MY WIFE, THE FORMER Adele Lawrence, observed, in the first year of our marriage, 1958, that, as by this time I had received some acknowledgment as a novelist, she had expected to meet more members of the literary world. She did not say this with any particular disappointment; her reading was mostly of detective fiction or works connected with her passion: saving the natural environment.
Adele became the assistant administrator of New York City parks and was a founding trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She had simply assumed that writers would see other writers, and had no objection to that. Indeed the oddity of our very happy union was that our interests were almost complete opposites.
"Is there some particular writer you'd like to meet?" I asked her.
She didn't know many, so she picked a famous one. "Well, what about Norman Mailer? You know him, don't you?"
"Certainly. And I happen to have an invitation from him in my pocket. For Wednesday night."
"Fine. Let's go. What time and where?"
"His apartment's in Brooklyn. But there's no point getting there before midnight. It won't get started before then."
"Midnight! In the middle of the week! No thanks. We working folk will be beddy-bye well before that."
She understood thereafter why it was so difficult in that day for writers caught up in the workaday world to see their confreres socially. It was not only the hours; it was the heavy drinking then associated with creative writing that wasted so much time. In my bachelor days, and when I was not practicing law, I had ample time to meet, and did, some of the great literary figures of the time, and adapt myself to their hours. I can recall coming home at eight A.M. after an all-night drinking session with Jean Stafford and Philip Rahv and thinking nothing of it. As a married lawyer-novelist I soon changed my ways.
Childhood had not brought writers into my ken. The only one who came regularly to the house was my parents' great friend Arthur Train, author of the popular Ephraim Tutt stories about a wily but good-hearted old lawyer who didn't hesitate to misuse his legal genius to get an innocent man off the hook. But Train was no Thackeray. At Groton I read deeply in the British nineteenth-century classics: Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, but nothing contemporary, no Hemingway or Faulkner or even Fitzgerald. We were then living in an age where many believed that Galsworthy was the greatest writer in English and Anatole France the greatest in French. I passionately agreed with this evaluation until Proust crept into my life. But with him I preferred the social parts about the parties of the Guermantes. I thought his whole theory that love springs from jealousy was twaddle. As a matter of fact I still do.
I was still in my teens when a great change occurred in my parents' social life. Up until then the gatherings that they hosted or attended had been made up of old friends or relations, lawyer partners or business acquaintances, a congenial but very familiar group, rarely stimulating, never exciting. That changed when they were taken into intimate friendship (mostly because of Mother's wit and wisdom) by the four closely knit and infinitely interesting daughters of Walter and Margaret Blaine Damrosch. The doors of the world of music, theatre, and letters burst open for them. When they went out for dinner Mother might find herself discussing the filming of Rebecca with David Selznick or a revival of Siegfried with Lauritz Melchior or his days as a pianist in a whorehouse with Harpo Marx. Father enjoyed it too, and he was always charming and well liked, but he was less on top of it all than Mother, who had the advantage of feeling at her ease with even such a deity as Kirsten Flagstad.
The broadened social life of my parents made a good many famous names familiar in family chatter, but I cannot say that they had much effect on my early writing efforts. Their bearers simply nodded genially to a junior. I do remember reading the witty and vivid memoirs of Gretchen Finletter, the most intellectual of the Damrosch daughters, about her girlhood, and having a glimmer of how the simplest domestic things could be turned into art, but otherwise the whole business of writing seemed to me to have nothing to do with anyone but myself. It was only when I ceased to regard reading and writing as connected with grades at school and college, but as necessities to my pleasure in life, that they became really me. That was in my sophomore year at Yale in Joseph Seronde's class in nineteenth-century French fiction and drama.
This brings up the larger question of whether writers in general influence each other, the way painters do, as almost all art critics agree. I suspect that the major writers do not, or in a very minor way. Henry James is universally cited as an influence, but on whom? Who writes like him? Percy Lubbock, author of Earlham, is often given as an example, and the book is a good candidate, but it's largely a literary curiosity today.
I once deliberately tried to write an American counterpart to a favorite French novel of mine: Renée Mauperin by the Goncourt brothers. I even started it with the same scene of my heroine talking to a young man while bathing in a stream. But before many chapters were written my characters had taken over, and my novel was very different from its model. Not as good, of course, but different.
During the period of my life when I was free to meet other authors on their own terms I was guided by Vance and Tina Bourjaily who ran a kind of salon for just that purpose, which was ultimately transferred from their apartment to the larger space of the White Horse Tavern. Their eye was very good, for I didn't meet anyone at their gatherings who didn't make some kind of a name for himself. Norman Mailer was their most famous regular. I had admired The Naked and the Dead a good deal more than I did its successors, but I was nonetheless dazzled to receive from him the greatest compliment one writer can give another. He said of my short story The Gemlike Flame that he wouldn't have minded writing it himself!
I found it difficult at first to win acceptance in the group. A registered Republican who was also listed in the Social Register was something of a duck-billed platypus to them. And by the time I had won a kind of welcome at the White Horse I found myself a little bit bored. Alcohol was certainly the bane of writers' meetings in those days, and it rarely improved the quality of the talk. I never had a really interesting conversation at the White Horse, though there were undeniably interesting people there. Perhaps I left too early, but I still doubt if any of the writers profited much from each other's company.
Do writers ever? Jane Austen, so far as we know, had no literary friends of any importance. Henry James had the most of all; he made a point of meeting every author of note in Britain, France, and America, many of whom sent him signed copies of their first editions so that his library when he died, though sold for a song by an idiotic niece, was worth a fortune. Would the late style of the three final novels have been altered in the least had he met none of the luminaries he cultivated? I doubt it.
It always surprises me that great authors don't get more personal satisfaction from their gifts. Some, of course, do and did. Trollope, Dickens, Browning, and Tennyson were all reputed to be happy in their trade. And, as I have noted elsewhere, I believe that Shakespeare was in exuberantly high spirits when he finished King Lear. But I have to admit that Henry James, and in our day William Styron, suffered cruel and crippling depressions at the very height of their literary powers. And was Emily Dickinson happy when she dressed in white and kept a door between herself and the friends she talked to? Who knows?