Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer was the first novel I read straight through. I was sixteen and in a Woolworth’s store in a shopping mall outside Rochester, waiting for my mother to finish getting her hair done in a nearby salon at the mall, when, not knowing what else to do, I began looking at books in a revolving kiosk next to the cashier aisle. I then became interested in one with a black-and-white cover in which the boxed views of a man’s perplexed face made it seem as if he was arguing with himself. The warm words of praise on the back cover made me imagine people saying things like that about me, and no sooner had I glanced at the first page than I found myself enthralled by the warm, charming voice of its first-person persona narrator, Binx Bolling, who seemed to be talking directly to me. The intimacy of this voice made me feel that I alone was smart and perceptive enough to understand what he was telling me, a secret so essential that only the two of us could possibly understand. I didn’t have many friends, none that I could talk to the way this writer was talking to me, and that alone was enough to make me pony up the $1.95 price, even though I could have checked it out of the library.
The novel was about things I liked, or wanted to do, like going to movies and riding through the countryside in a sports car with pretty women, but there were other darker philosophical things too, about very serious things like despair and verification, things I was drawn to but wouldn’t fully understand until I reread the book many years later. Though none of that mattered then. What mattered was the sad, wistful voice of the narrator that made me feel I was eavesdropping on a private conversation I was having with myself. It was the voice I used when I was frightened and lonely and needed to believe that I wasn’t entirely alone, that made me feel purposeful and valued. The quiet, confident way Binx listed things he liked to do after work made these simple things seem almost magical, if not essential: “It is my custom on summer evenings after work to take a shower, put on shirt and pants and stroll over to the deserted playground and there sit on the ocean wave, spread out the movie page of the Times-Picayune on one side, phone book on the other, and a city map in my lap. After I have made my choice, plotted a route—often to some remote neighborhood like Algiers or St. Bernard—I stroll around the schoolyard in the last golden light of day and admire the building. . . . It gives me a pleasant sense of the goodness of creation to think of the brick and the glass and the aluminum being extracted from such common dirt . . .”
I cried when I finished the book that first time, and not because I didn’t want it to end—I wanted every book I read to end as quickly as possible due to my anxiety with reading; I cried because I didn’t want Binx to stop talking to me, to stop being my friend. Nothing else, not even a book of van Gogh’s paintings that I stole from a downtown department store, made me feel that special. I didn’t steal a lot of things as some kids I knew did, only those things I especially valued, and I very much wanted this book, and not having any money, stealing it was the only way I could own it. The fact that I got caught and my father had to come to the store to pay for it didn’t make me love the pictures any less; in fact, it made me treasure them even more. I didn’t understand how emotionally expensive these paintings were to paint, or anything about van Gogh himself, but I did understand on some secret level that the humiliation I suffered in getting the book bore some relationship to the paintings themselves; that suffering had something to do with the ecstasy it created.
On its surface the story of The Moviegoer is simple: Binx is ordered by his great aunt to “help” his distant cousin Kate, fearing she will harm herself after her fiancé has died, which he attempts to do and, in the process, finds a way out of the “everydayness” of his own despair. “To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair,” Binx tells us. It’s Binx’s search I so powerfully identified with, his need to find an identity greater than himself, an identity not unlike those of his movie heroes, which no doubt is what I wanted too. My uncle Jake, who lived in the small room off our kitchen, listening to a police radio all night, was a stagehand at the Paramount movie house in downtown Rochester. All I had to do was knock three times on a back-alley door and he’d let me in for free. I knocked three times once or twice a week all through grade school and much of high school, always sitting in the same balcony seat to the left of the screen, where I could see Jake high up in his nest near the ceiling, opening and closing the curtains to end and begin what for each of us must’ve been hours spent among the only friends we had, the phantom images that seemed to play inside and outside our heads in dreamlike sequences we valued above all others. Long before I began to read and value books, I understood what Binx meant when he said he wanted something more than the “everydayness” of his life. He wanted what I wanted, to feel important to myself, not ordinary and forgettable. He seemed to be giving me permission to be myself, to want more than the immigrant kids around me wanted, permission to feel ambitious and special. It didn’t matter that I read so slowly, often painfully; suddenly the idea of becoming a writer like Percy became a kind of sanctuary, a nest high and away from everything else, a personal quest for meaning and escape. I wanted to make people feel the way he made me feel, important enough to be spoken to with purpose, and intelligence.
One passage particularly moved me. Binx is walking through the French Quarter of New Orleans and becomes interested in an unhappy-looking young college-aged couple walking just ahead. Assuming they’re newlyweds on their honeymoon like so many others there, he imagines that the young man is unhappy because he fears all the other young men, also on their honeymoons, are more worldly and exotic and, compared to them, he must appear ordinary in his bride’s eyes. His bride is unhappy, Binx thinks, because the young man is, and because she has no idea why. The young man, Binx thinks, is being consumed by his everydayness, which renders him invisible, and superfluous. Binx then spots the famous actor William Holden strolling just ahead, his movie-star stature casting a glow over everything around him, including the unhappy couple. When a group of middle-aged women Holden stops to ask for a match become flustered, the young man sees his opportunity and saunters up nonchalantly and lights Holden’s cigarette, and then he, Holden, and his bride all walk off together, chatting amiably. It’s Holden’s “peculiar reality” that fascinates Binx, the special aura of those engaged in a search to overcome the malaise of the ordinary, Cioran’s “contagion of nothingness,” and the boy’s and now mine, too. It wasn’t Holden’s celebrity or the boy’s enthrallment and moment of self-possession that so mesmerized me, but Percy’s capacity to show the reader (me) a way to proceed by allowing me to look at the world through Binx’s more philosophically sophisticated eyes.
The novel was inspirational. I wanted to do exactly what Percy was doing: to create first-person narrators who spoke with authority and intimacy, who helped others recognize and embrace whatever small sense of the sublime they were capable of. I wanted to see the world from a more gracious and philosophical perspective, the way Binx did, to adapt his fictional persona for myself. I was suddenly on a search of my own, for my own personas that might capture similar particular states of mind and feelings, a search that continues even now. Through high school and into college I found many personas to emulate in the poems and texts I loved: James Wright’s vulnerably wholehearted and earnest narrator in The Branch Will Not Break, Theodore Roethke’s narrator’s joyous grief and celebration of nature in “The Lost Son,” Hemingway’s Jake Barnes’s reconciliation with his own sexual despair in The Sun Also Rises, Elizabeth Bishop’s clear-eyed negotiation with youthful consciousness in “The Waiting Room” and “The Moose,” and especially George Konrád’s social worker for neglected and orphaned children in The Case Worker who, in his own mind, is “a radioactive tableau vivant gashed by light.” These writers and their personas seemed to understand me better than I understood myself; their investigation and search into the mystifying nature of their suffering was exactly what I wanted to do in my own writing.
This quote from an essay on Aristotle by Joe Sachs in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy pretty much sums up the power of persuasion that Walker had over me, enough so to make me want to do what he did for the rest of my life.
The five marks of tragedy that we learned of from Aristotle’s Poetics—that it imitates an action, arouses pity and fear, displays the human image as such, ends in wonder, and is inherently beautiful—give a true and powerful account of the tragic pleasure.
My persona method of writing is all about imitation as a means of arousing pity and fear in the service of providing wonder and beauty, though I most certainly didn’t know that until recently when I read Sachs’s essay on Aristotle, who believed the purpose of tragedy is to permit catharsis to take place.
Aristotle would disagree with Ginsberg—he believed writing is, in a sense, educational, the art of providing knowledge, and therefore elucidation, sustenance, and ultimately, satisfaction; knowledge leads to wisdom. This is what we writers must ask of ourselves, to turn our pity and fear into understanding and satisfaction. Is this why my friend Ralph Dickey wrote about what it feels like to grow up in a world that didn’t seem to want anything to do with him, what it felt like to find inspiration in the seclusion of his imagination? Why Theodore Roethke wrote about his seizures, which he would suffer sometimes in public while teaching, and about his fear of losing his mind, in poems like “In a Dark Time”: “What’s madness but nobility of soul / at odds with circumstance?” In the mid-Sixties I took a poetry class with the poet Jack Gilbert at San Francisco State College and I never forgot the story he told about how Roethke suffered a seizure while teaching and, struggling to maintain his dignity before his students, continued reciting whatever poem he was teaching even while being placed in a straitjacket and carried out to an ambulance. Gilbert’s point was the “nobility of soul” Roethke insisted on demonstrating in the midst of great suffering, and then later, in the act of writing about it, creating for himself and the reader the kind of profound satisfaction found only in beautifully made objects.
In George Konrád’s superb first novel, The Case Worker, his first-person narrator explains his job trying to help his hopeless clients in a Hungarian welfare building: “Suicides have been giving me a lot of work lately. Abandoning home, hearth, and work, they plunge into the silence that knows no suffering. They depart in haste, mysteriously, as though to take the long trip. . . . Of all nations mine has the highest suicide rate. Does that make it the freest?” Perhaps because I too worked in a welfare building in San Francisco in the late Sixties and could identify with the great sympathy Konrád showed toward “the silence that knows no suffering,” and knew firsthand the horror he was writing about with such vision and perspicacity, I was especially influenced both as a writer and as a citizen of another nation with a high suicide rate. There is certainly a great deal of pity and fear to be found in this book, and, as a consequence, as much catharsis as one can bear.
And there is perhaps no better example of the use of catharsis than in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about inconceivable loss, “One Art,” in which she deals with the suicide of her longtime Brazilian lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, in 1967. In comparing this kind of loss with the idea of losing things in general, she not only creates the perfect metaphor for loss, but underplays what for her is a great tragedy with losing “some realms I owned, rivers, even a continent,” things she missed that are ultimately no “disaster.” In fact, the more she undercuts the idea of disaster the more the word takes on its solemn register of tragic consequence. In this list of what is lost in losing her great friend, there is not only great pity and fear but a great tension that builds to catharsis in the last two lines of the final stanza: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
Another example is an early poem I wrote, “Gogol’s Coat,” that also deals with loss, in this case, loss of love. I based it on Gogol’s great short story “The Overcoat,” in which a lowly clerk loses his most prized possession, a new overcoat, to thieves. The story ends with his dying of a fever and his ghost retuning to steal the coats of those whose indifference to his suffering Gogol probably saw as a great societal illness. Whatever he was after, it’s a story unlike any anyone had written before, one that Dostoyevsky referred to as being seminal to all subsequent Russian fiction: “We have all come from under The Overcoat.” I used the clerk’s great disappointment as a metaphor to describe my own sense of loss and rejection. The poem came quickly, and I remember how surprised I was by its ending, especially the use of the word “forgiven.” There was certainly pity and fear here, and for me, at least, catharsis.
GOGOL’S COAT
I mean to imagine the wilderness
where trees are not trees when touched.
The lover’s longing when he wakes
with his head on her belly, his hand lost
in that dark. How then most of all
the trees are not trees when touched.
I think of Gogol’s clerk whose desire
for a skin so exquisite all Russia’s winds
would brush off his chest like a kiss
is the lover’s to be inside
where the trees are not trees when touched.
How as he stands before the mirror
& sees himself inside the coat, at last,
the salt of stars on his tongue, he remains
himself the clerk when touched, but loves
the coat which cannot be forgiven.
Whether writers are dealing with grief, great disappointment, or societal horror, we all share the same hope that what we may write next will change or enhance or resolve the source of all our suffering, often enough so that finding in ourselves the very thing we fear and hate inspires our most excruciatingly exquisite possession: our vulnerability.
Yes, this is why, despite my fear that others will see me as weird, absurd, or obscene, I insist on pursuing so fully-and-semi-consciously, abjectly, and willingly, every creative instinct, adding yet another rumor, whisper, image, or anecdote to this ongoing, illicit, often preposterously precious spilling of the beans; that despite the little black bird perched on my shoulder, reminding me constantly of the thousand and one reasons to remain silent, when my desire to create is greater than my fear, I find the strength to pursue the truth about whatever it is I truly feel under all my lies and obfuscations, and then know how to proceed. And that even when the fear is too great and I stop and never want to write again, it isn’t a lack of strength or will that has stopped me, or a matter of fault or blame. It is the comforts of the abyss that have stopped me, the lies and convenient truths that hide just below the level of my consciousness, behind which I seek refuge and blindness. And even if I can go no further, I now know something about myself that I wouldn’t have attained any other way, something that will help me with future projects.
But for those of us who persist there is the satisfaction of having successfully restructured some previously unassailable aspect of our emotional landscape into something presentable, something that “arouses pity and fear . . . that ends in wonder, and is inherently beautiful,” the reward being the kind of emotional truth that will afford us the perspective with which to view ourselves in an entirely new and more enlightened and even kinder way, despite all our fears and misgivings, and the endless equivocations of our big black birds.