BY 1963, WHEN ROBERT Hatch of The Nation asked me to review a clutch of foreign novels in any form I wanted, I had imposed certain rules on myself: never to do a review in order to blast someone or some book, never in fact to review anything not liked, only to review at will and at some length—and presumably for literature. (I had also kept off contemporary Americans—the only way I saw to keep friendships and avoid tea-pot tempests.) The Nation’s proposal seemed to me just on the order of what my British writer-friends might do—covering foreign news as it were, for a small, decent paper, at a thin, honorable price. ($75.)

I started out bravely anti-critical, fell into complacency over books I could easily despise, and was gratefully redeemed by a book I could praise, Günter Grass The Tin Drum. (And by the Germans—for me so long an idée fixe by way of war and family, that the slightest snuff of them hurtled me into the long view without half trying.)

The Nation asked me to continue, perhaps in a column, but I had had enough. Meanwhile, toward the end of my connection with The Reporter, I did some drama reviews.

As a dance-student since the age of six and as a high school and college actress, I had had the amateur’s “inside” whiff of the theater; as audience, I had started as a patron of Gray’s Drugstore’s cut-rate tickets when I was twelve. After my first book, at the instance of Cheryl Crawford, who hoped for a play, I had attended the Actor’s Studio for about a year, but was not deflected—I still had too many novels to write. And I knew the theater would take all my devotion, not half. If I ever again wrote a play (in college I had been a student of Minor Latham) I would attach myself to a repertory theater. Meanwhile, at the studio, I had seen how a working theater can serve novelists; they see their own limits—and avenues—better defined.

To review a play was refreshing; it took me “out of my field.” (By now, having written two or three novels, I had almost accepted the category thrust at me.) But a thinker’s only boundaries are his own. I had a vigorous sense that I was testing these—or else constructing them. For “the Germans”—actually my own compound of a childhood hatred of their bourgeoisie’s servility and “schmutz,” their evil history and my perverse love of their language—had appeared again. This time, I thought I was ready for them. The subject Was Peter Weiss’s play about Marat-Sade. I called the review, “The Agony of The Cartoon.”

Some poets, painters, thinkers represent mankind always with the risus sardonicus of death and corruption on its face, whirling in a society which is a death dance. Others trace this face with a certain tenderness of perfectibility on it, and see the society too as teleological, pushing along that famous incline toward the stars. Between these two views lie all the gradations of art. In Peter Weiss’s play, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (and as performed with disciplined rage by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the wizardry of Peter Brook), the stage at the Martin Beck Theatre is a pitched one, for real and for metaphysical, angling its inmates down, and toward the audience. Musical accompaniment is fifed and tympanied, or rattled from the metal sheets used so often in productions of Godot, by inmates placed in the boxes, while a Brechtian chorus of four more sings and mimes from the stage or from trapdoors below. Coulmier, the director of the mental home where de Sade, as an inmate after 1801, wrote some of the theatrical entertainments that were produced there as therapy, sits onstage with his wife and daughter—as indeed the fashionable Parisians who came to watch the antics at Charenton did sit. There are incursions of actors into balcony and orchestra, wherever sit the aristocrats of the Martin Beck. For, as in Genet’s The Blacks, the audience is indictable. When it claps the cast at the end of the play, the inmates clap back.

The intent is “total” theater, and in production terms—short of a possible spastic song-and-dance response from the ticketholders—the play gets it. Everyman is onstage in all the grotesques of his overt and hidden lunacy—the obsessive, the autoerotic, the weeper in her mob-cap, the drooler with the thick tongue, all performing their silent rhythms, and attended by coifed male nuns and butcher-clad nurses; the mime chorus is Elizabethanly drunken or whorish; other types and professions pass” behind in Molièresque charade. Directorial invention underscores the author’s intent at every chance. Where the author himself, careful not to have his play “about” one thing or any actor speak for only one, specifies that the Girondist deputy be played by an erotomaniac “in the smooth, tight trousers of an ‘Incroyable,’” then the Royal’s customary fondness for humanizing touches of bawdry improves upon this suggestion very versatilely; in a play which as much as anything is about revolution, then the blood poured from buckets at intervals is of course red, white, or blue.

In the modern theater, where so much device is available (and for all the complaints, so much money for it), audiences have often to quarrel over whether the play is really the thing in a new production, or whether directorial energy has made it so. When the two are so merged as here, that question may remain as unanswerable as the dialectical questions in this play itself—rand like them, sets up one of the vital tensions which make theater. For while it is evident at once that this play is not, like The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a weakminded pageant in which the elephant spectacle is poised on the butterfly wings of bombast, nevertheless the visual and aural confusion is at times overwhelming—too close to circus for us to get it all at one whack. This is an old Brechtian trick, but an older theatrical one. In a sense the play here is swarmed over, even attacked by the production ideas it itself invites, but not swamped. Sometimes, in one of these three-ring whirligigs, there is clear contempt for the play’s words, but here the important monologues are delivered at as staid a pace as Hamlet’s, underscored by the choral flow. Even in the din at the finale, when all might well be chanting “O Sophonisba! Sophonisba, O!” with all Jamie Thomsons anywhere, instead of: “Charenton Charenton/Napoleon Napoleon/Nation Nation/Revolution Revolution/Copulation Copulation”—one wishes the best wish, to come back for another performance, or to go to the text.

London critics have argued that the play itself derives from a number of fashionable sources; so it does, along with those I have indicated. But it is not merely an adroitly composite echo, though it is composite and does echo within itself. One brilliant idea sustains it: we are in the asylum; de Sade is producing his play; Marat (at whose actual funeral the real de Sade did deliver the oration) is in his bath (to which the real Marat was confined by a skin disease) before us, but in the bathhouse of the asylum, ready to be murdered by Charlotte Corday, toward which event all continuity proceeds. The aristocratic onlookers are watching, onstage and off. Marat is played by a paranoiac inmate, Corday by a sleepwalking upper-class girl, costumed like an Empire nymph and singing her somnambulist horrors to the lute. The director, always ready to speak for conventional political and social order, must by his very role interrupt at intervals the actions of the “disturbed.” The audience has its half-knowledge of history, and an awareness that both history and itself are to be manipulated. So the play at once acquires a juggler’s multiplicity of levels, and any idea extractable from it is intended to be seen in movement with the others.

Many so extracted are not new to the world’s logic: revolutions return rich and poor to the status quo, achieving nothing: money is Marxist in all its implications: man is a mad animal with further plans of madness. No criticism here, at least from me. Precisely because most ideas are not new to the world, ideas alone are unbearable in art, which must clothe and externalize them, it doesn’t matter how, as long as a forceful unrest is successfully raised under and around them. Mr. Weiss’s juggling is one way of doing that; he is not interested in a longitudinal play which progresses toward a resolution in the key of C—or even C sharp. “The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair/to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes” (Marat). Well and good, so far as it goes, and with a sop to existentialism too: though the pointlessly horrible aspects of our world are on record, they bear repeating. And although the energy with which both language and action here overstate, restate, and confuse themselves is familiarly Brechtian in mode, it is merely one of the many methods of drama, used to send us in pursuit of these elusive balances, these words lost in excitement—that is, back to the play.

Here, I suspect one will find that Weiss has a multiplicity of very realistic images, but after that brilliant beginning, no metaphor that would sustain it toward greatness. Nobody is asking for “answers,” or a play with a literal “point,” which is why I say “metaphor.” Ideas may not resolve, but once the chaos of our world has been established, plays still may, and not necessarily on an up note—as Genet, Sartre, and Beckett have shown. This play is not surreal enough. The “chaos” is as well ordered as a concertmaster’s. And though Weiss clearly knows that “total” theater is not just “everybody running,” his play’s total statement falls far short of Brecht also, absconding, as is currently fashionable in so many of the arts, with an implied: “Get excited. Start thinking. But don’t ask me!”

As the uncurtained scenes progress by topic and harangue—Stifled Unrest, Corday’s First Visit (she has three), Marat’s Liturgy, A Regrettable Intervention (a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer, e.g., “forgive us our good deeds and lead us into temptation”), Marquis de Sade is Whipped, Song and Mime of the Glorification of the Beneficiary, to quote a few—the most interesting and best-maintained dialectical balance is that between de Sade and Marat, the freshest antitheses being there. In Conversation on Life and Death, de Sade, who hates Nature, “the passionless spectator” who “goads us to greater and greater acts,” complains that “even our inquisition gives us no pleasure nowadays … our postrevolutionary murders … are all official. … There’s no singular personal death to be had.” And Marat replies: “If I am extreme, I am not extreme in the same way as you/Against Nature’s silence I use action/In the vast indifference I invent a meaning … work to alter … and improve.” Later, de Sade says: “Before deciding what is wrong … we must find out what we are … for me the only reality is imagination/the world inside myself.” And Marat replies: “No restless ideas can break down walls/I never believed the pen alone could destroy institutions.”

We appreciate this for a number of nicely posed—and mixed—reasons. Clarity, in the midst of a continuous-movement play, is welcome. We rise to how neatly Jesuitical it is that de Sade, that doctrinaire of the perverse and the exaggerated, should be made to speak for or stand for the inner imagination (usually assigned to gentler lyrists), and that it should be Marat, apostle of revolutions artistically complete to the last blood-drop, who itches symptomatically on the cross of that bloodletting, and dreams of action—in his bath. I say “stand for” with intent. For the counterside of plays which juggle, raise the hair, and leave us is that if the smoke clears for even a moment, the people tend to stand and stare at us from under the paternal arm of the playwright, as the adroit antitheses they are.

Weigh these as one may. Weiss’s stance is clear enough without statement. He writes of humanity in those ever-resuscitated grotesques of flesh-hatred which, in the long line from Bosch to Breughel and before, we used to call medieval. It is of course a genre which must accompany us forever, like our own smell. Lately the Germans have done it best; between wars they have an especial talent for it. Curiously, whether done by a Jew who lives in Sweden, or a half-Pole, it is recognizable as German still. Günter Grass’s robust humor gives the genre more depth; what grim jokes there are in the Weiss Marat-Sade are very like those in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent London production of Brecht’s Puntilla at which American audiences seem to laugh timidly, at least in this kind of play.

To be able to speak of the Marat-Sade as “this kind” of play may also be a measure of its scope, and of Brecht’s “epic” theater in general. Must it always be couched in terms of the cartoon? Or is that why, though the artist is not obliged to answer his own questions, “this kind” of play seems to truncate the question before it is asked? The power and agony of the medieval cartoons of humanity is in their assumption, under the grimacing flesh and the snake-scales, of a spiritual antithesis. Mr. Weiss neither demands nor assumes any antithesis, which is why his play remains one-dimensional and he correctly describes it as Marxist. Within that span, it has the mesmerism our own caricatures always have for us. We see the normals regarding the lunatics regarding the normals. It is no wonder that everybody claps.

Censorship, when not too serious, is often fun to watch. The modern version of the sport, now that sex has less shock to it, will be to catch onto whatever else will be sex’s substitute, not in the great arenas of politics and civil law, but in the small daily mind.

Once upon a time, in the story “The Hollow Boy,” Harper’s Magazine hadn’t let me, then a new writer, say a girl had her “monthlies”—which was the idiom proper to the story—but had insisted on the word “period.” In the Weiss review, The Reporter had balked at letting me say that Peter Brook had improved on the stage directions for the erotomaniac’s trousers by having him wear an erect penis, presumably wooden, inside them. “Improved upon them very versatilely” was all I could think of—a fine example of how Euphues takes over when you can’t be direct.

Yet in another piece, The Reporter let me speak of buggery—and even the arse—I was talking about homosexuals in literature—perhaps because the legal abrogation of homosexual freedom was just then under scrutiny in Britain, and therefore a liberal cause. For, what we were going through over here, especially in the theater, was that period of heart-in-the-right-place sentimentality which always precedes admitting a wronged sector of humanity to its full rights. As a Jew traveling in upstate New York, and a woman traveling in literature, I already knew that line. One day, but not quite yet, I would write at more length of homosexual writers, and of what American sex in general has done to its literature. Meanwhile, in a piece called, “Will We Get There by Candlelight?” I had this to say:

In a recent week I spent approximately seven hours of an otherwise idle life at two of John Osborne’s plays then running concurrently in London, the West End production of Inadmissible Evidence at Wyndham’s, and A Patriot for Me, in repertory and out of the Lord Chamberlain’s clutches, at the Royal Court’s “private” showing to the members of the theater club we had joined at least two days previously, that being the length of time which must lapse legally here between desire and performance. With the exception of Epitaph for George Dillon, seen off-Broadway, and The Entertainer, which I missed altogether, it has been my luck to see Osborne plays on home ground, beginning with the 1956 production of Look Back in Anger, which I was fortunate enough to catch on one of those celebrated Monday nights when discussions were held after the performance so that patrons could relieve their outrage at what the playwright was doing to English life, society, sex, youth, the class warfare, the welfare state, death and taxes, redbrick universities, the owners of sweetshops, middle-class girls who marry them and have therefore to do their own ironing—and general hard times for anti-heroes all.

In the 1956 Look Back in Anger, not all of the audience’s rage was caused by attack on institutions precious to it, or even by Osborne’s wickedly skin-raising flicks of line-to-line dialogue. Instead, it was in part teased out by the antics of the “anger” in the play itself, as it flitted restlessly from target to target like a bird that defecated intelligently from the air but never perched, or like a floating paranoia that never revealed itself centrally—what made the patrons sore was that what cannot be grasped cannot be attacked. In discussions of last year’s Tiny Alice, Edward Albee’s reply to questions on what this play was about suggested that this was not necessary to know; if the audience would but “think” along with him he would be satisfied—and, he hoped, they would be too. Thus he very cannily and properly avoided saying whether he himself knew precisely—for any artist is a fool who is willing to state his subject except in the work itself, or at least in another work as long.

Osborne’s case was different. He seemed not to make distinction between the world’s confusion, his hero’s, or his putative own, not even to perceive it or care. However, when “a pox on all your houses” is stated with such wit, vigor, and passion too, it makes for a rousing evening. Some audience irritation derived from having to admit it, particularly in the case of the hero’s famous soliloquy, which went on and on with such an intimacy of nagging that one began to need either to answer back, as in a family quarrel, or else leave the room—and then had to remind oneself that to make a theater seem a room, or an audience a family, is virtue indeed. Here what the author had done was to use sheer length and circuitous repetition in even greater proportions than Wagnerians are used to, or families either. And here, too, our itch went unappeased, for though Osborne might seem to be seeking a Tinker Bell rapport with us, he never gave us the satisfaction of being asked the question out loud.

In Inadmissible Evidence, Nicol Williamson brilliantly plays a solicitor whose hysterically egoistic need of both office and home entourages—mistress, wife, daughter, clerks, and secretaries—demands that they dance attendance on his twenty-four-hour daily merry-go-round of broken promises, until the clock runs down, the luck runs out, and the dread blow falls: he is alone. The promises are of varying sorts. He has an inability to keep appointments with clients in jail or at his office, he runs very near the law regarding trumped-up evidence; he doesn’t write his own briefs or study them, and meanwhile twits his junior and senior clerks for the hard work they do to keep the firm in order, plus the dull lives they must lead in consequence; his clients do not get a fair shake, at least from him. Nobody does; he cannot keep his appointments with life, though he presumably has a rare old time in the evasionary hours between.

For, mainly, his broken promises are to women; being late or never home to dinner with the wife is the least of them. He “stays late” at his office twenty-four hours a day for the usual reasons: he can’t get to the mistress with whom he pleads each day to stay home for his call; he has outgoing and incoming mistresses among the secretaries; even his own daughter is kept waiting so that he may be seen breaking his promises to her (or perhaps as excuse for the long digression—in this case on the younger generation—of which there is at least one in each Osborne play, often the liveliest part of it or the most worthy of serious attention). Always the broken bargains are plastered up with charm and/or argument, and the boundless energy of a personality whose energy can exert itself only thus and has done so since schooldays; he is an emotional athlete while obviously believing himself to be a sexual one.

Williamson’s job is to make us believe in the hero’s basilisk effect on others. The problem is somewhat akin to that of bringing on-stage a “great man” already known to us from the annals of history or art and having the greatness weigh true. For almost three-quarters through, Williamson, if not the play, gets away with it. Of course every energy and bit of brilliance is tipped his way; the other males are mere placatory figures and the women either telephonic devices or plasticine presences; the departing and pregnant office wife bows out in a tantrum; her successor complements the hero’s monologue with the complaisant gestures, almost in tutu, of a ballerina choreographed for Hot Young Thing and Has to Have It. (If a woman had written the play, which is somehow quite imaginable, she would rightly have been accused of seeing all “obligation” only in the context of what is due the female.)

What defeats both actor and play a good hour before its end is its monologue. For while Osborne, plainly narrowing his boundaries if not yet in control of them, has settled for the inadequacies of one man over those of an entire country or world, it can now be seen far too clearly that his real talent, even more especially when he is dealing with a modern man than with a historical one, is still for soliloquy. The play is actually a monologue and certainly in monotone, with any roles other than the hero—or male lead, as one is continuously tempted to call him—performing as little more than subservient projections of his will (and whose metaphysic?).

Meanwhile, I had begun to learn what I thought of Osborne’s metaphysic, or perhaps “moralities” was the better word. Hide as an author may behind his naughtiness (a word that would never occur to me except in England) or behind, say, his strenuously risky modernity, why did both these words, searched out to express his style, bring to mind such an opposite as “morality”?—a nineteenth-century antique that has not yet come back into its own in America. The answer may be that nursery-naughtiness brings on nannyish moralizing, in the reviewer as in the reviewed. Following this train of thought in the entr’acte, I recalled how many recent British plays did go back to the nursery in the end for emphasis—remember Osborne’s own squirrels and bears in Look Back, or Dorothy Tutin kneeling down to repeat “Dod bless Mummy” (as example to be taken, Dod Wot, of a pre-suicide’s mental state) in Graham Greene’s The Living Room. (American authors don’t go back to the nursery; they go back to childhood, which can be orful, but is not the same.)

“He’s trying to write Everyman with one character,” I mused, “in this case Vanitie”—but this didn’t seem quite enough either. Suddenly there came to mind a favorite set of illustrations in an old bound Harper’s of the-mid-1860s—a double-page spread of drawings showing the progressive corruption of a provincial young man, his rise in city sophistication and champagne wickedness, and predictable fall. As with many nineteenth-century cartoons, the style of these was a kind of bowdlerized Hogarth, still teeming with an eighteenth-century cast of characters, but all arranged now according to a virtue and a vice that plumbed the depths of neither. It had always typified for me that exact limit of “Victorian” sentiment in which good and evil become the tamed gorgons Naughty and Nice, watching over that slough of dismay (not despond) where, sadly but never quite tragically, the good people are uniformly dull and the wicked have all the endowment of vitality and charm. This seems to me both the range of Osborne’s “anger,” and how it stratifies itself also, which may be why it originally bewildered audiences used to the newer psychological mixtures. It may also be why Osborne’s comic comments have a persistently topical superficiality, and why his tragic ones never really hurt. I’d certainly never thought of him before as one of our more eminent Victorians, but take away the shrewd or shrewish patter of the language, especially as it attaches to sexual matters, and remember that our grandfathers never went undistinguished for staying power or long breath—and see what you see.

The second of these two plays, A Patriot for Me, tells the story of the rise within the Imperial and Royal Army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the nobody Alfred Redl; of his fatal flaw of homosexuality which leads to his spying for the archenemy Russia; and his ultimate fall.

Aside from the documentary technique that divides the scenes (those screen flashes: “Prague 1896,” “Vienna 1897,” which are always such a deadly impediment to the natural flow of “legitimate” theater that so knowing a dramatist can surely have used them only in haste) there is nothing here that devotees of Victor Herbert might not take to, except, of course, a slight sexual displacement. Alfred can’t love the Countess because going to bed with a woman gives him the willies (we have already had a scene with a whore, a tender one of course). And Alfred’s dear friend is a dear boy—Flash, Vienna, 1902! Plus any modern analogy the author would not be sorry to see us make.

And meanwhile we have the monologue again, this time Alfred’s. For monologue is what it really is—though in intent he speaks to people rather than at them, and the fast blackouts of the staging help by breaking up what might flower into soliloquy. Despite whores and nightmares, Colonel Redl takes ten scenes to discover his own dark secret, though the audience, being much wickeder, has long since jumped the gun. After that, why, the downfall—gradual very, and with flourishes, not infrequently, of violins. Surely even the Greeks, who made so much of fatal flaws, including this one, never followed one so dead straight to such literal consequences as the simple Osborne psychologic does—or with such deadly obvious development of event and retinue. Colonel Oblensky, the shaggy-friendly, cynic-sinister head of Russian intelligence who recruits Redl by blackmail (in a scene in the snow of winter, what else?) is himself a man of parts, many of them previously played and written by Peter Ustinov. Actually, all the sins against believability end by giving the play a kind of grossly reverse artistic form all its own, as we learn to deal with the difficulty of believing in light opera and psychology at the same time, with the oversimple scarlet-letterdom of the psychology itself, plus the unfortunate fact that, unlike Williamson, this time even Maxmilian Schell cannot make the hero as Dick Deadeye a fascinator as all the other actors keep saying he is—perhaps because vanitie allows of more inflection than sodomy.

That time should soon come (or may have) when homosexuals and heterosexuals alike will be bored at the recurrence of homosexuality as the dark secret or the fatal flaw of current dramas. For any such labeling of a man or of a life by a single quality is not only to patronize human individuality but also to sacrifice any artistic one, to melodrama or perhaps naughtiness. In the same way, to jot in a little anti-Jewishness—Redl is a concealed Jew, and the generals are made to make such anti-Semitic cracks as one expects of “the period”—is no automatic passport to drama or even sympathy; here it remains one of Osborne’s digressions, notable only as it suggests that where once these were almost arrogantly designed to kill our sympathies, now they seem complaisantly to bid for it. Too late, for, prefaces to the contrary, this is no story of a Jew in that army, or a man of any kind anywhere in history or out of it. Take the young man of my old Harper’s magazine cartoon, which was called “The Drunkard’s Decline,” change the accent, the army, the sex of the whores, and the vintage of the champagne—but keep the sentiment—and call it “A Fairy’s Fall.”

Nevertheless. Nursery or not, buggery fascinates us all. It is a word I never think of except in England—perhaps because it suggests a verbal bluntness, possibly a specious-one, common to English sexuality in general. As against the brilliantly emotional or religious logistic with which French writers depict the homosexual, or the shadowy, sometimes subcritical murk the Americans use, it does suit the bracing English style, half music hall, half Elizabethan clown, with which Osborne stages the one lively scene of the play, a cruelly funny one, where Redl attends a party “in drag.” There Redl, in uniform, fades from the play altogether; it is the supernumeraries in their transvestite array who are the thing: the false soubrette who warbles, Lady Godiva with rope tails hanging indecently from “her” pink tights, the classic whore telling of “her” first fall, and the Baron, a boxer-shouldered dowager in white satin ball dress and tiara, hilariously queening it over all. In spite of plenty of material from the good old folklore—“He wanted to be a homosexual but his mother wouldn’t let him”—or perhaps by a canny use of it, here is a scene that should be the comic set piece on the subject for quite a while, though I can’t see it being performed even in those “progressive” schools at home (where I hear they sometimes do Genet’s The Maids with girls, a lovely confusion which would never occur in the land of Sir Andrew Aguecheek). For though Osborne’s patriot has all but disappeared—and it has taken the playwright how many miles to get to this Babylon?—the scene has brio, to put it politely, and it’s certainly worth your time, though its full zest may not travel. Remember, that though the Lord Chamberlain might not get at us in our club, it couldn’t have been the aura of censorship that had so sharpened the author’s wit or our reception of it, as much as the aura of crime. For if there was brio here there was good reason; where homosexual practice elsewhere may be illstarred, in Britain it is illegal. It is necessary to understand the place occupied in this empire by a question that Parliament itself studies from time to time.

As we left the theater, trying to pin down between us the exact nature of Osborne’s Sachertorte, we heard a native voice bluntly do it for us. “Bit like The Merry Widow arse-backwards, wasn’t it?”

Goes to show what can be done on home ground. Anticriticism, like other mischief, attacks the idle—like me when between books. At one such a time, The Kenyon Review asked me to contribute to a symposium on the short story. The symposium, like the Festschrift, is a device to keep a literary magazine going, as well as a straight road to the highest form of nonsense without humor. It appeals to vanities who don’t mind sounding off in a crowd of them. I refused, but the idea smoldered, until I wrote the following, under the title “Talk Given In Heaven After Refusing To Go There”—(which the Sunday Times “Speaking Of Books” column called “Writing Without Rules.”)

To write about “the” short story or “the” novel as an entity—an actual “art form” wandering the Aegean or West 44th Street and only waiting to be drafted for the literary wars—is an ancient kind of high-altitude nonsense. From which the artist unerringly excludes himself, every time he sits down to write a manuscript which shall be as single in shape and essence as the mortal coil will allow.

He wants every work to be a reformation, and to come like Luther’s, straight from the bowel. Secretly he hopes people will get to understand it because they too have bowels—which is one of the connections between literature and the world. Only one of course. And mentioned here merely to anticipate a volume of essays shortly to be published on that subject by Marvin Mudwrack, Leslie Fiddler and Steven Muckus—to be entitled “OUR Mortal Coil: A Symposium.” What is a symposium? It is an attempt to arrange in orderly theory those very works that are alive because they are singular. And to put down the artist for disorderly conduct unbecoming to a symposium.

There is no “the” short story. Or novel. More than a foot away from a particular one, we are discussing the nature of art—another fooler. The nature of art is that, one foot away, it can best be talked of only in terms of what it isn’t. For the artist knows that a work of art is everything else but what can be said of it, one foot away. What he says of it—meanwhile standing on his own navel to get close enough—is what he makes his art of. He doesn’t waste time dreaming of the realms of “the.” Insomniac that he is, he’s forever working on a “this,” beautiful as a skin without pores, and to the words of anyone else—not pervious.

The symposiast of anything, however, is an old-fashioned Platonist. He believes in Rainbow’s End. Clinking up there among the other absolutes is the final Smasher Short Story and the definitive Nevermore Novel, at which writers down here are to aim as faithfully as they can. The symposiast’s job is to establish their pecking order. He does this very simply. First he sips, from any blushful cup of Hippocrene proffered. Then, like any winetaster, he spits. … And here I am back at the bodily functions again. It will take a critic to tell me why the very thought of criticism so often leads me there.

For the critic’s job, as some see it, is to tell all of us not only what we and the artist are to believe—but what the Artist already does believe about the Art Form he’s working in. Against that Ammunition, the artist can only say, in the lowest case possible: i don’t. Or he can sit and think about his immortality—that endless and useless chance to talk back. For if he opens his mouth to shout to the heavens what he doesn’t believe in, he can never command the decibel of those crying aloft what they do.

I don’t believe that the short story or the novel—or the symphony, or the sculpture of object—should ever stand still enough in artistic time for us to say unequivocally what it is, or should be. For that is the End, whenever that happens, isn’t it? I don’t believe in any comprehensive methodology of any kind—even if you say I’ve used it. What you really see, if a piece of work is good enough, is the particular order it has self-imposed.

“Point of view”? In the professorial anthologies, every story has one, narratively speaking—whatever that is. Often the prefaces still urge that a story has or should have only one point of view. Readers of these should remember that the commentator is urging strictly his own limits, not the author’s. No reason why a story can’t be told from 80 points of view if the writer can manage it—the best are as spiny with viewpoint as a porcupine, as whorled as a whelk’s idea of a whelk. Even in a work of the smallest scope, the daring attempt is to do as many things as possible, and to do them inseparably. I once said as much, to the first students I’d ever addressed. One said thoughtfully, “That’s not what Miss Rubaker said.” My answer was awed—we were from the same city. “You had Miss Rubaker too?” I guess I never listened to her. But in some quarters, I hear her yet.

I hear other voices too. Mr. James, striding to dictate, stares across the Channel and says, “Today, I shall write a story with an ‘omnipotent narrator.’ Or is it ‘omniscient’?” Mr. Joyce scowls myopically higher. “Mine ends in an epiphany.” Now I’d advise both those eminences not to be too sure of what they’ve done, before looking it up in Northrop Frye. I’ve not read him myself. All those people are too smart for me. They know everything—except that their business is fantasy. Of a purer, more restricted sort than mine.

The writer should flee confrontations of that sort in the manner that Blake fled Joshua Reynolds; he should beat down classifications, or any gnomic effort to put it all in a neat nutshell. Read it all if he must, and learn to spit it out. Write a story like a nutshell, and another as fleecy as the top of Mount Ida, if he chooses. If he’s lucky, he isn’t even an iconoclast. That’s for the converts to creative freedom. If he’s blessed, he has a more congenital disorder. He doesn’t even see the rules that are there.

I treasure the categorizers, nevertheless. Like weeds in the garden, they tell us where the flowers are. For, little as a good writer should know about the general logistics of the Elysian field, while he writes he has to be cocksure about his own. Afterwards—when he is telling himself and humanity how he did it, in the exquisitely punchy journalese which comes to all of us at such moments—then maybe it is healthy for him to read what one of those cats may have written of him. Let him read all about how he did it, and in the best Latinate agglutinate. That’ll humble him back to his own vernacular. And maybe send him on, to a kind of book he himself had never thought of before.

For the writer knows well enough how he did it of course, from the first reveries through the rheumatics of the daily chair. His dilemma is that he can’t really talk about his work in any words or terms but its own. If he were seriously to try, his “extrapolation”—more exhaustive than any outside analyst’s, though maybe not as lengthy—would be to reconstruct, step by step, the work itself. And he doesn’t want to bother, but to do something different. Not merely from other writers’ works. From his own. Something different from last time. Which will again make its own rules.

Is this anarchy? Yes, of course. And no. The anarchic appearance of experience is what stimulates a writer to regularize it in the telling—and to tell the world. The ways of doing that, when seemingly inimitable, make writers who are “hew.” For the moment. Then somebody smells out a few “theories”—for which read mannerisms and preoccupations—and the imitative race is on. After a lapse of time and dust and followers, a few writers remain who are not merely inimitable, but of whose work it can now be freely admitted—that it was not done by rule. These are the great.

The ordinary artist however—that is, the live one—will never persuade the world that his magic calculator and charisma computer isn’t somewhere—and somehow communicable. The sadder likelihood is that the world may persuade him. People will pay him to teach them his secrets, for one thing. He can usually fob them off with his own personal ambience, or with his convictions about other writers’ works.

Yet one honesty he will never be allowed. He will never be excused from explanation of his own work by lazily pointing to the work itself. If he insists, a variety of vengeances are taken, the most indulgent one being also the most irritating: writers, like the dear saints, don’t know how the mystery occurs. From which it follows, that if the poor naif doesn’t know how he does what he does, then he can’t know what he’s said, in its true and full significance. If he answers in a rage, as I have often done, “The book is what I am saying. That is what a book—a novel, short story is!”—well, watch out for that kind of stuff. He may be illiterate.

Once, at a party for the first issue of Discovery, in which I had a story, I was led humbly up to an Authority. I mean I was humble—there “were about 400 other Discoveries there. He watched my approach with a gaze I know better now—the true appreciator’s air of having discovered himself. Then said, down his Apollonian nose (it was John Aldridge): “I wonder. If you really know. If you really saw. Everything you said in that story. I can’t think you really saw.” It was my first encounter with internists of this order. (And of course it occurred to neither of us to question whether he had seen everything there was to see.) For days after I thought of replies both deep and brittle. Like, “Oh well, the midwife is the last to know.” What I said however was, “Well, unh, I wrote it.” He smiled. And like a deb who’d tripped over her train, I was led away.

That’s all changed now. Or is it? In a way. They used to warn writers not to “talk it out” and so waste subconscious material—until we learned this was merely “their” way of pre-empting the field—for talk. It would give us “blocks,” they said. But writers are quicker than anyone to know where the power is. These days I can count on a hand the quaint characters who have blocks. Once I’d have needed an abacus.

Talk has done it—and the breakdown of the distinction between print and talk, between “fiction” and “autobiography.” Nobody has to wonder which he’s doing anymore; it’s all reportage. Poets have helped. “Readings” have made us all troubadours. Sound is king. And on the terrible bandwagon of present-day politics, quite a number of johnny-come-latelies to the world of social concern have rediscovered themselves—in a kind of talk-print-feint social action, which is a medium all in itself. The new slogan for the writer is “Don’t just complain; Explain.” We’re invited to do it endlessly. Writers are almost their own critics now.

They have often been the most prophetic ones, against all the standpat formalities of the lawgivers—Blake against the Whole eighteenth-century academy, Proust retroactively against Saint-Beuve. Uncommitted to any theories but their own—and uncommitted to the permanence of these. A writer’s arrogance toward the present is often really a humility toward the future. And very hard to maintain. For it’s such fun to be easily doctrinaire, most of all about our own work. Especially now. America, always hungry for a Left Bank, now has one. The college is the café now—and offering the talk-print carte-du-jour. Writers have helped make it so. We now have the classic two establishments, money and the salon, “to help us contend with what we are. Wherever a glass is drunk to the Muse these days, the circulation manager of some modish mag stands ready to foot the tab. The café categorizer has even higher aims. He wants to make us like himself—a man who understands the “the” of everything.

How can we tell him our aims are infinitely lower! To flourish as we are. Magicians whose pockets are literally empty, until the next time. Apostles of what is unphrasable to us except in those primary manuscripts. Before which, all others appear to us secondary.

So gentlemen, my thanks to your symposium, which I leave just in time to escape. Your job is to clean up the past. Ours to keep the future clean for possibility. Meanwhile, very humbly, I toss a lion to you Christians. Here’s a book.

I sent my friend on The Kenyon Review something else.

Sometimes art has to be defended even from the young—as from any who confuse it or associate it inseparably with living either the “arty” or the “revolutionary” life. Here, as quoted by John Leggett in “Metamorphosis of the Campus Radical,” is a student, now a senior, looking back on her year as a freshman radical: “It was really nice then. They were the bad guys and we were the good guys. Everybody who was a writer or an artist or smoked dope was us.”

I was always glad that the young thought writers were good guys generally. It spoke well for both of us.

I took it for granted that some people assumed that all artists doped or drank or did something to excess, their work being the product of it. (And that the possibility of art itself being the “excess,” never occurred to these outsiders.)

But be damned if I’d let them say that taking dope made you an artist.

I was hearing a lot of that, from the young especially. And had heard it before.

In “A Five-Sense Psyche” I answered them.

When I was twelve, I spent a lot of Saturdays at the museum, staring at the Corots. Until recently, I had gauged those half-dull, mindlessly brown reveries as the first clear signs of an aesthetic feeling separate from all the other lymphatic swelling’s of the adolescent self. It would be possible, of course, to interpret into that communion with those cobweb Barbizon forests, landscapes carefully dreaming as only the nineteenth century could dream, the first properly saloniste stirrings of sex. Fortunately, my fantasies in that direction took place in quite another red room of verse, sound, sobs, and touch, all floating with the naked human figure, male and mine, in which I had as yet no interest one could call classical. No, what I was seeing in those paintings, and with the exquisite recognition of relief, was something much more literal than either case—the trees. At the time, of course, I must already have been suffering from some sensibility. But also, in those days of irregular eye-tests, I had a mild myopia, as yet uncorrected by lenses. I knew what trees tended to look like “artistically” to other people—from the wintry black-and-white of etchings at home to the luscious green clumps of colored advertisement. But here on the museum wall, if I got close enough, was comforting testimony that once upon a time another vision, and one considered worthy, had seen real trees exactly as I saw them, on my walk in Central Park—now.

What I was experiencing, as I would later be told in college, was the well known phenomenon of the “element of the familiar” in art—in visual art, or perhaps in any art, the prime satisfaction of the novice; but to the artist himself, and to the people who can learn his vision, the most primitive. “It’s what makes people say, ‘Look, just like the barn at home!’” said the instructor. “But you can find that satisfaction on a postcard. If postcard naturalism is all you are able to see, or have learned.” He was being loftily modern. And he went on to be what he thought was witty. “But, until you can also see the composition and color-relationships the artist poses, you too will be up against a barn door!” Unknown to both of us, we there in front of him were already hopelessly far beyond him in what our eyes saw as reality normal to us—and in the music that would seem sonically normal to our ears, and in the literature already dropping unalienly into our minds, as well.

For he, born circa 1880, was talking principally of the components of objective art—which to him was still the principal art. And we, still gazing so innocently up at him, according to his own predilections, with Greuze-blue eyes perhaps, and here and there a Jacques David curve of odalisque above our wool kneesocks, already had the cells of almost another reality—non-objective, atonal, anti-heroic—in our bones.

Between our cradle days and our instructor’s, reality, that open secret, had once more been changing its terms. At the time of his birth, the impressionists had already broken up light. By the time of ours, the a priori tenets of all the arts had themselves been smashed to bits—in music the scale, in language the words. And the dimmest of us, from the most conservative backgrounds, had taken some of this, like fluoride slipped into a city’s water, into our mental lives. I still knew nothing of “modern” art, but in ballet school I had long since danced to Stravinsky, as nonchalantly as the ballerinas preceding us had to Chopin, and those before them to Rameau. A foreign girl next to me in the dorm had Max Ernst and Kurt Seligmann on her walls, and both our mercantile fathers, before they retired, would become used to ads no longer couched in the visual terminology of Landseer or even-Marie Laurencin, but in the poster techniques of Stuart Davis.

Outside the school where we studied Spenser to perhaps Whitman, we ourselves and our men friends were reading Eliot. In philosophy, we had long since given up teleology or else had never even experienced the feeling—by instinct already sensing that even in science the world wasn’t progressing on any upgrade toward heaven, Utopia, or peace. In religion, we had given up church, or had never had it. In literature, where I was, we laughed at continuity in any form—of moral view, or of form itself. Or, rather, we were puzzled by, or doubtful of, it. Secretly, we sometimes mourned the death of character, which had become fluid, vaguely attached to regions or to dissenting opinions, or to violence, but rarely personal enough to be great or even interesting in the old style. But there wasn’t an apple-cheeked one of us who didn’t know that reality, or rather the ways of proving it, was radically different now. If we were to have heroes they would have to be nonobjective ones, for that was the way reality was expressing itself and affirming itself to us.

And, as we gazed up at the art instructor with his slides, this was really all we knew. Since we were university students, we would try to clock what we were pedantically, as in terms of an educated vision which had come upon us consciously. Actually, all our habits of reading, viewing, and discussion, and the conclusions, too, were only after-the-event expression of what had already effortlessly happened to us in being born when we were. This we did not suspect, either. We would have denied with vigor the shocking idea that every human being is already a participating member of the fear-guard the minute he is born.

Actually, the visions and insights of art-in-general—plastic, musical, or literary—are ways of expressing reality, which is to say, of proving it. And while individual artists may seem to be ahead of the general current, or enough out of it to be individual, they are all the while actually augmenting it with their work; the seepage of that current is continuous, and waits for no man, educated or not, to be born. The most important fact which the instructor or we might have mentioned had escaped all of us. For in fact, by then, even thirty years ago, even the “postcard” people were no longer looking at visual reality in strictly postcard style.

But all we stubbornly knew, that day, and for the conventional number of years after, was how modern we were. And how old-fashioned “Mr. Slides” was. As old-fashioned as I am now or appear to be, as I sit here, in the new world acoming, stubbornly ensconced, entrenched in my mere five senses—limited as a stereopticon facing whole nebulas of radio-telescopes, all of them lodged in one room. As I sit here—lodged merely in my five senses—in any one of the sugar-cube, hemp-sweetened parlors, conversational or actual, of the “psychedelic” world.

As I sit here, what am I trying to do? As usual with humans, I am trying to assess the “new” reality, more than likely either by refusing it or asserting mine. Dr. Johnson, confronted by such Berkeleyan conundrums as where the room went when the observer was out of it, was able to prove the existence of matter, and of himself, by kicking a stone. But he was a lexicographer, and a critic, too. Being what I am, I might do it better via art itself. But art is long. So as I sit here in the pot-clouded room, with the cubes of “acid” scattered delicate as sesame on the table, and the needle-and-spoon in its ready little box, stashed say at the bottom of the baby’s bassinet (all of which, for the sake of the Feds, shall we say is imaginary, excluding only the baby?)—I shall settle for one or two insights which anybody might have, on reflection. How did I get here, for instance, in this peculiar position, refusing the glorious sense-data of the unknown, standing on the mere equipment which nature has given me—and will shortly take away—as on a beleaguered isle? Is nature still the newest, freshest thing around—or a has-been? In the role of artist alone, am I at worst a coward before experience, at best a fool, at likeliest a conservative? Or is it still possible that I can get as much out of my five senses and brain as anyone who gives up his autonomy over them, such at least as he was born to have? Will it one day be seen that this room—like vomitoriums, saunas, the baths of Caracalla, the chapels of the flagellites, the massage-room at the New York Athletic Club, or you name it—is only modish in its turn? Or only valuable when it is not communal but tragically personal—as, say, the bedroom of Thomas De Quincey? Am I really, in my isolation, gloriously reasonable—an angel who refuses to be confined to the pinpoint of a needle, or a pill? Stop the questions. Let us see how I got here.

Take a look at historical reality, which, whether you consider it most influenced by the battle, the plough, the apse, or the monumental person, is ever in a state of change. Alongside its panorama goes that other, more single-file drama, preoccupation of the philosophers—the problem of the observer versus the observed. Like the question of the existence of God, the problem is pitiful in that it is unsolvable, wonderful in that the mind subject to its condition can still conceive of it. Meanwhile, man, who has to live under the assumption that reality is fairly stable, has always had spiritual-physical ways of relieving himself of the dailiness of his own psyche. These vary from time to time, in means, method, and popularity. But that we should want to escape from our self, or to enlarge it, is eternal. This particular room, in its clouds of acrid smoke and sweet illusion, its pleasure in the possible company of the foul angels or lucky devils we are sure to have within us, is nothing new. Nor is art’s specious presence here new, nor youth’s. Like so much in life, it is merely new to us.

In the youth of many who are now middle-aged, Sex was the respectable way to be revolutionary. This was especially so for those not involved in “pink” politics, but often was a sideline or indulgence for those, too. For some of the literati, both practicing and fringe, assertive Sex was a way of proclaiming that literature was life—or that one had found this out. Or that one was a member of the literati. In the other arts, and gradually for much of the populace, the mystique went much the same: sexual conduct, though still pretty much a private flight of the psyche, was publicly meaningful, and in certain places an avowed synonym for poetic pioneering into both Eleutheria and la boue—into both the mysteries and the mud-slush of life. A current mystique always is. (Just as it is always a sign that mystique and mysticism have once more been confused.)

Nowadays, of course, sex is for everybody—either everybody’s Eden or everybody’s duty, seems to be the line—and to capitalize the word, as was then often done, seems scarcely amusing. But to do so is owed to history, and helps to note that Sex, to those pioneers (and for that reality), had in the main a holy, male-female connotation. Not to say that other forms of love or orgy were unknown or not busy at their mystiques; at any time in the world all of the latter somewhere coexist. But one may always recognize the fashionable, the Mother Mystique, by the difficulty of slanging it without being thought “not with it”—as is the case today. Youth particularly tends to revere the connection between the orgiastic and the serious. Innocent as we might be of sexual orgy in the old days, we were chary of kidding it. But only yesterday I heard a young “swinger,” to whom “turning on,” whether or not she does it, is still the sacred key to Eleusis, say laughingly of the other, “Oh yes, that. Group-grope.”

In the ’40s, alcoholism was particularly fashionable for writers, and some of them made art of it. Other writers tried to inherit these men and women’s demons intact. But men’s personal demons, or the art that may go with these, are never heritable in a straight line. A writer-cum-bottle is now old hat, as “out of it” as any member of Rotary. Those demons are the property of any club car, now. The furies don’t come in a bottle any more, or in the pure-and-simple bed. Sex as revolution, alcohol as the black-mass acolyte of the soul are both supremely out of style.

Looking back on our era, it may one day be said of us that travel, both literal and poetic, was our major attempt at once to extend bodily sensation and to relieve ourselves of the pains or burdens of the inner dialogue. New estimates of the nature of time and space, new powers over distance, have been with us scientifically for more than a generation, and the “new” time-space metaphors engendered by this have all but been exhausted in the arts. However, it takes a while for metaphor to seep into the general populace, and this, of course, includes the non-artistic side of the artists and scientists as well. Just at about the time the early intellectual intuitions of an era are codified and on the way to senescence, they become part of generally accepted reality. Like any other discoveries, once implemented or open to all, they are regarded as commonplace. Travel to the moon may remain poetic for a time, the moon being what it has been to humans, but it can scarcely remain mysterious.

Once upon a time, the tour—the literal kind, on land, by sea or by air—was for fun, education, or rest. Now, even in this mode, it often has another aim. People go touring for the significant experience, as to the kibbutz; the idea is not to escape from responsibility but to find it. Or one vicariously follows the bloodbaths of the world as some follow sporting events, to be where the action is; yesterday’s papers report that voyeur tourism in Vietnam is on the rise. Voyeurism is of course deeply connected with the “real” experience that one dare not have oneself, or with the lost innocence of the real emotion that one cannot have any more. There are so few unspoiled private places any more—as the travel-agents used to say—short of other people’s graves.

But there is one. The psychedelic “trip,” being limited to the self, must remain more arcane even than moon-going—until, at least, we perfect even other ways of self-peeking than those electronic buggeries we now have. As a testimony that travel in perception is as possible as travel by miles, the drug-trip has its dignity—though one not unique to it, surely. It is versatile, since the individual can travel either alone, or alone in a group. One advantage of the group is that it has a special attraction for those who have trouble with such relationships, or are limitedly seeking them. Philosophically, the drug trip has deeply seductive roots in the experimental psychology of us all, as drug-taking has had down the ages. For what could be closer, more clairaudient to that classic dialogue of the observer and the observed? Finally, the drug-traveller can give the white feather at once to those who stand and wait for experience to happen; he coins it, courts it by a process for which the word “happening” is so apt, advancing like Stanley into the inner darkness of himself. And, so doing—at once actor and audience, novel and writer, poet and poem (like Swinburne, like Coleridge, see?)—whether or not he already is an artist, or wants to join up, he has imposed an extra handspring on the processes of art. Hasn’t he? For he has used the very stuff of himself creatively. And that’s new, isn’t it?

Having listed all the virtues of psychedelia, except the obvious one of escape, it now occurs to me that the process of ordinary thinking has most of these, and indeed travels by the very same routes and means. But it is so ordinary. As for Coleridge and Swinburne, one can no more measure what portion of an artist’s imagination is under stimulus, rather than native to it, than one can weigh the contribution of Dostoevski’s epilepsy to his. Except perhaps to remark that when a poet is also avowedly his poem, he is often at his worst. As an abstainer, it is even possible that I need feel no guilt at all.

For those who hope to make, psychedelic connection with the arts, where other means have failed, the estimate is more certain, and has nothing to do either with moral wrong or with health. Great artists have been thieves and drugtakers, have starved or grown rich, but neither thievery nor poverty, wealth nor poppyseed, makes artists—or any coterie of circumstance or even intellect, or other laying-on of hands. As a fashionable mystique among artists themselves, psychedelia is as phony and temporary—and as ancient—as any other. There is nothing more innately artistic about drug-taking, solo or in soiree, than any number of modes of conduct, given the proper aura and spice. Naked communal birdwatching, say—in front of the Plaza. So many delightful ways of enlarging the perceptions are possible. But no more artistic because artists may be doing them. For the artist, once delivered of his insight or apart from it, is vulnerable to the reality of the day, like any other man.

It has taken me a long time of sitting here in this room to see this. And it now occurs to me that I have been in such rooms, or ones very similar, before—often on greater occasion. I was here in the ’40s, when it proved guiltily impossible for me to transmute my young ache to help the needy into Communism’s doctrinaire. I was here once as a Jew, when, for all my will to build Zion in the name of the martyrs, I could not manage to see Zion as merely and only Israel: Every time I am tempted, either from ambition or solitude, to join a sympathetic or powerful coterie of artistic conviction, I am here—innumerable times. I am here every time I am tempted to give up my absurd autonomy, which any man may have: his reserved right to go on seeing the differences in the world, and to see it differently from the rest.

This can be saddening for both sides, joiners and non-, as it has been since the beginning of the world. Moreover, that sort of dissidence can come, not worthily, from intellectual choice, but merely from a nasty sense of one’s own boundaries—as any yearner who sees the front lines of so many fracases dissolve into the arrière-garde before he can get there, well knows. Ours, however is a generation trained to fear a mysticism which thinks democratically, in groups—which is what Fascism was. From there, we have gone on to mistrust group thinking altogether; at least some of us have. Often, the mysticisms of ordinary people are frightening, precisely because they have little or no spiritual or intellectual content. The psychedelic movement is unlikely to shake governments or affect too many more than those engaged in its tarantella. But mass-moods toward mindlessness are scary, at least in the Western world.

There is a certain snobbery, though, in insisting on the antennae of one’s own senses only. They afford no surety. After a certain age, surely, mayn’t the data of one’s senses be as decadent as any provided by C17H12N04—old-fashioned cocaine, once thought the height of psychedelic sophistication? And even when one is young these days, the hillside is no longer that dew-pearled; what does all that cleareyed gandering bring one except the stench of other peoples’ blood, or at best food already corrupted at the chemical root, desensitized sex, and bad air? To all this kind of argument there is no answer, not even to remark perhaps that nature corrupts and purifies itself faster than we can ever—for we are back at the duet of the observer and observed. It is a matter of temperament.

A charming couple had lunch with me yesterday. Just out of grad school, they are as conventional for the breed of the times as any I ever saw. Husband is a physicist, where the best butter is, but is also a fiend at the guitar. They speak proudly of a working-class background, but find the actual Czech parental pad in Yorkville as stifling for a really groovy home-visit to New York as any rebels fleeing Scarsdale. (They have made the ritual visit to Paris and are now perhaps a little more European than their parents—in the way of food. He loves it, better than haircuts, and she, neat as a phoebe, is already watching his weight.) They adore each other, obviously. They are wise enough to sense that “folkies”—the “life-pattern” they have somewhat subscribed to—are on the way out, but their alert sense of style will keep them “with it,” totally unaware that this merely means being one’s age, at that age. She has a degree in home economics, but need not be ashamed of it. For, of course (not too often, as a matter of modernation and economy), they are in the habit of turning on, and that one symbol makes everything right. In ten years I see them, succumbed, as they already have, to that greatest of drugs—convention. There’ll be another name for what they’ll be, and no opprobrium for it from me. But they’ll be what they are now. Squares.

They in turn are clearly disappointed in me. Introduced by a friend, they know better than to expect antics of all writers. They don’t mind the lunch being good. But they are astounded at my attitudes as expounded above, and coming from someone who has published in their Koran—a magazine so hip that they don’t have to read it. They have listened politely. They speak of the material that turning on might bring me. I agree that bizarre thoughts and perceptions, which thank God I have constantly, are a fine matrix for creation, but useless when the controls are absent. “I like to be there, you see. When I have them.” But their eyes are onyx; in fact, orthodox. They’re in that room. And, as usual, I’m outside the church. Later, our mutual friend reports their puzzlement. “You wore an apron, you dog.” I can play roles as well as any—and I did cook lunch. “They can’t understand it. You were a sweet lady, they said.”

Who of us knows for sure a revolutionary when he sees one, even if it is himself? I had my first experience with drugs at twenty, when an appendectomy went wrong. After days of dosage for the pain of having had intestines reeled out and put back again, and violent dope reactions of which I was totally unaware, I woke to an old harridan of a head nurse leaning over me. “Why didn’t you tell us,” she snapped, “that you were allergic to morphine?” Even my incision wanted to laugh, and answer, though I couldn’t, “How the hell should I know?” I had never had anything more vicious than aspirin in my life. “Trauma,” said the doctor at her side. “Next time it may be different.” And he was right. It is a question of the patient wishing to go under. Some rooms can be entered after all, at will.

That is why the thought of death so troubles me. If I am in pain, I shall certainly want painkillers. But a mere five-sense psyche is always untrustworthy. Its trouble is that it never wants to die. And it never confuses nirvana with experience. Or lethe with life. That’s hard going at the end, that is. So I see why people might want to study the ins and outs of turning on and turning off, to learn how to prepare themselves early. Otherwise, even at the bitter end, one might not know how to go gracefully under. One still might want to rise. And kick the stone.

(Thus spake who?—not reminded he was daily slave to a boiled egg.)

Certainly what I am slave to is clear. I still want to kick the stone.

I had never really looked back before, at my own literary history as entangled with others. I seemed to me just getting to be of an age to have a history, though not ready yet to embalm it in conventional autobiography. There have been eras, like the 1920s and 1930s, when certain writers have done that extraordinarily young—and some, having expended their stamina and lifescape, live the rest of their lives collecting their medals but without conclusive work. My era, elasticized by literacy, media and an ambivalent life-expectation—die older, if you dodge the bombs—seemed ever more hypnotized by the future. Art was at best a present seizure.

The past for some artists was entirely a dead lava-plain.

Oddly enough, their future looked just like it.

Ego art. We know we are the era of it. Naturally, our reasons are compassionate: in clouds of self-media—but only after the death of certain gods, and under continuous war—we take on ourselves, as the supreme burden. Our century began, after all, with the great re-entry of Self into art. … Eras, before they decline, exaggerate. Ego art occurs when that great art-of-the-self becomes a trade.

A writer is expected to use his ego like a great probe, suffering diagnostically to record the world. He always expected to, but now he must do it by convention. The “world” in turn no longer feels itself reportable in third person, or in imaginative art: everything must be first-person in order to be believed. Imagination as willed fantasy, or fantasy wilfully shaped, is therefore false: the “conscious” artist must fall back before the scrupuously accidental action-painting of “life.” Reviewers cannot read novels which present themselves as more than this or different from it, and novelists, quick to catch the blight, cannot write them. The suspension of disbelief is willing no longer. A writer must be his own character, so thinly veiled that we know. Fyodor Dostoevski—give him his full name—can still be his underground man, but how can one Dostoevski be Raskolnikov? Was he ever? Satire, always closer to the critical faculty, is still reputable. But once the imagination shaking free of the ego-possible, strays past “It really happened to me” into those mysteries which lie beyond, or once the writer declares his intent to make a world that lies beyond, made perhaps of third-person-reported pysches, or not clearly based on his journalistic ego—then he has crossed the Styx, into the world of ghosts. The facts are against him. The critical faculty—in novelist as well as critic—coaxes us to mistrust what cannot be explained or has not been literally lived, and to deny that powerful art is made of it. Non-ego art is still here, as it has always been. But speaking up for it, to those for whom the journalistic “I” is now the sole category of literary belief, is like trying to describe what even blind men can see with their eyes closed, to a very visual elephant.

Modes of writing really have very little to do with the quarrel. “Fiction” and “non-fiction” are magazine words or workshop ones, indicating only as always that business is perfectly capable of influencing art. The real bite is not between novels and history, or journalism and novels, or even between confessional and “constructed” art. (Any more than that there exists a real quarrel between poetry and prose—instead of a teasing, Constantly changing, pingpong difference.) All are sides of the writer-animal, evoked as the spirit moves us. Or as the battle does. Or as the wind turns. The real tussle—paradise lost, hell regained—is between the orphic and the didactic poles in all of us. Literature is all the gradations between. Yes—all.

Time was when the novel, that bastard upstart, was more clearly a poor fictive thing, and belles lettres—always doing what it could for other forms—more surely sublime. As almost always, the lettrists are still in power, and as always have to be reassured of it. For though men of letters start out from interest in the conduct of values, the conduct of their lives is often such as to persuade us—and even themselves—that power is what they are primarily interested in. The change in them is—that the lettrists of today, or critics once pur et simple, will do anything to keep from being genteelly called belles. They, learn their tough stance, of course, from the novelist.

The old New Critics, less genteel than predecessors like Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, were still formally on the side of us angels, the pur et simple writers—although the effect of their honest dissections was usually to show that an angel is a winged creature who cannot walk. Men like Van Wyck Brooks went on to explore their own nervous crises as artists did—and men of letters often have, or wrote their critical work under the assumption that this too was art. Edmund Wilson, with the sincerest flattery, now and then wrote “imaginative” books. Why not? A critic attempting a work of imaginative art is only as assumptive as a writer attempting literary criticism. Each may be assuming that he can have or get the best of both sides. Or each may be freely reveling in the continuum that is literature. In which writers might more keenly remember that the limits of a critic’s generosity show up as quick as those of his intelligence. And critics might be warned that imagination never conceals what you are. And is most nakedly what you are. What is required of either of us is a soule—though soul is welcome too.

Today’s men of letters want that as much as ever; only the form of their desire is different. As usual they copy those who, in the bitter nature of things, precede them by writing the books on which their own must wait. Today’s lettrist can’t be belle, not only because the world isn’t, but because the writers aren’t, anymore. He wants to be an ugly lettrist—a true-blue plug-ugly whom nobody gets to imagine, mind you, but himself. Where, if he talks about himself instead of books, as the critic does so much of nowadays, it is with a lash aspiring to Swift’s and a whine he hopes is Rousseau. Again, he gets this harsh-tender stance on himself from the novelist. On whose attitudes he must wait, before he can react, shadow-box, kill—perform. The meateater smells of his meat. Often tainted with the “put up your dukes!” reverse romanticisms of the day (as in Making It, where a sensibility as conscious as any maiden’s becomes an insensitive ego sensitively recording). He craves the same wounds as the “imaginative” artist, given and taken in the same ring. Or the self-inflicted ones. Particularly those. So, the critic too, ends up writing ego art. He has to tell you about his psyche before he can render his judgments. Often it is very interesting—because psyches are.

But when he gets around to the books again, to that other-directed artist to whose north pole he is south—watch this jolie laide very carefully. He himself has claimed the free man’s heady right to an obsession with his own life; now, for the novelist, he may stipulate it. He mistrusts the objectivity of another man’s imagination, on the same terms as he mistrusts the objectivity of his own intelligence—nothing will convince him that these objectivities are not the same. So, ten to one, he will be telling you what the imagination can’t do anymore. He never sees it as the other writer sometimes does—illimitable, grossly and gloriously unfactual. To him, the nonreal is never a true source. Artists must no longer invent. Novelists must report only their own dilemmas, in the appropriate areas, ages and sex of their own true lives, otherwise he can’t believe it—he won’t. Twain is not Huck; Anna Karenina is not Leo Tolstoi. It’s over. And of course it is. For this psyche is projecting. It is timid about imagining imagination. People who have to wait around for other people’s often are.

Yes, watch the ugly man of letters. How he craves imagination’s risks!

And watch me. How sometimes I, at the other pole, I crave his.

In school and early childhood, fantasy is sometimes coddled, but the didactic is what we are urged to trust. Early on, I ran from it, as from what teachers and other crocodiles fed on only to regurgitate a dead corpus of that literature which I had to find out for myself later was still painfully alive. Fantasy, imagination, whatever you called it, a great free river of possibility in language, was what you could trust. Once you learned to swim and mull there, life and feeling accreted to it. From its dark shallows came those anode-cathode associative bounds, those sudden firm ledges of insight, of something put into the world that had perhaps never been there before. A small babe of vision might be made. After a while, I never read critical comments any more; their comparable river ran so sandy and thin. Critique was a game that I had played at in college, trifled with as a possible vocation, and done too wildly well at: “You certainly sling the King’s English—but what is this you say!” I was too young to confess that the only authority for it was myself. Or others like me but better at it. Even later, I would always rather read what I still tend to think of as the primary manuscripts. And if confined to hard choice—rather write them.

What I know now is that one need not make it a hard and separate choice—indeed one cannot. Slowly, all those categories the crocodiles put in me were one after the other to melt away. Grudgingly, I would see that in the greatest of writers, the fantastic and the didactic combine. (Not always, surely, in the first person singular, or any of its facsimiles. Sometimes in a wildly differing array of personae, not all of whom could possibly be her or him.)

For if criticism doesn’t precede writers but follows them (never a popular theory with those “influential” reviewers, who prefer to project a more innocent version of their influence), then writers do not consciously or collectively know the change that is coming upon them, at the time. And prefer not to. Talk can kill verbal art. That blind orphic impulse wants not to be phrased, but to phrase.

But one inescapable way of learning what literary change is, is to live through one. Unconsciously.

Category, I can tell you, is the only real crocodile.

In 1948, it was astonishingly true that the reigning ideal of the “proper” short story—not only at The New Yorker, which published my first few, but generally in America—was the absolute reversal of what I have called ego-art. Author should not appear. A story, a novel, possibly even a poem, was designed—should be—to drop from a hand which was nowhere, as a Ding an sich, a globe maybe ready to burst inside the reader from its own hot internal pressures, but meanwhile wholly contained, even coolly so, by only its own symbolic skin. Later, when I was more knowing if not wiser, I would term this method “the oblique.” It is one of the great modes of art, and at first I was writing in it, but I didn’t know that. The one supernal fact about any mode of art is that it isn’t the only one—but I didn’t know that either. (Not consciously, though an inner tug was soon to move me). At this time, I knew no writers, only a couple of very restrained editors whom I saw rarely, in fact almost nobody who “talked books,” and this isolation was to continue for some time. Further, I had read almost nothing of the “modern” short story, American or otherwise. I hadn’t known I was going to write any, for one thing, and even if so, hadn’t the temperament for research. Even then I was perhaps self-protectively reading books strangely unallied with what I was doing, and always books a little behind or tangential to “current” ones—a habit that has persisted and one I often suspect other writers of. It keeps you out of the collective conscious.

First influences, they say, are always the deepest. Well—for a time. Back in high school, I had read much on my own among the Russians, but only the novels were important to me. Chekhov I absorbed silently along with the rest, but in college, where I found him in the curriculum, I immediately backed away. I had a tendency to back away from whatever was touted there. James (except for Daisy Miller) was not yet studied there. Sometimes I touted him (and other stumbled-upon oddities like Gide and Colette) to them. But at home, much earlier than any of this, what I remember is the thumbed small book of Hawthorne’s stories, and one of Flaubert’s (containing “A Simple Heart,” “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaler” and “Herodias”) which I still have. Also Wilde’s Fairy Tales (I knew “The Nightingale and the Rose” was a sexual dream though I didn’t know of sex yet), some Jewish Publication Society folklore where the one-level characters never grew, so rather bored me, but I would read anything—and a corner of tattered paper Nick Carters, where I much lived.

Make what one can of it. The likely truth is that any actual influences were outside “the short story” entirely: in the Bible (mostly Ecclesiastes and the Prophets), whose rhetoric I was never to recover from—and a complete set of Thackeray, read and re-read by the age of ten, in which I was quite as happy with “The Yellow-plush Papers” as with Vanity Fair. Thackeray keeps appearing in his own pages, remember? (Always welcome too, except when he quoted Greek.) And the Bible, though pithy, keeps saying what it thinks.

This was soon to cause differences of opinion between me and The New Yorker, the causes of which neither of us really knew. On my side it was not yet opinion at all. I had a rhetoric not always calm, though it did tend to collect. At the ends of stories. Stories? When I wrote them, I wanted to end them, and often in a burst did so. At the time this was felt to be unsuitable. Why? Because in her way, though still so anonymously, author did appear. I had violated the oblique, as I was increasingly to do. (To the point of finally breaking away into other forms, novel to essay, where there was more natural space for it.) Twice, in two of the earliest stories, editorial suggestion (which, apart from the fact-questioning done by the checkers, was never concrete, always delicate, rather like a maitre in an atelier flicking with his pointer a passage in the nude drawing, here, there, which had not quite fulfilled itself) got better endings out of me than I had first put there. (Once, with the first story written, “A Box of Ginger,” where I took a corny sentence out and felt much the better for it. And once, with “The Watchers,” justifiably rejected for not being quite finished, where, after some months’ mulling I found the right sentence—while looking into the toilet as a matter of fact—and put it in.)

But with “A Wreath for Miss Totten,” a story bracketed in two paragraphs, opening and concluding, which are quite plainly both rhetorical and moral observation (shoot the oblique from both sides), when it was flatly suggested that these be removed, though I was of course otherwise “free to send the story elsewhere”—I sent it. Not merely because I knew that the story, unbracketed, thereby fitted nicely into these memoirs-of-a-memorable-old-character which are a New Yorker genre. Something else in me, an instinct not yet formulated, lurked beyond that. Several stories on, with In the Absence of Angels, there was to be another controversy, this time in a way political. It was the time of the first SHELTER signs in public buildings, when New York City feared Russian bombing (Collier’s printed an entire issue devoted to a mythical such bombing). My story (of Westchester under totalitarian rule), though already much praised “at the office” was finally regretfully rejected on the grounds that the magazine wished to do nothing to contribute to that fear. I replied with a letter of protest suggesting the magazine’s obligation to print what it had on all other grounds highly praised. Later, on telling an editor there that I was abashed over the letter (I am always abashed, later) he replied, “That letter did you no harm.” And indeed the story was later printed, the delay and soul-searching on their part (or on Harold Ross’s part as I was told it was) being in a way a credit to their still admirably sustained conviction that the pen is or can be—a sword. I agreed with them. During our correspondence—for the total of nine stories they ultimately printed there was quite a lot of it—I several times wrote to tell them so. These early statements were my first letters of indignation. The burden of them was “It has to be my sword.”

I felt pretty shaky about it. It seemed that I would have to do—what I had to do. In whatever guise—some of which I am not yet sure of—whenever author wanted to appear, author would. But I wasn’t at all sure I had the figure for it—as a dancer, I knew that those girls who didn’t, were often the ones most willing to strip. Later still, I would often wonder how some editors could be so knowing, why they never were as shaky as me. Simple. They don’t appear.

By which a writer meant—in what he writes. Which then meant—no commentary of any kind. Nothing on literature, neither of the world or one’s contemporaries, and no comment on one’s own work—above all nothing on that. In the American convention of the time (to which, from an inclination to privacy that still persists, I inarticulately subscribed to without knowing it) “author” like his works remained oblique. He had almost a responsibility to, which went far deeper than the mere preservation of a private life, or a dislike of public “personal” appearances. Superficially among lesser writers, the attitude may have had to do with snob dignities. Going down or out to the litry hustings, they surmised must indeed be a descent. For the “best” writers, hunted in picpost flashes, or traced in gingerly answers to news interviews, still were aloof. Except when acquiring Nobel prizes, they kept their thoughts on literature—and on life—to themselves.

There were good reasons for this, practically and psychologically. Even on the eastern seaboard, American literary life couldn’t concentrate as it does in Britain and France; the distances between writers, in backgrounds as well as miles, were often vast. Often, and most poignantly before the 1950s, American artists had gone to those countries half for art maybe, but also to meet those semblables, themselves. At home, for discussion companionship a writer had a choice of small letter-united friendships, or perhaps a provincial group (agrarian or not) attached by ethnic origin or to a “little” review, or else a social life essentially unserious, ranging from the New York martini, to the leftovers of Boston tea.

But paramount; in the realms of opinion, the American writer per se, had long since lost his supreme authority or relegated it. In the academy the critics cluster, in the reviews they bluster; to them now belong the barricades. Except for James, a special case, American writers had never much had an authority in the European tradition of a Goethe or Gide, or of those dozens of minor writers who by aristocratic right would both formulate over the corpus of literature and create it. Or of those like Lawrence, who were savagely and openly anti-critical. When the American writer finally appeared to explain or defend himself, or to express judgments he had perhaps been nourished by, it would more often be in posthumous letters like Hart Crane’s, or post-hoc crackups, or in memoirs which were the pre-death flare sent up to show that his work and his quarrels were done. Now and then, in interview, to a younger person or in a foreign country, a Hemingway or a Faulkner unbent. But characteristically they hoarded their mana, like men who had wiser uses for it.

A writer may well mistrust literary companionship. Talk is bloody hemophiliac. The orphic in us is a pulse; the didactic is a code and a restraint. All work involves pre-judgments too delicate for aeration perhaps, or which codify best of themselves. Gestation goes on best in the dark. When it is over, you are already gathering energy for the next, in the usual anxiety over what you can’t do, arrogance over what you can. It is then, idle and meditating, that an urge to write about books may arise. An intent one, gaze bent on the dark coil that makes books.

The counter-urge—not to spill the seed; not to expend the love—is one of the strongest I know. And comes from the same fear—of not having enough. Enough energy and time (a day’s writing is a day) and enough fertility for both art and analysis. Yet, sometimes, one has the, wild urge, need, to assess or correct the critical attitudes of the day—which almost certainly are not one’s own. Why bother?—they never will be. I suppose that is why.

Professionally, in America, you ran a risk. Since you were not an equal-opportunity critic, having neither the lingo nor the connections, you could not really be talking to them, about literary concerns. It would be assumed you were really talking to reviewers, about your own concerns. You could earn equal time, of course, by constantly writing reviews yourself and joining in all the litry cabals, on the principle of the partygoer who by accepting all invitations, both insures himself against gossip behind his back, and makes it known he’s been asked. If you don’t want to be an underdog of literature, hadn’t you better set yourself up as the watchdog of it? I have heard many writers shrewdly take this into account. There was of course the chance, especially if you had never before spoken up about books, yours or other peoples, that attention might be paid because of the oddity of it, and those who respect your work might respect your views. Never of course engage with reviewers on any score—and not merely because of these obvious revenges—silence, or the last-word slash. Even if you respected a reviewer, and he you, it was dangerous. The American gap was still too wide for it. If you respected yourself, you would know enough to keep your pose arcane. You might not think you were lowering yourself by speaking publicly to him. He would.

That hasn’t much changed since the ’50s. Slowly, other author obliquities which also had nothing to do with literature itself, did seem to be giving way. Media has had much to do with it. University teaching has had more. With a press and a pulpit, many a silent writer has learned to talk—and talk always enlarges itself. The habit of the lectern instills the habit of knowing. The habit of writing instills the habit of finding out. As in my own way I was enveloped in the usual media-clouds and university respectabilities, I sometimes knelt inwardly, praying to remember the difference.

Meanwhile, for me and others, a categorical silence familiarly imposed on short-story writers was breaking down—as it could not help but do. Perhaps because we were in a short-story renaissance, it was felt that writers of them should not—in fact could not—turn into novelists. When the novels did come on, good or bad, it was always keenly observed that they were “not the same,” although the one sure difference between the two forms—length—insures that they can never be the same. Looking back it is clear that stories were getting longer everywhere; writers were tiring of the short stint. On my own side, almost at once I felt I had finished with the “Hester” stories, typically a young writer’s autobiographical material which I no longer wanted to stay in, but also the “environment” I was told The New Yorker had bought me for, never having seen it “done” before. For me it was merely my childhood; I felt no obligation to stay in it. Already stories had shifted subject—and were getting longer. It felt like Alice, I must say, or adolescence—gawky skeleton enlarging, qualifications crowding in on childhood’s gospel, and in the half-poemed cherub’s enclosure that so many stories of the time stayed in, the long gaunt boots of another kind of prose. (By 1953, I would begin the novel False Entry, whose related novel, The New Yorkers, written years after, would finally return in part to that never-since-used environment, now altogether transfused out of the autobiographical.)

Paradoxically, stories were having to be defended—were they really as good as novels?—meaning were they as important on the literary scale, and in a Times interview I was asked that. My answer was much what it would be now, “Whose scale?” As another complication, many of the best story-writers of the day were women, and this was seen as a sign of special affinity between the form and the sex, rather than as part of the greater intrusion of women into general literature. Actually, once again the real truths went deeper. (Deeper even than sex, which is pretty far, but a distance writers are used to.) … Why list the old false imperatives though, if you never believed in them? Because you didn’t know that, at the time.

All over, in the same way that scientific “discoveries ignite simultaneously half across the globe from each other, writers were not merely going from short forms to long, which they classically do; they were getting damned tired of the oblique. Which had been perhaps a rather specifically American reaction to rambling Victorian morality, had never been as tightly and totally the thing in European writers anyway, and was now over. From then on, author would appear on his pages in that capacity when and where he chose, commentating on absolutely everything. And stories in this style, soon in its turn to become a category, would appear in the best magazines.

For there were other sides to the explosion, far more important ones—political and sexual revolutions, and the last throbs of the Freudian one. What one must say ultimately has the greater effect on how one says it. And should. When numbers of writers begin to think the same about the world, then a literary tradition is made without their ever having corresponded or met—and one not really based on expressional modes. Explaining why is like answering the question, “Why I had the baby,” and of about the same use—it makes ya think. The material of the world—which precedes art—was forcing us all to be more dogmatic, open, shrill at any cost, and committedly personal. We had to give the picture of our own pain. In the name of all of it. Art for art’s sake? Ah, that was an ivory tower, belonging to Anonymous.

Well, here we are not so many years later, and in the name of either world or personal pain, a great many writers have since appeared both on the platformed page and in the world publicly, as authors who are themselves continuously. And on the page, in all guises and pronouns—:as “he,” “she,” “you,” “we,” and even “they”—as long as it is understood that’ these are all surrogates for the most popular pronoun, the out-and-out confessional “I.” “Fiction” and “non-fiction” (those words made of plastic elastic) now do not merely combine. Nor yet see themselves as inter-mirrored in any of the ways that normally have confounded philosophers. The only fiction now worth, writing is from fact. This has made all the difference.

A reader-critic must now be able to feel that any of the “old” pronoun approaches to experience really are masks for the literal “I” of the writer. The experiences described must have happened, or be conceivably happenable—to him. So why bother with those other approaches, which no longer seem to work anyway? (As indeed they don’t, under such an assumption, since they are avenues out from the solipsistic world, not toward it.) Since they no longer seem worth doing, why bother with “fiction” at all?

Why indeed? This is segregated art, with all the limits of art wherever artists are so confined—this time to their own autobiography: to black-white, male-female, national, ethnic, country-city writing, to the end that only a pup called Rover can truly tell you about Lincoln’s doctor’s dog. The “Active” world, whatever that is, must never sound imagined beyond the life-mobility of the author. The story or novel, to be living, whatever that now is, must never be—oblique. It must spurt, hot and unwilled, uncorrected and undirected by art (which is only a fake word for artfulness)—the real red-ink blood of a poet. Into your honest hand. You’ve got the real thing now. (Don’t ask how he got it to a publisher.) The burden of belief a reader once had to carry is lifted. You don’t any longer have to be guilty of that lie, imagination. Know what? You’re not vicarious any more!

This is the willing suspension of our disbelief now.

And if the novel (whatever that is) won’t do that for you in that way, or begins to bore you at it—then it is soon to be very dead. So it will be. That way will be. It is one of the great modes of art, but it isn’t the only one. Segregation, in art as any where, is a straight road to escape. For a time. Look back on how, in painting, the human body, once individualized, canonized, was finally impressionized out of all personality. And now, unerringly, returns. The human figurative always does. And in any art, it also knows how to hide. The novelist (whatever that is) is also and always has been a quondam-diarist, proto-historian, part-time pundit, pseudo-dramatist, and putative poet—he eats roles. And frequently smells of them. He as often wants to conceal himself in his work as to reveal. Give him the wide-open chance to be himself on a platter and he may take this as his right; compel it and he will as soon chuck it back at you, in exchange for the delights of being a hunted, wanted man, and for the sheer professional practice of peering at you from some other bunghole.

What is the fictive world? Does a fact, the moment it is phrased, start to be imaginary? Does the imagined earn reality through very language? Where, on the street of shadowboxes that is now our life, is the non-fictive world? Can you and I tell each other sometime? Don’t bore me, I’ll bore you. I’ll tell you about I.

I was well used to finding out in my books what I dreamed of the world. Slowly, at another point of the pen, I began to find out what I thought of it. At times it was almost as if those old philosophical divisions, in the anatomie of our melancholy intelligence, were true. There were two rivers in me, two pens that dipped in these, very separate and entirely alternate. The connection between them—for there is one—could give a critic no cheer. A writer’s critical ideas were always preceded by his books. (I don’t do as I say. I say later what I can then see I hoped to do.) Special pleading? Of course. A writer would be mad not to. He has an obligation to keep the field free, always to enter it against those who knew too well how to do precisely what. Generalized pleading, toward a system, was for the critique, and not his affair.

There’s peril in it—in that second pen. I have never got over my fear of it. Too much logic destroys the image, which is a fusion of the vague. Imagination had its own precisions, which a habit of critical thought could blunt. There is a certain amount of hermetic air around us at the beginning of things; once carved into attitudes, could it ever return to the nobility of an emptiness waiting to be made?

Long ago, describing how a story began, I said, “One wants to show this thing. One feels a clean … strong … almost anger, that this half-visible thing is not yet known. It’s a paranoia toward, not against. One has seen. One must rescue it.” A story, a poem, a novel was a rescue of life, a muckraking of it, or even a letter of indignation—to one’s friends. Criticism still seemed to me more like a lettre de cachet, meant for the enemy, which might turn out to be mine. I might end up outside the beloved prison, looking in.

At the same time the conscious feeds the unconscious; that stream is not always one-way. The creative in us (I knew we would come to it) is not always the hothead part of a writer, the critic in us not always the objective and willed. Each passes through the sieve of the other. Outside in the world, wars between the two come less from the critic’s secular power than from his assumption that he is there to instruct. When he loses his cool, dropping into the ego-explanation, the life justifications that afflict other writers, I find that encouraging. It is a sign that, at his pole of literature, he is aware that no man can be its procurator; each man may add to it.

But when I write with the second pen, I still think of it as ego-art.

Once, wandering into a round-table conference, I came upon a rising young American critic who was addressing a group of European writers. “Oh, h’lo,” he said over his shoulder, when the rest of us entered, and went on: “We—” he said, and at that pace, “—who are working in literature—” I stood behind him, uncredentialled and feeling it. He sat. Who was working in literature, dammit? Suddenly one of the others at the table, not a critic either (the blessed Richard Hughes as a matter of fact) winked at me. It was better to be uncredentialled in that way. Better to stand behind.

And once, I was taken down in the bowels of the British Museum, where by law a copy of every piece of printed matter originating in England, broadside to ballyhoo, had to be kept. Libraries all over the world were choking on their own goods, and reaching for the microfilm. Yet as I stood there, it seemed to me that I could hear the huge, rosicrucian murmur of language reincarnating itself in the old habit; what was Cheapside down here would someday be taken into a poem upstairs.

Literature is a continuum. We can only continue it.

I thought so. I dreamed it.

Am I coming to the end, for me, of one more kind of expression? In my other work, this displacement process has become a familiar, one. Though I don’t want to investigate why I write what when, in fact want to be the last to know consciously, I can’t help an awareness as innate as any body-rhythm, that after a long or massive and perhaps “irregular” piece of work, I will want to do something “small and finished,” or that after some concentration on the “inhuman” or metaphysical, I will want most to “get back to people.” Or that after work in which I have tried most of all to invest the ordinary with strangeness, I may find myself stretching toward the reverse. Each time, the feeling, physical and plastic, is that I break the mold in the act of making it, leaving it behind me. (Just as, nearing the end of this book’s auto-biology, I already know that if someday I should have a further span of life to report on, biographing that in this way will no longer be possible.)

The sensation of leaving, dependent of course on one’s private admission that one has soared a few feet up, and not too badly—is rather as if one has been an eagle-for-a-day in a certain vicinity, and is now bored with eagledom in that neighborhood. I am able to get away, perhaps, because each piece of work, like any living organism—which for the time being it is to me, somewhere contains the seed of the next.

Anti-criticism, I begin to find, won’t remain fixed for me either. At first, as a squib tossed out to set fire to some too-fat-and-fancy bottoms, it can progress to avuncular chat, dangerous though it is for the writer to be sage uncle rather than fresh green nephew. But after two or three such anti-rounds, even anti-criticism has to be something more.

Under the working title In Full View Of The City (which I sometimes wish I had kept) I had just done a long novel, in some ways set in a “real” New York I thought I remembered. I labored for that realism, not only to capture a period now gone, which I had in part inhabited, but also because the people in the book, the two principal women especially, were thus set off in their own strangeness—in its turn that very human oddness which the “realistic” side of any environment tends to create.

Behind these forces within the book, there was another influence I had never worked under before. This book, The New Yorkers, was in a sense a sequel to my first novel, False Entry, though actually prior to it in time sequence. Since either one could be read alone, before or after the other, their permanent intersection lay somewhere in space—in the reader’s mind after he had read both. Both were intensely concerned with the notion of “place.” For my generation, changes in that concept had become the number-one trauma, outdistancing even the touted changes in our concept of the psyche, secondary only to the traumatic looming of death itself, personal or racial—and in some ways allied to both.

In the earlier book, “the real place” was that romantic, metaphysical or spiritual one we all yearn for, often confusing or combining it with other elsewheres seemingly in situ—notably “time.” The later book was concerned with that actual place which is so much where we are that where treated in the novel it does better to be more real than real. In the first book’s climate—one essentially still prevailing when I appeared in the world—the spaces between rich and poor, grandee and dressmaker’s boy, England and America, were still fixed enough for encounters between the two poles of social class to have an exotic flavor—as for North and South, I remember thinking that its “Knights of the Midnight Mystery” (drawn from actual Ku Klux Klan records still in force when I wrote) belonged as much to the gothic novel as to mine.

The second book explored that class where the novel is said to have begun—the middle. Not so much in its social relations as in its dreams and textures—to outsiders always furnished to the nth, and full of its own darkness. Almost unconsciously, I used everything my class had accumulated in its carpetbagger progress and crisscross realms of perception—because I too had them, in our mutual background.

Here in my book were the talk-thought marathons of the novels our youth had admired, the chapter alternations our shared reading had been fed on, plus one of those culminating dinner-scenes in which everybody arrives (an integral part of middle-class life in any time) and two of those long monologues which novelists from Richardson to Joyce have unerringly given to women characters—perhaps in recognition that free association and internal monologue are part of the essentially feminine.

As always with me, the style or form had aped its material, or inflected with it. This time, I seemed to have made the novel’s ontogeny—where it and its people were “now”—echo their joint phylogenetic history—what both they and the novel in general had come through, to be what they were. This is what living people do every day, so acquiring a more than present-day density. And this is “where” the book was set.

Taken together, the two books were in their way a recapitulation of what the American “mind” of my time had come through. Afterwards, I began to think about that. Because, once again, I was leaving.

That year, in a hired hall somewhere, or maybe the “Y,” three or four writers got together and more or less reported the death of the novel. A lot of people paid to hear. I didn’t go, because I already knew about it, but I read the account the next morning. What these sighing Alexanders had said was that “modern times” wasn’t good for novel-making. They were right, of course. Modern times never are.

If a writer sees himself too regularly as an inhabitant of this, he may well be in trouble. An Era is such a dull place for a book to be. Once, when I told a “serious” novelist he had a talent for the comic he oughtn’t deny, he took it as a put-down. “I want to make a serious impact on my times.” He and I clearly differed on what comedy was, but still I was awe-struck. He sighted “the times” along the barrel of his .22—bang! Meanwhile I was up to my neck in it—it was having such an impact on me.

Modern times is a bad place for seeing the great metaphors that all art must have. In the mixed media that modernity always inhabits, God is often very possibly dead, but the arts are surely. They are so because they form part of the tangible godhead of that daily life which all men, including artists, are trained to see small. There, in the slim incarnation of our lives as we can see them now, painting is always on its last pop cycle, and music, shorn of the “ancient” melodies, is silent. Even the past is never as rigid as modernity is. For, looking back, we can see without pain that art is fluid, or even celebrate how art has united with document. But for today, the arts are always catatonic—fixed. This comes about because the document of our own time affrights us all. And the idea that art must be document, or should be, or will be—cuts at the very wrist of the artist, as his hand grips what it can, midstream.

A novel is a kind of enclosure. So of course is a poem, a watercolor, a fugue. But the novel, whether it maps by way of people or dream, or in the very essence of the void, still sets itself, up as taking place somewhere within the human stockade. So, in effect it always takes place within that prison. It makes a place for itself there, sometimes cosmic or international, sometimes parochial, in a street or a town or a childhood—or in the great savannahs of a single mind. But always, the novel in some sense will tell us about a place, actual or metaphysical. For the novel, place is the devouring unity. The nature of the novel is to tell us what the nature of some part of the prison is.

“And it was so much easier, wasn’t it,” you hear people say, “when the enclosures were there for all to see—and almost certain to be strictly regional. When the world had useful boundaries, never seeing itself too large or too small—look at Barchester! While look at us—fragmented moonborne, yet at the same time colonized to the inch, tape-recorded in every known Babelese, and shhh, worst of all, on camera, down to the very declivities of our newly-to-be-exchanged worlds—or hearts.” I think rather that the people of an era never really see themselves as living in those neat amphitheatres which art or history will later assign. Where are we to find again the tidy Barchester of yore? In the reminder that Trollope—a man of many other milieus by the way—gave us it.

In the nineteenth century, a novelist expected to depend on the dignity of a literal setting, often an agreed-upon reality gained from what men already knew of such a habitat—from which starting-place he might then go on. The degree to which he could depart from it into further recesses or heights, would determine the greatness of his work, and this is what keeps great novels accessible. Agreed-upon reality never stays the same. Places disappear. But in time, a great novel sheds its literal place, whatever that may be, for an eternal one.

To that modernity of the moment—us—it is the concept of place itself which has most altered. Will we ourselves be magnificent in all those spaces that are to be—or only ever more cramped back into what we miserably are? In literature, has even the most traditionalist sense of a particular place long been swamped by those other unities, action and time? What’s going to go next? For the world and the novel, what is “place” now?

I guess we see clearest what it no longer is. As late as 1932, there was another English novelist in the tradition of Bronte, Winifred Holtby. Her much praised South Riding could subtitle itself An English Landscape and mean it, in the old exhaustive way from manorhouse to councilhall, squire to alderman. Reading it now, one suspects that for many in its own time it was already déja vu. For by then, the concepts of place and place-time had so altered that novelists either were affected, or had already helped to alter them. For all men, the old Aristotelian unities were shaken forevermore—or again. By 1930, Robert Musil had already published The Man Without Qualities, where a 1913 Vienna vibrated with all the interpenetrations of a “modern” city, and chapters had headings like “If there is such a thing as a sense of reality …,” or “Which remarkably does not get us anywhere.” Proust had written. Joyce had given us his Dublin of the mind, and Kafka had given us a paralyzed geography in which man stood on the pinpoint of himself. Some of this had already been done before—some always has. But for the art of the future, and the man—the psyche was to be the recognized “place” now.

So, it’s come about that literal place-reality in the novel can no longer impose the same dignity or force. We can neither read nor write about it solely in the old way, without that unalterable flash of déjà vu. New enclosures, long since sighted by literature, make this impossible. And these in time become the new convention, as we have it now: “Better to ignore place altogether now. Or make it metaphysical.” For of course, a convention is an either-or proposition. It never lets you do both.

And in the American novel, the dilemma has been particularly sharp. For we were still lagging in the pioneer’s lively enthusiasm for real places, new ones, and for that “American experience” so rooted in them. No one wished to annihilate this, or could. What happened was simpler. Certain places, mostly urban, became proper literary; “modern” novels could take place there without fear of ridicule, or damwell had to. The rest of the country could go back to pulp, and damnear did. The West went into the westerns. The South redeemed itself, as the special home of our guilt. The small town disappeared down a trap-door marked Babbitt. And nobody heard tell anymore of the farm. Not in high places. And so arose a new American literary convention, of unparalleled naiveté.

A “regional” novelist was now a man born in the sticks and doomed to write about it, under rhythmically weathered titles: Hardscrabble Sky, A Light Sweat Over the Carolinas, this to let the reader know that the book’s prostitutes would come from the fields and there would be no highclass restaurants. Metropolitan novels meanwhile, even if bad were never regional. The provinces had too much parvenu respect for the city, and the city agreed with them. Across the nation, the whole literary push had been toward the cities—as in Dreiser, whose novels were saved by that fact. Or toward Europe—for experience of which Cather, Anderson and Wescott could be condescended to, and Hemingway praised, for having once again (after Wharton and James) brought Europe back to us. For thirty years, literature rushed east, and many writers sank there, in all the artificialities that a buried nativity can become. But, as with any convention, all writers have been affected by it. For, if “rural” now meant “rube” forever, the city now became the very citadel and symbol of Nowhere.

It has been several other clichés in its time. Once, as in Dos Passos, it was the Great Collage. Before that, the abattoir, and the “teeming poor.” Or in a later frivolous era, the Penthouse. For the real American interest is in change, and the city is the place that changes most, and most “modernly.” In time, the city has become the best place for an American novel to be, since all psyches of any importance are presumed to be there. At last it has escaped the old dilemma of place altogether, by becoming the existential Place. Totally surreal, of course, never parochial; the absolutist novel cannot be both. Personae in the novels of this type wear their eyeballs on stalks and float down nameless avenues, like paranoid balloons. The Action: Unisex in Nighttown. Probable Title: a single symbol, maybe &, or $. And, presto, a new cliché, of sorts. Natives of the city will once again recognize an old one: The City—by an author who comes from somewhere else.

A writer’s region is what he makes it, every time. Great novels will not be impeded by the presence of cows there. And the absence of them, or the presence of pavement, has never kept great urban novelists from a kind of rural concentration. Dickens, Musil, Biely, Proust—are all great regionalists of a city kind. London, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris all “live” in their pages, through people who if written of elsewhere would not be as they are. Looking back to those eras, the perfumes and stinks, and the ecology, are all clear to us now. The people live in the scenery of those cities, and the city now lives in the people, tangentially, through their eyes and minds, or as in Biely, like a hero itself in the wake of the supernumeraries, its streets following like waves the little people it makes flotsam of. Simple. Yet for our times, our own times always, what a balancing! For a novel at best is never a historical or descriptive thesis, but a sub-news or a supra-news of the world, which all but drags the novelist down, or up and out with it. The novel is rescued life.

What a novelist must trust to is that continuity exists somewhere, somehow to be seen, perhaps as a useful terror strikes his heart. Casting ahead, in order to see change in the name of intellectual duty, will not help me. Nor will going back—to such as West Egg or Wessex or Yoknapatawpha; these and their kind hang like mosques made for once only, above their own documents. The novel never goes back in that sense, just as it never leaves the documents as they were. After seeing an enclosure, which means making one, a writer may then choose to leave it, as a philosopher leaves a fully expressed idea. Or he may elect to spend his writing life there. But except as a reader, another writer will not be able to accompany him.

So, every age is a sighing Alexander—how can there possibly be more than this? Yet every decade brings in more documents. Ours asks the literary artist in particular to shiver and to bow before these—forgetting that the “facts” of the past are often very much what art has made of them. Sometimes, one is tempted to say that all art of any kind is an attempt to make the unimaginative imagine—imagination.

And there’s no perfect time for it—except now. “Modern times” sees itself as the time of the breaking up of the myths. That may well be its. The age which my own most reminds me of is the medieval—the same brutality and enchantment, the same sense of homunculus peering around the cornice of a history happening far from him—and the same crusade toward a heaven not here. It’s chill, lone, and wuthering for some, an overheated faery-land for others, and running with guilty blood for all. An age when change can be caught like quicksilver and held up against the gloss of what we think we remember, where all the gauntlets of starvation and curtailed freedom are still thrown down to us, while sex will be our aphrodisiac and the documents our earthly paradise—who can fail to recognize that description? It is a marvelous time for art.