Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  What has been his international role since the prize?

  “I just sign more manifestos,” he said. “My name has to be ignored by Brezhnev more and more often.

  “I would have been quite happy without the Nobel Prize,” Bellow added. “I know it upsets some men not to get it, but actually it’s better to write a marvelous book than to get the prize. It’s easy for me to say that, but what I mean to say is, I still go on doing my damnedest to write the best book that’s in me.”

  Will that be difficult, now that he’s become an industry?

  “I don’t mind becoming an industry,” he said. “In Japan people go to the Buddhist temple and buy a long strip of paper with their horoscope on it, and with Japanese efficiency they roll the papers up and tie them to shrubs by the temple door, so the shrubs have more horoscopes than they do leaves. And I suppose the Saul Bellow industry makes a shrub of me by the temple door. It’s all right as long as they don’t come and tear off my blossoms.”

  He had earlier, in passing, mentioned a vague Hollywood interest in his books. Had he ever thought of writing for the movies?

  “I concentrate on the form of unreality I know best,” he said. “When I was young and pretty I was fingered by a talent scout who asked me to come to Hollywood. Dangling Man had just come out, and I thought he wanted to buy the book for the movies. He was a member of the Goldwyn family, not a very famous member, and he hadn’t even read my book. He saw my picture on the jacket and thought I could make it as an actor. Write for them? Hell, I could’ve acted for them.”

  Now, would he, as a way of concluding this talk, compare the Bellow who wrote The Adventures of Augie March with the Bellow who had just finished The Dean’s December?

  “One of the things I said in the new book,” he said, “was that the dean lived a very quiet life. And the reason was that he had made so many mistakes that he had a lot to think about. He had his work cut out for him. You remember when you took elementary chemistry? You were handed a lump of stuff and the professor said, ‘By the end of the semester I want you to tell me what’s in this.’ And you had to sweat over it in the lab for what elements were in it. Well,” said the author with an unfinished smile, “I haven’t gotten to the bottom of my lump.”

  1982

  E. L. Doctorow:

  A Strong Voice in the Universe

  Shimmering Loon Lake

  A Strong Voice in the Universe

  The prevalence of talk against the novel, and of its supposed relegation to a position behind nonfiction in our age, has gained much of its real momentum from novelists. Philip Roth, some years ago, gave aid and comfort to the reactionary legions of nonfiction supremacists by suggesting that the novel had trouble keeping pace with modern life, that today’s theme was swiftly superseded by tomorrow’s newspaper. Soon thereafter, Roth wrote The Great American Bathroom Novel, which is not likely to be superseded by any newspaper. Also, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, out of some cancerous boredom with their previous interior literary landscapes, turned to nonfiction. Though their work has been nonpareil, has had an ennobling effect on magazine and book journalism, and has made them culture heroes on the basis of their artistic vision of events, their elegant or boisterous public syntax and their self-regenerative TV personalities, it has also demeaned novels in the public mind. Capote and Mailer stand as ex-novelists turned relevant fact-mongers, and highly successful because of that. Novels, by contrast, are made to seem irrelevant fantasies, the doodlings of cloistered freaks, read chiefly by hefty androgynes and English majors who still smoke meerschaum pipes.

  Wrongheads who think like this should read E. L. Doctorow’s new novel. The Book of Daniel (Random House), which imposes an eminently relevant perspective on the past four decades of America by imaginatively reenacting a tortured moment: the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were electrocuted in 1953 after being convicted of conspiracy to steal U.S. atomic secrets for Russia.

  Only one nonfiction book on the notorious case is still in print. But even if a dozen were in print, none would be likely to convey what Doctorow’s does; for nonfiction’s virtue is providing a cerebral comprehension of events through an authentic marshaling of facts (even if the facts are the workings of Mailer’s matchless mind); and Doctorow gives the fact fetish a swift kick in the slats. He did not research the private lives of the Rosenbergs (he told me), he invented them. He did not know them or their children or anyone who did. Yet his people are convincingly real (he calls them Paul and Rochelle Isaacson; their children, Susan and Daniel), and his book achieves authenticity at a level closed to nonfictionists, that is, the province of the novelist—the creation in the reader of an emotional comprehension of history. This is fodder for inexhaustible argument. I only suggest that the difference between the impact of nonfiction and fiction on the psyche is the difference between enjoying stimulating new vistas with an old flame whose limits we understand, and falling in love with a voluptuous stranger.

  “The novelist,” Doctorow said in a phone conversation, “has to break through the facts to get at the truth. And if he feels constrained by the facts, to that extent he’ll fail.”

  Doctorow doesn’t fail. His book is a stunning success. It is only ironic that its weakest points are those where he imposes too much historical data on the story and slows the action in order to re-create the eras through which the characters move, and the philosophies (1940-ish communism, the Truman Doctrine, last year’s Yippieism) that undergird them.

  The book purports to be the doctoral dissertation of Daniel Isaacson, a young man whose human, political and literary savvy are equal to Doctorow’s, which is to say, very high. As such, it is a curiosity shop of styles, moving back and forth between first and third person, in and out of essays (on capital punishment through history, and a brilliant conclusion on Disneyland as cultural totalitarianism). The eccentric Daniel includes his sudden surreal impressions (violin spiders), a moving conversation with his grandmother after her death, Joycean foolery (if this bee is tristante make the mort of it).

  The book is ultimately less about the parents than about Daniel and Susan, whose relationship is the great achievement of the book: two children who must rebuild a life after an entire nation turns its full hatred on their parents and executes them. Doctorow has written that he sees this as a metaphor for a current condition in which “all children discover that their parents are murdered by the system, and that murder is what they have to build their lives on.” That seems too general a burden for such a specific book to carry. But it does reflect, as Doctorow also said when we talked, “the essentially sacrifical function of Left politics, the peculiar and bitter kind of career it offers; but also its humanity.”

  For black writers today, such social themes are everything, but for white American novelists, black and dreck humor are still the vogue, along with studies of cultural alienation, neurotic introspection, sexual emancipation, suburban desiccation. Doctorow’s book is a throwback to the concerns that moved the young Steinbeck and Dos Passos.

  “I don’t see how our name novelists have been able to remain absolutely silent about the Vietnamese war,” Doctorow said on the phone, “and I think that’s one reason why people talk about the death of the novel.”

  Doctorow, forty, worked as a literary editor for a decade and is now a teacher (next year, at Sarah Lawrence). He wrote two early novels, Welcome to Hard Times, an allegorical Western, and Big as Life, a fantasy in the science-fiction vein. He’s writing a new novel, and a children’s book on comparative revolution.

  “When I went to college,” he recalled, “the general view of the artist might have been expressed by a Henry James remark to the effect that life is hot but art is cool. That can be a terrible burden if the artist believes it too thoroughly. Pablo Neruda’s inspirations were not cool at all. Dostoevsky was not a cool guy.… My own view is that there’s no reason for the novel except to convey your own imaginative vision of the life of society, bits and pieces of everything
and everybody. And all sorts of strange voices in the universe.”

  1971

  Shimmering Loon Lake

  Two-thirds of the way through this stunning new novel by E. L. Doctorow, a failed poet by the name of Warren Penfield, watching a puppet play in Japan, has this thought:

  “… when I speak I hear someone else saying the words when I decide to do something someone else is propelling me when I look up at the sky or down at the ground I feel the talons on my neck how true what genius to make a public theater out of this why don’t we all stand up and tear the place apart what brazen art to tell us this about ourselves knowing we’ll sit here and not do a thing”

  The narrator then adds: “The puppet play told the story of two lovers who, faced with adversity, decided to commit suicide together and so at the intimate crucial moment there were eight presences onstage.”

  The implication here from the narrator is that it takes a composite of four psychic stances to create one individual, a sort of Jungian concept. Jung wouldn’t have limited the number to four and in fact neither does Doctorow. A case can be made that he creates at least five significant males and five significant females who shape the psyche of his hero, a wanderer he calls Joe from Paterson (New Jersey).

  One of the novel’s great achievements is the way in which Doctorow has those five, or ten, resonating constantly in Joe’s consciousness. What he achieves is the creation of a truly complex man functioning in a truly complex society—the 1930s Depression years in America.

  Much of the book is set in the Northeast. Albany, Utica are evoked by name. The Adirondack wilderness at Loon Lake (where five presidents vacationed in the late nineteenth century as America discovered that wilderness too could be luxurious) is a major presence and symbol in the novel.

  The social view is from the top, in the person of a millionaire named F. W. Bennett who has a fifty-thousand-acre estate on the lake which he shares with his elegant, hoydenish Amelia Earhart–type wife, Lucinda.

  The view is also from the cultural wasteland that the poet Penfield (a wonderful character) inhabits; and it is from the world of a traveling carnival, where Joe works as a roustabout for the teeth-sucking owner, beds his larcenous wife and grows protective of the moronic fat lady who is a sex object for the yokel customers.

  It is the view from an assembly line in Bennett’s Autobody Works in Jacksontown, Indiana—Heart of the Hoosier Nation—where Joe finds a job, and where he unknowingly befriends a company spy and inherits both the spy’s treason and his wife. It is the view from below in the person of the gangster Tommy Crapo, who breaks heads for Bennett, and Clara Lukacs, Tommy’s moll, who becomes Bennett’s doxy and Joe’s woman.

  Early in the story Joe takes off from the lower-class life in Paterson, rides the freights, wends his way north and one day sees the beautiful, blonde Clara, naked in a private railroad car. On impulse he follows the tracks and ends up on Bennett’s estate, where he is attacked by a pack of wild dogs, and after being nursed back to health by sullen servants, becomes part of Bennett’s domain and begins his erratic rise in the world.

  Here Joe meets Penfield, who is a roly-poly lap dog for Bennett’s wife. He becomes friends with Clara (and eventually runs off with her) and he also stands up to Bennett himself by rejecting him.

  Unlike Bennett’s servile servants, Joe has no use for the self-annihilating security they find in Bennett’s employ. What he runs on, he tells himself, is “the force of self-distinguishing,” which he found common among hoboes. “When you are nobody and have nothing, you depend on your troubles for self-respect.”

  And so he tells Bennett he won’t work for him and will go back on the road. Bennett, amused, implants his capitalistic wisdom in Joe’s brain (with strange effect) with a remarkable speech:

  “Well, I say why not, if that’s what you want. Just be sure you’ve got the guts. So that if you have to steal or take a sap to someone’s head for a meal, you’ll be able to. Every kind of life has its demands, its tests. Can I do this? Can I live with the consequences of what I’m doing? If you can’t answer yes, you’re in a life that’s too much for you. You get on the bread line. If you can’t muscle your way into the bread line, you sit at the curb and hold out your hand. You’re a beggar. If you can’t whine and wheedle and beg your cup of coffee … why, I say be a poet. Get in, get into the place that’s your nature, whether it’s running a corporation or picking daises … live to the fullness of fit, become what you are, and I’ll say to you, you’ve done more than most men. Most men—and let me tell you, I know men—most of them don’t ever do that. They’ll work at a job and not know why. They’ll marry a woman and not know why. They’ll go their graves and not know why.”

  What happens to Joe, the voices he hears, the wisdom he swallows, the crises he survives, is the novel’s story. It is told with a pervading sense of strangeness, with obliquely rendered interior monologues which seem irrelevant to the story and yet prove eventually to be the soul of it. There are computeresque reports on the characters, there are excerpts from Penfield’s wretched poetry, and yet there is poetry in the book which is clearly Doctorow’s and which is full of haunting imagery.

  Some critics have noted echoes of Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos in the book, especially the latter’s use of innovative devices and poetry to give a wider social ambience to his story. True enough; and some of his stylistic debt is also to William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, which taught a whole generation of writers how to tell a story as a puzzle. One of Faulkner’s notable devices was the use of the biographical sketch to enlarge and complete the story; and Doctorow does this on the book’s final page with great effectiveness.

  This single page forces the reader to reconsider all that has gone before, but in a new light, and it thumbnails the character forward with both economy and high significance.

  On first reading some sections seemed irrelevant to the main thrust of the book; but Doctorow insists by his willful style that when he says that something is relevant, it most definitely is relevant.

  Not every reader will agree. Those who buy Loon Lake expecting a repeat performance of Ragtime, his phenomenal best-seller of five years ago, will be in for a twelve-dollar jolt.

  I think this is Doctorow’s best novel, which is saying a great deal, for The Book of Daniel, his third novel, was a work of great power. Nevertheless, I think Loon Lake is better, more shimmering as a work of art and an example of the contemporary American literary imagination at its very best.

  1980

  Norman Mailer:

  An Eavesdropper at the Lotos Club

  On November 13, 1991, Norman Mailer was formally invested with his most recent laurel by Governor Mario Cuomo, who conferred upon him the title of New York State Author. It is an honorific position that lasts for two years, and carries a few obligations—some formal speeches around the state, and serving on the committee to choose the State Author who will succeed him.

  At Norman’s investiture I gave the introduction, and because no one here at the Lotos Club tonight, except Norman, my wife, my son, and myself heard that introduction, and because Norman taught me many years ago that the mark of a serious man is that he can always reconstitute his mood, I thought I would repeat my speech and its mood.

  Back in 1967, when Norman had just published his tenth book, and his fifth novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?—plus a lengthy magazine essay on film, literature, politics, and American culture—and was also writing, directing, and acting in his first movie, I decided to write a piece on him for my Sunday column in the Albany Times-Union. For me Mailer was—and still is—a great innovator, a writer with extraordinary control of the language and an outlandishly inventive mind. He was an unpredictable citizen of multiple worlds, a man who didn’t seem to repeat himself, who was anxious to create new forms of fiction, journalism, and self-communion. Like most of the American literary community, and long before I was a part of it, I relished Mailer’s debut in 1948 with The Naked an
d the Dead; for although he’d taken a major cue from John Dos Passos, a hero of innovation in the American novel (he has also said the biggest influence on that novel was Moby Dick), Norman had moved the form forward into territory—explicit sexuality, for instance—where Dos Passos had never trod. Norman was twenty-five years old, a wunderkind, and he reaped the rewards that go with such an incarnation.

  The Deer Park came along in 1955, and maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t Jack Kennedy’s favorite among Mailer works, but it became mine; the best Hollywood novel—though it was much more than that—since Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust.

  The year 1959 saw the publication of Advertisements for Myself, a paradigmatic work whose form was so viable that it is still being emulated today. Advertisements was a vital, funny, wacko, nasty, talented, and enormously readable work, a roundup of fiction, poetic, dramatic, and polemical fragments from all points of Norman’s literary compass. It was in this book that Norman began collecting his opinions. He probably has not yet published his opinion on everything, though it does seem that he has: strong opinions, provocative opinions, offensive opinions.

  It really isn’t unreasonable to say that throughout his long and judgmental career as a writer, Norman has offended just about everybody worth offending. He has made enemies of Presidents, clerics, conservatives, liberals, prizefighters, sportswriters, militarists, oncologists, feminists, blacks, birth-control advocates, sexual purists, gays, voters, readers, plastic manufacturers, publishers, critics by the boatload, and, of course, other fiction writers.

  One of his non-ideological traits that usually offends the self-effacing wallflowers among us has been his willingness to talk to himself about himself. Early on he found, in his own internal conversation, a bountiful supply of ideas of notable substance, and, working as an aggressive and scholarly journalist of the ego, he relentlessly explored them. In the process he delivered unto us that memorable literary form, “The Self-Interview.” I’m not sure Norman invented this form, but he certainly elevated it to new significance.