by Gore Vidal
There is no doubt but that the West has come to Malraux’s “twilight of the absolute.” One awaits with hope the period between when, unencumbered by the junk of dogma, writers can turn to the great things with confidence and delight. Loss of authority by removing targets does not destroy the true novelist, though it eliminates the doctrinaire and those busy critics who use the peculiar yardstick of social usefulness to determine merit. (It is no accident that the few works admired by Mr. Aldridge are those compositions which sturdily and loudly discuss the social scene, or some “pocket” of it—interesting books, certainly, whose public effect is often admirable; though the noise they create seldom persists long enough to enjoy even a first echo.) Actually, one might say that it is only the critic who suffers unduly from the lack of authority. A critic, to criticize, must, very simply, have standards. To have standards he must pretend there is some optimum against which like creations can be measured. By the nature of his own process he is eventually forced, often inadvertently, to accept as absolute those conditions for analysis which he has only tentatively proposed. To be himself significant he needs law and revealed order; without them he is only a civilized man commenting for others upon given works which, temperamentally, he may or may not like without altering the value, if any, of the work examined. With a law, with authority, with faith he becomes something more grand and meaningful; the pythoness through whom passes Apollo’s word.
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Much of the despondency and apparent confusion in the world of peripheral letters today derives partly from the nervous, bloody age in which we live and partly from that hunger for the absolute which, in our own immediate experience, delivered two great nations into the hands of tyrants, while in our own country the terror of being man alone, unsupported by a general religious belief and undirected by central authority, has reduced many intellectuals either to a bleak nihilism or, worse, to the acceptance of some external authority (Jesus, Marx, Freud). One is reminded of Flaubert’s comment nearly a century ago: “The melancholy of the ancients seems to me deeper than that of the moderns, who all more or less assume an immortality on the far side of the black pit. For the ancients the black pit was infinity itself; their dreams take shape and pass against a background of unchanging ebony. No cries, no struggles, only the fixity of the pensive gaze. The gods being dead and Christ not yet born [sic], there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius one unique moment in which there was man.”
Our own age is one of man alone, but there are still cries, still struggles against our condition, against the knowledge that our works and days have value only in the human scale; and those who most clearly remember the secure authority of other times, the ordered universe, the immutable moral hierarchies, are the ones who most protest the black pit. While it is perfectly true that any instant in human history is one of transition, ours more than most seems to be marked by a startling variety of conflicting absolutes, none sufficiently great at this moment to impose itself upon the majority whose lives are acted out within an unhuman universe which some still prefer to fill with a vast manlike shadow containing stars, while others behold only a luminous dust which is stars, and us as well. This division between those who recognize the unhumanity of creation and those who protest the unchanging ebony sets the tone of our literature, with the imaginative writers inclining (each in his own way) to the first view and their critics to the second. The sense of man not being king of creation (nor even the work of a king of creation) is the burden, directly and indirectly, of modern literature. For the writers there is no reality for man except in his relations with his own kind. Much of the stuff of earlier centuries—like fate, high tragedy, the interventions of dei ex machina—have been discarded as brave but outworn devices, not applicable in a world where kings and commoners occupy the same sinking boat.
Those of our writers who might yet enjoy the adjective “affirmative” are the ones who tend to devote themselves to the dramas within the boat, the encompassing cold sea ignored in the passions of the human moment. Most of the worst and a number of the best writers belong to this category. The key words here are “love” and “compassion.” And though, like most such devices, they have grown indistinct with use, one can still see them at work and marvelously so, in the novels of Carson McCullers and certain (though not all) of the plays of Tennessee Williams. Christopher Isherwood once said that to his mind the finest single line in modern letters was: “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers,” from A Streetcar Named Desire. At such moments, in such works, the human drama becomes so unbearably intense that time and the sea are blotted out and only the human beings are illuminated as they cease, through the high magic of art, to be mere residents in a time which stops and become, instead, archetypes—elemental figures like those wild gods our ancestors peopled heaven with.
Then there are the writers to whom neither sea nor boat exists. They have accepted some huge fantasy wherein they need never drown, where death is life, and the doings of human beings on a social and ethical level are of much consequence to some brooding source of creation who dispenses his justice along strictly party lines at the end of a gloomy day. To this category belong such talented writers as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. In theory at least, speculation has ended for them; dogma supports them in all things. Yet it is odd to find that the tone of their works differs very little from that of the other mariners adrift. They are, if anything, perhaps a bit more lugubrious, since for them is not the principality of this world.
Finally, there are those who see human lives as the lunatic workings of compulsive animals no sooner born than dead, no sooner dead than replaced by similar creatures born of that proliferating seed which too will die. Paul Bowles is a striking example of this sort of writer as he coolly creates nightmare visions in which his specimens struggle and drown in fantasy, in madness, in death. His short stories with their plain lines of monochromatic prose exploit extreme situations with a chilling resourcefulness; he says, in short, “Let it sink; let us drown.”
Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams are, at this moment at least, the three most interesting writers in the United States.* Each is engaged in the task of truth-saying (as opposed to saying the truth, which is not possible this side of revelation). Each has gone further into the rich interior of the human drama than any of our immediate predecessors with the possible exception of William Faulkner, whose recent work has unfortunately resembled bad translations from Pindar.
On a social level, the hostility shown these essential artists is more significant than their occasional worldly successes, for it is traditional that he who attempts to define man’s condition demoralizes the majority, whether relativist or absolutist. We do not want ever to hear that we will die but that first we must live; and those ways of living which are the fullest, the most intense, are the very ones which social man traditionally dreads, summoning all his superstition and malice to combat strangers and lovers, the eternal victims.
The obsessive concern with sexuality which informs most contemporary writing is not entirely the result of a wish épater le bourgeois but, more, the reflection of a serious battle between the society man has constructed so illogically and confusedly and the nature of the human being, which needs a considerably fuller expression sexually and emotionally than either the economics or morality of this time will permit. The sea is close. Two may find the interval between awareness and death more meaningful than one alone. Yet while ours is a society where mass murder and violence are perfectly ordinary and their expression in the most popular novels and comic books is accepted with aplomb, any love between two people which does not conform is attacked.
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Malcolm Cowley has complained that writers no longer handle some of the more interesting social relationships of man, that there is no good stock-market novel, no Balzacian concern with economic motive. His point is valid. The public range o
f the novel has been narrowed. It would be good to have well-written accounts of the way we live now, yet our important writers eschew, almost deliberately it would seem, the kind of book which provided not only Trollope but Tolstoi with so much power. Mr. Cowley catches quite well the tone of the second-rate good writers (a phenomenon peculiar to this moment; it seems as if a whole generation writes well, though not often to any point); they are concerned with the small scale, and goodness as exemplified by characters resembling the actress Shirley Booth holding out valiantly against villainous forces, usually represented by someone in business. But Mr. Cowley does not mention the novelist from whom these apotheosis-in-the-kitchen writers derive. Carson McCullers, using the small scale, the relations of human beings at their most ordinary, transcends her milieu and shows, in bright glimpses, the potentiality which exists in even the most banal of human relationships, the “we” as opposed to the meager “I.”
Or again, in Tennessee Williams’s remarkable play Camino Real, though the world is shown in a nightmare glass, a vision of those already drowned, there are still moments of private triumphs…in Kilroy’s love with (not for) the gypsy’s daughter and in Lord Byron’s proud departure through the gate to terra incognita, his last words a reproach and an exhortation: “Make voyages! Make voyages!”
And, finally, most starkly, we have a deliberate act of murder, Gide’s l’acte gratuite, which occurs at the end of Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down. Here the faceless, directionless protagonist, in a sudden storm of rage against his life, all life, commits a murder without reason or passion, and in this one terrible moment (similar perhaps to that of a nation gone to war) he at last finds “a place in the world, a definite status, a precise relationship with the rest of men. Even if it had to be one of open hostility, it was his, created by him.” In each of these three writers man acts, through love, through hate, through despair. Though the act in each is different, the common emotion is sufficiently intense to dispel, for a time at least, the knowledge of that cold drowning which awaits us all.
The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small “yes” at the center of a vast “no.”
The lesser writers whose works do not impress Mr. Cowley despite their correctness possess the same vision as those of the major writers, but their power of illusion is not so great and their magic is only fitful: too often their creatures are only automatons acted upon. Though they may shed light on interesting aspects of ordinary life they do not, in the best sense, illuminate, flood with brilliance, our strange estate.
Among the distinguished second rank of younger writers there is much virtuosity and potentiality. The coolly observant short stories of Louis Auchincloss provide wise social comment of the sort which the Cowleys would probably admire but never seem to read in their haste to generalize. Eudora Welty fashions a subtle line and Jean Stafford, though currently obsessed with literary interior decoration, has in such stories as “The Echo and the Nemesis” displayed a talent which makes all the more irritating her recent catalogues of bric-a-brac, actual and symbolic. John Kelly, whose two novels have been neglected, has created a perverse, operatic world like nothing else in our literature, while the late John Horne Burns, out of fashion for some years, was a brilliant satirist in a time when satire is necessary but difficult to write since to attack successfully one must have a complacent, massive enemy—and though there are numerous villains today, none is entirely complacent.
The serious writers have been attacked by the reviewers for their contempt of narrative and their neglect to fashion “real live characters” (which means familiar stereotypes from Victorian fiction masquerading in contemporary clothes). The reviewers have recognized that a good deal of writing now being done doesn’t resemble anything they are used to (although in almost a century there has been a royal line of which they are ignorant…from The Temptation of Saint Anthony to The Golden Bowl to Mrs. Dalloway); they still feel most at home with The Newcomes, or, if they came to maturity in the 1920’s, with The Sun Also Rises. When the technique of a play like Camino Real seems bizarre and difficult to follow for those accustomed to the imitators of early Ibsen, there must be a genuine reason for the change in technique, other than the author’s presumed perversity. The change from the exterior to the interior world which has been taking place in literature for at least a century is due not only to a general dissatisfaction with the limitations of naturalism but also to the rise of a new medium, the movies, which, properly used, are infinitely superior to the old novel and to the naturalistic play, especially in the rendering of plain narrative.
The Quiet One, a movie, was far superior as a social document (as “art,” too, for that matter) to any book published so far in this country dealing with Negro problems. Instinctively, the writers have reacted to the camera. If another medium can handle narrative and social comment so skillfully, then the novelist must go deeper, must turn into the maze of consciousness where the camera cannot follow. He must also become wise, and wisdom even in its relative sense was never a notable characteristic of novelists in our language. Yet one can anticipate the direction of the novel by studying that of the painters who, about the time of the still camera’s invention, began instinctively to withdraw into a less literal world where they might do work which a machine could not imitate. It is a possibility, perhaps even a probability, that as the novel moves toward a purer, more private expression it will cease altogether to be a popular medium, becoming, like poetry, a cloistered avocation—in which case those who in earlier times might have written great public novels will be engaged to write good public movies, redressing the balance. In our language the novel is but three centuries old and its absorption by the movies, at least the vulgar line of it, is not necessarily a bad thing. In any event, it is already happening.
For the present, however, the tone of the contemporary novel, though not cheerful, is precise. Man is on his own. In certain human actions, in love, in violence, he can communicate with others, touch and be touched, act and in the act forget his fate. The scale is often small. Kings are neglected because, to relativists, all men are the same within eternity. Or rather their crisis is the same. The concern in modern letters is with that crisis which defines the prospect.
In general, the novelists have rejected authority, parting company with their cousins-german the serious critics. To the creative man, religious dogma and political doctrine, when stated in ultimate terms, represent the last enemy, the protean Lucifer in our race’s bloody progress. The artist speaks from that awareness of life, that secret knowledge of life in death the absolutists are driven to obscure and to distort, to shape, if possible, to tidy ends.
The interior drama at its most bitterly human comes into sharp focus in the writings of Williams and McCullers, and there are signs that other writers, undismayed by the hostility of the absolutists, may soon provide us with some strength in these last days before the sure if temporary victory of that authoritarian society which, thanks to science, now has every weapon with which to make even the most inspired lover of freedom conform to the official madness.
The thought of heaven, a perennial state of mind, a cheerful conception of what might be in life, in art (if not in death), may yet save our suicidally inclined race—if only because heaven is as various as there are men in the world who dream of it, and writers to evoke that dream. One recalls Constantine (to refer again to the image of the early church) when he teased a dissenting bishop at one of the synods: “Acesius, take a ladder and get up to heaven by yourself.” We are fortunate in our time to have so many ladders going up. Each ladder is raised in hope, which is heaven enough.
New World Writing #4, 1953
*This was written in 1952. McCullers was a good and fashionable novelist of the day (I cannot say I have
any great desire to read her again). Paul Bowles was as little known then as he is now. His short stories are among the best ever written by an American. Tennessee Williams was famous but beleaguered (Time magazine regularly denounced him as a decadent and “fetid swamp,” while Mary McCarthy publicly resented his success). I have not changed my mind about Williams’s early plays. Other forties writers whose books I might have mentioned had I liked them as well then as I do now are Saul Bellow and John Hawkes. John Horne Burns I deal with on this page.
A NOTE ON THE NOVEL
Any discussion of the novel nowadays soon strikes the pessimistic note. It is agreed, for instance, that there are among us no novelists of sufficient importance to act as touchstones for useful judgment. There is Faulkner, but…and there is Hemingway, but…And that completes the list of near-misses, the others, poor lost legions, all drowned in the culture’s soft buzz and murmur. We have embarked upon empire (Rome born again our heavy fate) without a Vergil in the crew, only tarnished silver writers in a bright uranium age, perfunctorily divided by editorialists between the “affirmative” (and good) and the “negative” (and bad). Only cultural researchers (wandering lonely as a crowd) and high critics merit serious attention. From the little red schoolhouse to the library at Alexandria in one generation is the heartening success story of American letters.
