The enthusiasm for stories told with nothing but words on paper was so intense in the United States during the first half of this century that a beginning writer used to look on someone who had published a marvelous tale as a literary ancestor, even though the age difference between the tyro and the master might be minuscule. Thus did it come to pass that I, born in 1922, thought of Budd Schulberg, born in 1914, as a member of another generation at the end of World War II, although he was actually one year younger than my brother Bernard. He had by then published the small, hard-edged, one-hundred-percent-American masterpiece What Makes Sammy Run?
Amazingly, he is now my friend, and in all respects, like my brother, a clear-headed and healthy contemporary. But I will never stop thinking of him as a member of another generation to which my own owes a lot. Mine is Norman Mailer and William Styron and Richard Yates and James Jones and Vance Bourjaily and Gore Vidal and so on. His is William Saroyan and Nelson Algren and Irwin Shaw and John O’Hara and John Cheever and so on most gloriously. I do not know if Schulberg in turn looks on me as my brother always will, as a little kid. I doubt it, since I myself, when thinking of writers old enough to be my own kid brothers and sisters, perceive no clear break between them and me, although they surely do. This is self-protection. I do not want to be an elder, a graybeard, a dean.
Schulberg himself, of course, has written brilliantly in the persona of a kid about “ancestors” of his own whom he came to know just as I have come to know him—most notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Granted: They were more senior to him than he is to me.
Let us grant, too, that the popularity of stories told with nothing but words, no matter what age the author, is in sickeningly steep decline. New technologies now send beloved actors and convincing illusions of love and hate and weather and catastrophes and so on, underscored with appropriate music and other sound effects, to every corner of the planet where there is disciplined electricity. So that even the forty million United States citizens who are said to be able to read very little, if at all, still have stories coming out of their kazoos, so to speak.
What is being missed by those who cannot read or will not read? Nothing less than the most profound and influential form of meditation yet stumbled upon by humankind. The invention of the printing press was as cold-bloodedly technical in its intentions as TV and computers and xerography and fax, and who can say what’s coming next? But a person getting information from a book, purely by accident, simply because a book requires this, achieves isolation and a body state recommended by Oriental holy persons as ideal for meditation. I ask that reading a book not only be recognized as a form of meditation, and treasured as such, but that those who do it celebrate it as being superior to the Oriental varieties, which I have likened elsewhere to scuba diving in lukewarm bouillon. Not much happens when a person meditates in the Oriental style, and I have done it, and I still do it from time to time. I think better of life after I have done it. Life is sweeter and I am sweeter, but not much else has changed.
But I say to the literate person who holds this book of fine stories by Budd Schulberg: Be aware that you are about to engage in Western-style meditation, which is not only refreshing but instructive, since it allows you into the brain of a highly intelligent and gifted person who has seen things you may have seen, but in a very different light, and seen things you will never see, and had thoughts you yourself would never have shared if you had not engaged in Western-style meditation.