by Gore Vidal
Finally, there is the matter of death. A recent survey among young people showed that since almost none believed in the continuation of personality after death, each felt, quite logically, that if this life is all there is, to lose it is the worst that can happen to anyone. Consequently, none was able to think of a single “idea,” political or moral, whose defense might justify no longer existing. To me this is the central underlying assumption of our society and one which makes us different from our predecessors. As a result, much of the popular writers’ glumness reflects the unease of a first generation set free from an attitude toward death which was as comforting as it was constraining. Curiously enough, this awareness is responsible for one of Mr. O’Hara’s few entirely successful works, the short story “The Trip,” from Assembly.
An elderly New York clubman is looking forward to a boat trip to England, the scene of many pleasures in his youth (the Kit Kat Club with the Prince of Wales at the drums, etc.). He discusses the trip with his bridge partners, a contented foursome of old men, their pleasant lives shadowed only by the knowledge of death. An original member of the foursome died some years earlier, and there had been some criticism of him because he had collapsed “and died while playing a hand. The criticism was mild enough, but it was voiced, one player to another; it was simply that Charley had been told by his doctor not to play bridge, but he had insisted on playing, with the inevitable, extremely disturbing result.” But there were those who said how much better it was that Charley was able to die among friends rather than in public, with “policemen going through his pockets to find some identification. Taxi drivers pointing to him. Look, a dead man.” Skillfully O’Hara weaves his nightmare. Shortly before the ship is to sail for England, one of the foursome misses the afternoon game. Then it is learned that he has died in a taxicab. Once again the “inevitable, extremely disturbing” thing has happened. The trip is called off because “I’d be such a damn nuisance if I checked out in a London cab.” This particular story is beautifully made, and completely effective. Yet Boccaccio would have found it unfathomable: isn’t death everywhere? and shouldn’t we crowd all the pleasure that we can into the moment and hope for grace? But in Mr. O’Hara’s contemporary mirror, there is neither grace nor God nor—one suspects—much pleasure in living.
Why our proud Affluency is the way it is does not concern us here. Enough to say that Mr. O’Hara, for all his faults, is a reliable witness to our self-regard, boredom, and terror of not being. Nor is he without literary virtues. For one thing, he possesses that rare thing, the narrative gift. For another, he has complete integrity. What he says he sees, he sees. Though his concern with sex used to trouble many of the Good Gray Geese of the press, it is a legitimate concern. Also, his treatment of sexual matters is seldom irrelevant, though touchingly old-fashioned by today’s standards, proving once again how dangerous it is for a writer to rely too heavily on contemporary sexual mores for his effects. When those mores change, the moments of high drama become absurd. “Would you marry me if I weren’t a virgin?” asks a girl in one of the early books. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know,” is the man’s agonized response, neither suspecting that even as they suffer, in literature’s womb Genet and Nabokov, William Burroughs and Mary McCarthy are stirring to be born. But despite Mr. O’Hara’s passionate desire to show things as they are, he is necessarily limited by the things he must look at. Lacking a moral imagination and not interested in the exercise of mind or in the exploration of what really goes on beneath that Harris tweed suit from J. Press, he is doomed to go on being a writer of gossip who is read with the same mechanical attention any newspaper column of familiar or near-familiar names and places is apt to evoke. His work, finally, cannot be taken seriously as literature, but as an unconscious record of the superstitions and assumptions of his time, his writing is “pertinent” in Santayana’s sense, and even “true.”
The New York Review of Books, April 16, 1964
E. NESBIT’S MAGIC
After Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit is the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children (neither wrote for children), and like Carroll she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own. Yet Nesbit’s books are relatively unknown in the United States. Publishers attribute her failure in these parts to a witty and intelligent prose style (something of a demerit in the land of the dull and the home of the literal) and to the fact that a good many of her books deal with magic, a taboo subject nowadays. Apparently, the librarians who dominate the “juvenile market” tend to be brisk tweedy ladies whose interests are mechanical rather than imaginative. Never so happy as when changing a fan belt, they quite naturally want to communicate their joy in practical matters to the young. The result has been a depressing literature of how-to-do things while works of invention are sternly rejected as not “practical” or “useful.” Even the Oz books which had such a powerful influence on three generations of Americans are put to one side in certain libraries, and children are discouraged from reading them because none of the things described in those books could ever have happened. Even so, despite such odds, attempts are being made by gallant publishers to penetrate the tweed curtain, and a number of Nesbit’s books are currently available in the United States, while in England she continues to be widely read.
Born in 1858, Edith Nesbit was the daughter of the head of a British agricultural college. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, a journalist. But though they had a good deal in common—both were socialists, active in the Fabian Society—the marriage was unhappy. Bland was a philanderer; worse, he had no gift for making a living. As a result, simply to support her five children, Nesbit began to write books about children. In a recent biography, Magic and the Magician, Noel Streatfeild remarks that E. Nesbit did not particularly like children, which may explain why those she created in her books are so entirely human. They are intelligent, vain, aggressive, humorous, witty, cruel, compassionate…in fact, they are like adults, except for one difference. In a well-ordered and stable society (England in the time of the gross Edward), children are as clearly defined a minority group as Jews or Negroes in other times and places. Physically small and weak, economically dependent upon others, they cannot control their environment. As a result, they are forced to develop a sense of communality; and though it does not necessarily make them any nicer to one another, at least it helps them to see each other with perfect clarity. Nesbit’s genius is to see them as clearly and unsentimentally as they see themselves, thus making for that sense of life upon the page without which no literature.
Nesbit’s usual device is to take a family of children ranging in age from a baby to a child of ten or eleven and then involve them in adventures, either magical or realistic (never both at the same time). The Story of the Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbe-goods, and The New Treasure Seekers are realistic books about the Bastable children. They are told by Oswald Bastable, whose style owes a great deal to that of Julius Caesar. Like the conqueror, Oswald is able through a cunning use of the third person to establish his marked superiority to others. Wondering if his younger brother H. O. is mentally retarded, he writes, “H. O. is eight years old, but he cannot tell the clock yet. Oswald could tell the clock when he was six.” Oswald is a delightful narrator and the stories he tells are among Nesbit’s best. For the most part they deal with scrapes the children get into while searching for treasure in familiar surroundings, and the strategies they employ in coping as sensibly as possible with the contrary world of grown-ups. In a Nesbit book there is always some sort of domestic trouble. One parent is usually missing, and there is never enough money—although to the twentieth-century reader, her “impoverished” middle-class households, each with its three servants and large house, suggest an entirely golden aristocratic age. Yet many of the children’s adventures have to do with attempts to improve the family’s finances.
To my mind, it is in the “magic books” that Nesbit is at her best, particularly the tri
logy which involves the Five Children. In the first volume, Five Children and It, they encounter the Psammead, a small bad-tempered, odd-looking creature from pre-history. The Psammead is able to grant wishes by first filling itself with air and then exhaling. (“If only you knew how I hate to blow myself out with other people’s wishes, and how frightened I am always that I shall strain a muscle or something. And then to wake up every morning and know that you’ve got to do it….”)
But the children use the Psammead relentlessly for their wishes, and something almost always goes wrong. They wish “to be more beautiful than the day,” and find that people detest them, thinking they look like Gypsies or worse. Without moralizing, Nesbit demonstrates, literally, the folly of human wishes, and amuses at the same time. In The Phoenix and the Carpet, they become involved with the millennial phoenix, a bird of awesome vanity (“I’ve often been told that mine is a valuable life”). With the use of a magic carpet, the phoenix and the children make a number of expeditions about the world. Yet even with such an ordinary device as a magic carpet, Nesbit’s powers of invention are never settled easily. The carpet has been repaired, and the rewoven section is not magic; whoever sits on that part travels neither here nor there. Since most intelligent children are passionate logicians, the sense of logic is a necessary gift in a writer of fantasy. Though a child will gladly accept a fantastic premise, he will insist that the working out of it be entirely consistent with the premise. Careless invention is immediately noticed; contradiction and inconsistencies irritate, and illusion is destroyed. Happily, Nesbit is seldom careless and she anticipates most questions which might occur to a child. Not that she can always answer him satisfactorily. A condition of the Psammead’s wishes is that they last only for a day. Yet the effects of certain wishes in the distant past did linger. Why was this? asked one of the children. “Autres temps,” replied the Psammead coolly, “autres moeurs.”
In The Story of the Amulet, Nesbit’s powers of invention are at their best. It is a time-machine story, only the device is not a machine but an Egyptian amulet whose other half is lost in the past. By saying certain powerful words, the amulet becomes a gate through which the children are able to visit the past or future. Pharaonic Egypt, Babylon (whose dotty queen comes back to London with them and tries to get her personal possessions out of the British Museum), Caesar’s Britain—they visit them all in search of the missing part of the amulet. Nesbit’s history is good. And there is even a look at a Utopian future, which turns out to be everything a good Fabian might have hoped for. Ultimately, the amulet’s other half is found, and a story of considerable beauty is concluded in a most unexpected way.
There are those who consider The Enchanted Castle Nesbit’s best book. J. B. Priestley has made a case for it, and there is something strange about the book that sets it off from the bright world of the early stories. Four children encounter magic in the gardens of a great deserted house. The mood is midnight. Statues of dinosaurs come alive in the moonlight, the gods of Olympus hold a revel, Pan’s song is heard. Then things go inexplicably wrong. The children decide to give a play. Wanting an audience, they create a number of creatures out of old clothes, pillows, brooms, umbrellas. To their horror, as the curtain falls, there is a ghastly applause. The creatures have come alive, and they prove to be most disagreeable. They want to find hotels to stay at. Thwarted, they turn ugly. Finally, they are locked in a back room, but not without a scuffle. It is the sort of nightmare that might have occurred to a high-strung child, perhaps to Nesbit herself. And one must remember that a nightmare was a serious matter for a child who had no electric light to switch on when a bad dream awakened him; he was forced to continue in darkness, the menacing shadows undispelled.
My own favorites among Nesbit’s work are The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck, two books that comprise a diptych, one telling much the same story as the second, yet from a different point of view. The mood is somewhere between that of The Enchanted Castle and of the Five Children, not midnight yet hardly morning. Richard Harding, a crippled boy, accompanies an old tramp about England. The Dickensian note is struck but without the master’s sentimentality. Through magic, Harding is able to go into the past where he is Sir Richard Harding in the age of Henry VIII, and not lame. But loyalty to the tramp makes him return to the present. Finally he elects to remain in the past. Meanwhile in The House of Arden a contemporary boy, Edred, must be tested before he can become Lord Arden and restore the family fortunes. He meets the Mouldiwarp (a mole who appears on the family coat of arms). This magic creature can be summoned only by poetry, freshly composed in its honor—a considerable strain on Edred and his sister Elfrida, who have not the gift. There are adventures in the past and the present, and the story of Richard Harding crosses their own. The magic comes and goes in a most interesting way.
As a woman, E. Nesbit was not to everyone’s taste. H. G. Wells described her and Hubert Bland as “fundamentally intricate,” adding that whenever the Blands attended meetings of the Fabian Society “anonymous letters flitted about like bats at twilight” (the Nesbit mood if not style is contagious). Yet there is no doubt that she was extraordinary. Wanting to be a serious poet, she became of necessity a writer of children’s books. But though she disdained her true gift, she was peculiarly suited by nature to be what in fact she was. As an adult writing of her own childhood, she noted, “When I was a little child I used to pray, fervently, fearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought and felt and suffered then.” With extraordinary perceptiveness, she realized that each grown-up must kill the child he was before he himself can live. Nesbit’s vow to survive somehow in the enemy’s consciousness became, finally, her art—when this you see remember me—and the child continued to the end of the adult’s life.
E. Nesbit’s failure in the United States is not entirely mysterious. We have always preferred how-to-do to let’s-imagine-that. As a result, in the last fifty years we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies for theory and invention. Our great contribution has been, characteristically, the assembly line.
I do not think it is putting the case too strongly to say that much of the poverty of our society’s intellectual life is directly due to the sort of books children are encouraged to read. Practical books with facts in them may be necessary, but they are not everything. They do not serve the imagination in the same way that high invention does when it allows the mind to investigate every possibility, to set itself free from the ordinary, to enter a world where paradox reigns and nothing is what it seems. Properly engaged, the intelligent child begins to question all presuppositions, and to think on his own. In fact, the moment he says, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…?” he is on his way and his own imagination has begun to work at a level considerably more interesting than the usual speculation on what it will be like to own a car and make money. As it is, the absence of imagination is cruelly noticeable at every level of the American society, and though a reading of E. Nesbit is hardly going to change the pattern of a nation, there is some evidence that the child who reads her will never be quite the same again, and that is probably a good thing.
The New York Review of Books, December 3, 1964
JOHN HORNE BURNS
In 1947 The Gallery by John Horne Burns was published, to great acclaim: the best book of the Second War. That same year Burns and I met several times, each a war novelist and each properly wary of the other. Burns was then thirty-one with a receding hairline above a face striking in its asymmetry, one ear flat against the head, the other stuck out. He was a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great (he had written a number of novels before the war, but none was published). He was also certain that to be a good writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed, he named a half dozen celebrated contemporaries, “A Pleiad,” he roared delightedly, “
of pederasts!” But what about Faulkner, I asked, and Hemingway. He was disdainful. Who said they were any good? And besides, hadn’t I heard how Hemingway once…
I never saw Burns after 1947. But we exchanged several letters. He was going to write a successful play and become rich. He was also going to give up teaching in a prep school and go live in Europe. He did achieve Europe, but the occasion of the return was not happy. His second novel, Lucifer with a Book (1949), was perhaps the most savagely and unjustly attacked book of its day. Outraged, and with good reason, Burns exchanged America for Italy. But things had started to go wrong for him, and Italy did not help. The next novel, A Cry of Children (1952), was bad. He seemed to have lost some inner sense of self, gained in the war, lost in peace. He disintegrated. Night after night, he would stand at the Excelsior Hotel bar in Florence, drinking brandy, eating hard candy (he had a theory that eating sugar prevents hangovers…it does not), insulting imagined enemies and imagined friends, and all the while complaining of what had been done to him by book reviewers. In those years one tried not to think of Burns: it was too bitter. The best of us all had taken the worst way. In 1958 when I read that he was dead, I felt no shock. It seemed right. One only wondered how he had achieved extinction. Sunstroke was the medical report. But it being Burns, there were rumors of suicide, even of murder; however, those who knew him at the last say that his going was natural and inevitable. He was thirty-seven years old.
Twenty-one years ago the U. S. Army occupied Naples and John Horne Burns, a young soldier from Boston—Irish, puritan, unawakened—was brought to life by the human swarm he encountered in the Galleria Umberto, “a spacious arcade opening off Via Roma….It was like walking into a city within a city.” From this confrontation Burns never recovered. As he put it, “I thought I could keep a wall between me and the people. But the monkeys in the cage reach out and grab the spectator who offers them a banana.” It was the time when cigarettes, chocolate, and nylons were exchanged for an easy sex that could become, for a man like Burns, unexpected love. He was startled to find that Italians could sell themselves with no sense of personal loss and, unlike their puritan conquerors, they could even take pleasure in giving pleasure; their delight in the fact of life persisted, no matter how deep the wound. Unlike “the Irish who stayed hurt all their lives, the Italians had a bounce-back in them.”
