he considers to be the very substance of literature.
A discreet-looking man with a powerful, radiating presence, Gaddis opened his talk by referring to his brief stay in Moscow. It was 1985, a time when the collapse of the Soviet Union was still unimaginable, and our public was curious to hear the impressions of a writer reputed to be a keen observer of political and social realities.
“Back here in Paris, I’m in total disarray: in Moscow, we tried to explain our works, but realized that there was not much we could say, since the Soviet writers clung to their ideas of peace and happiness, but this is not what the plays of Arthur Miller or the writings of Gass are about, nor is my work. The Recognitions, published thirty years ago, is more about human shambles than happiness. Only Allen Ginsberg, playing the harmonica, tried to convey a kind of happiness that our works didn’t.”25
Gaddis went on to share an anecdote that pointed to the blindness or bad faith of the Soviet intelligentsia. At one of their meetings with the Union of Soviet Writers, Arthur Miller had asked about the authors who were in prisons or camps. One writer from the Union replied that “they were not writers, but ordinary parasites who had broken the law.” Miller insisted, handing them a list of writers he had compiled, which concerned some one hundred of them currently locked up. Gaddis acknowledged that in the end “Miller’s persistence didn’t get him anywhere.”
Chénetier took over, asking Gaddis to read a short excerpt from his latest novel before going deeper into any discussion, but the author refused. He retorted that he didn’t see any reason for doing so, explaining that “Carpenter’s Gothic is not like a poem by Dylan Thomas that you can read in one breath. This novel is all dialogues and requires changing voices.”
“To me,” Gaddis went on, “the act of reading is a contract between the reader and what’s written on the page, and it is up to the reader to make out of it whatever he can. The reader has to be left alone and do his part, that is, supplement the reading through his own experience. And this, I can say, often works to the disadvantage of the writer.”
“What do you mean exactly by ‘the disadvantage of the writer’?” someone in the audience asked.
Gaddis: “When J R was awarded the National Book Award, I was confident that it was going to stimulate sales. But the reality is there on paper: my latest royalty statement for J R, a book in print since its publication and which continues to be read, so I’m told, but when I see such a figure . . . I say . . . well, the millions of American readers must be passing around one single copy! [laughter] . . . and when I mentioned this to my publisher, he said: ‘Oh, this is an elitist book, and the American Book Award is an elitist prize.’ So, here we go: Danielle Steel has five million copies in print. All the boxes are ticked, nothing left up in the air, and no place is left either for the reader’s imagination. In America, we definitely have two distinct things: books and literature . . . leading to my next point, why write?”
Q: “A crazy scenario like J R’s story seems to contradict the ‘facts,’ an essential element in your own work. How do you reconcile the two?”
Gaddis: “In Gogol’s Dead Souls, one of the greatest works of literature, here goes Chichikov buying the souls of the dead serfs not officially registered. This crazy, unimaginable scenario is also the most realistic panorama of Russian society at the time. In order to buy those souls, Chichikov has to penetrate every strata of the society, and, through the people he meets, he demonstrates the extraordinary foolishness of the human being. This is a con man of the first order, a hatter, and yet what can be more realistic than this novel? To me, the key phrase is ‘the willing suspension of disbelief,’26 when the reader suspends his judgment to accept the implausibility of the narrative, like in Carpenter’s Gothic, when on the steps appears a stranger . . .”
Q: “Fundamentalism is central in your new novel. What is your relationship to religion?”
Gaddis: “My relationship to religion has become much colder than it was. In my youth I had a certain attraction to the Catholic religion. At the time, we didn’t have anything like Buddhism. Today, religion is everywhere and is yielding to fundamentalism. . . . What about real religion? I do not see where it is. Anyhow, the number of priests is diminishing drastically, but religious cults are on the rise, and it would seem that the more outlandish, the better for business. To me, religion is the last refuge ignorance has from intelligence. You can’t even argue with fundamentalists, and this is truly frightening. Reagan, for one, is convinced that America has been chosen by God . . . but it’s not the only thing he is convinced of.”
Three years later, on September 2, 1988, the French translation of Carpenter’s Gothic, Gothique charpentier,27 was launched at the Village Voice. At his previous talk, Gaddis had insisted that his novel, if read aloud, had to be done with “changing voices.” His remark did not fall on deaf ears this time. His editor Ivan Nabokov invited two prominent French actors, Dominique Sanda, the mythic actress in Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and Philippe Laudenbach, to be the distinct voices of the wife and her husband, the two main characters of the novel. The photos taken that evening convey the festive mood of this literary social gathering, with Sarah, the author’s daughter, radiant with joy as she went around chatting with guests and friends.
During her own Parisian years, Sarah Gaddis was very much a part of the American community evolving around the Village Voice, and while pursuing her art studies, she also wrote her first book, Swallow Hard, a fictionalized memoir of her childhood. In it, Rollin, the protagonist, is born “a perfect combination of Southern mentality and Yankee cynicism.”28 In time, this obvious incompatibility leads her parents to go their separate ways.
Written with great sensitivity and an artist’s eye for detail, the novel follows the divided life of Rollin growing up in two different worlds, torn between the American South of her mother and her father’s exciting New York circle of writers and artists. The young painter also conjures up the magical summers she spent on Fire Island with her father’s bohemian set of friends. She imbues this memory with much beauty, but just as disturbingly, draws a stark portrait of her father as inaccessible to her, absorbed as he is in his writing.
The sorrow she feels as a young girl desperately vying for his attention is captured in the illustration on the book cover: father and daughter sit apart on the steps of their summer house, the former deep in thought, probably mulling over the next sentence of his work in progress, while Rollin anxiously “watched him, waiting for some signal, some glance, but he didn’t see her and turned back towards his work without a word.”29
Sarah celebrated the publication of Swallow Hard at the Village Voice on April 23, 1991. That morning, most unexpectedly, her father appeared at the door of our bookstore with an armful of magnificent lilac blossoms to honor her reading some hours later. William Gaddis had just landed in Paris to be by the side of his daughter on that special day.
Don DeLillo
At his reading, Gaddis had remarked that “religious cults are on the rise and the more outlandish, the better for business.” This could be the epigraph of Don DeLillo’s tenth novel, Mao II,30 presented at the Village Voice on April 2, 1992.
DeLillo was the youngest of this group of American authors who tirelessly investigated the political, societal, and cultural issues of their time and country. In a congratulatory letter to DeLillo, Gaddis praised the way he married “style & content . . . embracing the American writer’s historic obsession with getting the facts down clear,” as earlier specified by Jack London: “Give me the fact, man, the irrefragable fact!”31
The two writers give detailed evidence that a fact is not just inscribed in the present, but acts as a codified warning sign of the future. To the twenty-first-century reader, these two writers appear as visionaries of a changing world, challenging our imagination and calling for reflection and concern.
DeLillo was introduced by his French publisher Hubert Nyssen, the founder and director of Actes Sud, then a young but fast-growing publishing house with, at the time, two prominent contemporary American novelists in its catalog: Russell Banks and Paul Auster, both of whom had recommended DeLillo. “This is how DeLillo became our third ‘musketeer,’” Nyssen quipped, glancing over at the author.
He went on, observing that “while subjects in contemporary French novels are often ludicrous, American fiction shows us true heroes, deeply rooted in the territory where they evolve, thereby bringing out the realities specific to their own milieu. DeLillo has no fear of the issues he explores in his novels, speaking of obsessions, catastrophes, and fears haunting us, whether personally or collectively. Yet his stories have a highly symbolic significance that connects them to the great myths.”32
Modest and/or seemingly impassive, DeLillo stood up and started to read the opening chapter of Mao II, called “At Yankee Stadium.” In a low, matter-of-fact voice, he carefully detailed an actual and terrifying scene of a compact crowd of 6,500 couples, all followers of the Moon sect, standing in line and waiting their turn to be married by its Guru leader.
This depiction introduces the core issue of the novel—the disappearance of the individual into faceless and brainwashed crowds and, along with this phenomenon, the disappearance of literature. Its central protagonist, Bill Gray, a journalist and secluded writer, refuses to publish at a time when it is no longer possible “for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture,” and when “news of disaster is the only narrative people need.”33 An author condemned to silence, Gray reminded us of Salman Rushdie, publicly sentenced to death two years earlier for his own banned book The Satanic Verses, with copies of it being burned around the world.34
During the discussion that followed, Nyssen stressed that literature is not solely about facts: literature is also about language, and in DeLillo’s narrative, “the wide gap that exists between the character’s interior language and what he actually says is what creates the dramaturgy of the novel.”
At the close of the evening, a young man in the audience thanked the author for writing novels that were not the sound-bites of so many contemporary books, comparing him to “the Kabbalist who shows the way to the inner sanctum of language that bears a redemptive and humanizing meaning.”
Odile and Don DeLillo, Village Voice Bookshop, April 2, 1992. © C. Deudon
Jay McInerney, November 3, 1993. © C. Deudon