The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  5.

  That said, I think An American Dream is pretty good.

  6.

  So, defend indefensible Mailer. I once promised, in another essay, to land on judgment, not hover: Advertisements for Myself, The Armies of the Night, the two campaign books, and, er, parts of The Fight, parts of Of a Fire on the Moon, parts of Cannibals and Christians, parts of The Deer Park, parts of etc. Parts, always parts. The novelist Darin Strauss, confessing his Mailer-thing to me when I confessed mine, said, “Other writers are inconsistent book to book, but Mailer’s inconsistent within books, sometimes even within paragraphs …” I wonder: Does anyone credit Mailer this postmodern way, as a purveyor of fragments, a centrifuge of sentences? Mailer’s false accents—Texas, Patrician, boxer-tough—are like Orson Welles’s false noses. If only he’d landed, in the end, on a jeu d’esprit like F for Fake instead of the dreadful parade of King Tut, Oswald, Jesus, and Hitler …

  7.

  Joan Didion, 1979: “It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story.” Conrad Knickerbocker, 1965: “Mailer has evolved a rhetoric that moves far beyond his original naturalistic endowments. His words always hinge on the event, but he gives perspective to events with a kinetic poetry that turns the huge losses of his characters into, strangely, gains of a kind.” Knickerbocker again: “It’s such a vulnerable book. What wrenching innocence, what cool nerve, to write melodrama in the Age of Herzog!” Cynthia Buchanan, 1972: “We read him not for moon talk, not for mayor talk, not for marches or wars on women, but because he is ‘our genius’ … He is medium and metaphor; he is infinitely vulnerable.” Reading reviews of Mailer’s books pre-’80s, you glimpse the world that’s been lost (on both sides of the conversation). And twice comes that completely disarming and accurate judgment, that Mailer was above all “vulnerable.” Sticking to Mailer’s reviews pre-’80s, you wouldn’t know that Mailer was fatally out of fashion.

  8.

  But no. With my lifelong habit of attaching like a remora-fish to interesting readers older than myself, and now, in the profession of mentoring writers much younger, I feel uniquely well vantaged to make the sad judgment that Mailer is as much on the skids as the world of referents in his work is evaporating. If nearly anyone above a certain age surely holds a set of opinions on Mailer—had taken the task of understanding him, and not too quickly, as an appointment of their literary citizenship, even if a weary one—it was as certain that anyone below a certain age, even the most talented and alert of my students, take Mailer’s toxic preposterousness, and obsolescence, for granted. All the pomp of Mailer’s recent funeral rites, the endless tributes, felt like an era tucking itself in for the long night, rather than the graduation of Mailer’s best writing from the burden of his person. I suspect we saw the ark of Mailer’s work being pushed out to sea with the corpse aboard, not a moment too soon for a status quo for whom it still, fifty years on, conveyed fear of disarrangement.

  9.

  If, as in the Isaiah Berlin formulation, “the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” then Mailer’s gift and curse was to have been a hedgehog trapped inside an exploding fox. What the hedgehog knew was that the uncanny symbolic life of our imagination resolutely steered the outward action of the legible world, no matter how much we might legislate it out of existence or deny its relevance in one realm or another. This hedgehog thought had two tenets: First, that in any realm of collective experience or action the pressure of the denied myths would invariably make themselves crucial. Second, and paradoxically, that in the life of a given individual the nourishment and cultivation of the realm of the symbolic, the self’s own intangible dream stuff, was no small responsibility but a tender and delicate affair, endlessly at risk of betrayal or abandonment. Fair enough. The difficulty was that the fox in Mailer wanted to detonate this hedgehog of insight, like a grenade’s shrapnel, into five decades of culture, into McCarthyism, Vietnam, feminism, Gore Vidal, Madonna, Bret Easton Ellis, ensuring himself a dozen frags for every decent kill.

  10.

  “… the increasing anxiety of American life comes from the covert guilt that abundance and equality remain utterly separated, and we have reached the point where socialism is not only morally demanding but unconsciously obvious—obvious enough to flood with anxiety the psyches of those millions who know and yet do nothing.” That’s Mailer in 1953. Socialism as “unconsciously obvious”! The implication, that Marx’s work could only be fulfilled in Freud’s, and vice versa, sounds to me like nothing so much as Slavoj Zizek, the hipster-provocateur of contemporary political theory.

  11.

  I lived for a time in Canada, and found myself fascinated by the slavish pride of a culture basking in a self-recriminating joke. “A lobsterman turned his back on three catches in an uncovered bucket. A bystander worried the lobsters would escape, but the lobsterman waved him off, saying, ‘No problem, these are Canadian lobsters. If one reaches the top the others will pull him back in.’ ” Yet who, lately, seeing how transparent the Internet-comments culture has made our vast leveling rage, our chortling conformism and anti-intellectualism, our scapegoat-readiness, could keep from thinking: “We’re all Canadian lobsters on this bus.” If Mailer’s grievance, as stated in Advertisements, was “The Shits Are Killing Us,” then perhaps my grievance is along the lines of “We Have Met the Shits and They Is Us.” By temperament or generational necessity (or both), I find myself again and again compelled by questions of collective culpability in conspiracies of amnesia and distraction, and by the vicarious waste of our best attention to ourselves and the others beside us. Likely anyone would agree that for three decades Norman Mailer took up too damn much room. Lately I’ve wondered whether, if another Norman Mailer came along, there’d be any room for him to take up at all.

  White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist

  Manny Farber’s “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” is a characteristically thrilling rhetorical gesture from a critic I adore and who bewilders me (by disliking movies I adore). “The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizewinning creativity.” Whereas: “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Farber locates an instance of what he calls “one of the good termite performances” in John Wayne in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a film which otherwise annoys the critic: “Wayne’s acting is infected by a kind of hoboish spirit, sitting back on its haunches doing a bitter-amused counterpoint to the pale, neutral film life around him.” Then Farber generalizes: “The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” His examples range from newspaper columns to detective novels by Chandler and Ross Macdonald to, weirdly, “the TV debating of William Buckley” (I guess you had to be there).

  Once Farber’s termite-elephant paradigm crawled into my ear, it never burrowed out the other side. I find it shaping my responses to nearly anything. For instance, the New York Mets outfield: Carlos Beltran a White Elephant ballplayer, Angel Pagan a Termite. This is nonsense, of course, in terms of the outcome of the ball game: Whether Beltran or Pagan hits a home run, it counts the same. Similarly, if a John Irving novel alters your frame of reference, it counts as much as if the alteration is performed by, say, Charles Willeford, or Patricia Highsmith. Certainly Termite vs. Elephant needs to mean something deeper than Underpaid vs. Overpaid, or Underrated vs. Overrated, or it means nothing at all (and it’s unlikely John Way
ne was underpaid for gnawing at the edges of Ford’s film). Yet the situation complicates in the feedback loop of an audience’s projections: Are Pagan’s options on the field of play freer than Beltran’s? Can he do more, as a result of Termite-affect?

  Well, the juncture where this became personal should be obvious. Six books into avowed Termitism, somewhere between accepting an award for Motherless Brooklyn and the putting across of The Fortress of Solitude, I clambered into a White Elephant suit, the standard costume which, it looks to me, novelists of a certain “stature” are largely required to wear if they are to appear in public at all. (The other option, the infinitely seductive Invisible Elephant, anointed with silence-exile-cunning, may or may not be authentically available to anyone besides Pynchon and DeLillo anymore.) Please understand: I clambered in willingly. It’s a rare and coveted thing, an invitation to don that costume.

  A writer like me—well, me, specifically—had gone through an alternate-reality rehearsal for White Elephant Ops: On European book tour, France especially, where the instant a novelist of any type disembarks he or she’s taken as a cultural ambassador on par with Susan Sontag—when this first happened to me, trust me, no one in the United States was asking the fresh-faced author of As She Climbed Across the Table, one barely untethered from the sales counter of Moe’s Books, his opinion on Roth’s chances of a Nobel, or Clinton’s Kosovo policy. Did I explain to French or Germans that no one in America would flatter me with such questions? No. I weighed in. One silly morning in Turin I woke to a large headline in an Italian newspaper: A leading U.S. novelist had denounced Colin Powell, and he was I.

  But in those days I had only to board the airplane back to JFK to regain termite freedom.

  The splendor and disaster of elephant privileges were vivid to me before I tasted them myself: the peculiar immobility that made figures like Bellow, Heller, and Styron seem so dull before I’d read them (and then been sometimes surprised); the Ken Kesey escape act, which seemed to render him pitiable; the blowing-it-up-from-within of Joyce Carol Oates’s helpless overproductivity, which enraged people; the defiant enmeshing disaster of Mailer’s talking back to the problem, and his decades of faux-termite nonfiction, filmmaking, etc., before collapsing back into unwieldy-elephant-supreme; the woeful invisible-elephantism of Salinger; and so forth, leading up to the Agonies of Franzen.

  There were so many things, apparently, you couldn’t or shouldn’t do once you’d written a novel that succeeded in the “big” way (or even one that tried to—success being, always, in the eye of the beholder, unless your sales stacked to the moon, which mine didn’t). The worst of both worlds: The old high-modernist Authority of the role was in savage decline, yet White Elephants still seemed obliged to blunder around acting Authoritative, scorning opportunities for playfulness and distraction, never-apologizing-never-explaining (let alone replying to critics), stiffening in an encaustic of self-regard while waiting for the right young termite-wannabe-elephant to begin popping away with an elephant gun. Borges, in “Doctor Brodie’s Report,” describes the behavior of a certain tribe toward its elected king:

  Immediately upon his elevation he is gelded, blinded with a fiery stick, and his hands and feet are cut off, so that the world will not distract him from wisdom … If there is a war, the witch doctors take him from the cavern, exhibit him to the tribe to spur the warriors’ courage, sling him over their shoulders, and carry him as though a banner or talisman into the fiercest part of the battle. When this occurs, the king generally dies within seconds under the stones hurled at him by the Apemen.

  But I exaggerate.

  Anyway, I thought, my silly feelings about the bogus prerogatives invested in my role would be fun to explain, as part of the job of debunking bogus prerogatives—something to which I felt devoted, in a general way. I figured I’d had practice disappointing expectations before, for instance, by not wanting to follow my detective characters into sequel Conrad Metcalf or Lionel Essrog adventures. But those were termite-disappointments. (Termites migrated by Farber’s definition, chewing the bounds of their own commitments.) An elephant’s maneuvers, I found, were overdetermined. And there are elephant cops. Any caprice is taken as a dereliction of the novelist’s mission of grinding downfield with the stolid, earnest, edifying-redemptive football of “the novel,” a mission deemed crucial in a values-flattened, superficial, ironized culture. Of course, this takes for granted that we’re a values-flattened, superficial, ironized culture, one starved for stolid, earnest, edifying stuff. I don’t. My guess is that the not-too-secret secret of our times is that, behind a few self-congratulatory tokens of decadence and irony, an elephantine utilitarianism and conformism grinds at the center of our culture and its response to art and artists.

  So I’ve teased, haplessly, at disqualifying my own elephant function. Extracurricular engagements and deliberate “minor works” at least freshened my own sense of possibility, but none were really provocative enough to do more than lengthen the wait for the “next major novel.” The fact is that I waited, too, since my feeling for major novels is sincere and I’m proud and even amazed that people expect them from me. My bridges were left only half-burned, to the consternation of bystanders on both shores. But since my aesthetic methodology often involves splitting differences, it was natural for my career postures, once I realized I’d have to have some of those, to follow suit. This book is loaded with evidence of what termite moves you can still try to bust in an elephant suit. The sad fact is that a perfectly natural gesture of termitic appetite, like writing song lyrics for your friends in rock bands, may, coming from the perceived-elephant quadrant, resemble a gallery exhibition of Sylvester Stallone’s oil paintings.

  Out of my mingled termite-elephant fate, I learned two things that really mattered.

  One: Distrust self-authorizing perma-termites. This goes with my critique of the sentimental auto-marginalizing of (beloved) zones like science fiction, or Brooklyn. If my reservations about the collective ethos of Internet culture can be pinned to one description, it’s this: Internet culture flatters itself with the delusion of an infinitely renewable termite’s license, a permanent oppositional status pardoning all guerrilla actions. One day any termite wakes up to find it is, if not an elephant, then certainly the biggest termite in the room. And with a trunk and ears. (Honesty about one’s own power is an ethical prerequisite.)

  Two: We’re thrust onstage holding scripts—and I don’t just mean “novelists.” This is the Cassavetes insight I mentioned in “Stops,” and which gave form to much of Chronic City (as major a novel as I’ve managed): What counts is what freedom you can taste, and what love you can offer, from inside the role you’ve been handed. But your script exists.

  VII

  DYLAN, BROWN, AND OTHERS

  The incomplete is often more effective than completeness, especially in the case of eulogy: the aim of which requires precisely an enticing incompleteness as an irrational element which presents to the hearer’s imagination the illusion of a dazzling sea and obscures the coast on the other side, that is to say the limitations of the object to be eulogized, as though in a fog. When one refers to the known merits of a man and does so in detail and at length, it always gives rise to the suspicion that these are his only merits …

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Human, All Too Human

  I was afraid to write about music for a long time. I felt the obvious reluctance to try what seemed destined to fail but also wondered if I wanted to see my writing brain colonize an area of such sheer joy. I suppose my reader’s appetite for music writing made it inevitable that I’d shrug off the reservations. Once I did, my subject, typically, turned out to be the joy and the reservations.

  Joy first.

  Joy first.

  The Genius of James Brown

  1. The James Brown Statue

  In Augusta, Georgia, in May of this year, they put up a bronze statue of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, in the middle of Broad Street. In June, during a visit to mee
t James Brown and observe him recording parts of his new album in an Augusta studio, I went and had a look at it. The James Brown Statue is an odd one in several ways. For one, it is odd to see a statue standing not on a pedestal but flat on its feet on the ground. This was done at James Brown’s request, reportedly. The premise being: man of the people. The result, however: somewhat fake-looking statue. Another difficulty is that the statue is grinning. Members of James Brown’s band, present while he was photographed for reference by the statue’s sculptor, told me of their attempts to get James Brown to quit smiling for the photographs. A statue shouldn’t grin, they told him. Yet James Brown refused to do other than grin. It is the grin of a man who has succeeded, and as the proposed statue struck him as a measure of his success, he determined that it would measure him grinning. (Though in any of his many hundreds of compelling in-concert and backstage photographs James Brown scowls, squints, grits his teeth, performs facial expressions conveying detachment, ambivalence, dismay, aggression, and so on, in any publicity image—any posed photograph, say, taken alongside a president or mayor, or alongside some other showbiz legend, say, Aretha Franklin—James Brown says “cheese.” By James Brown the Augusta statue must have been deemed, essentially, publicity. Never apologize, never explain, and never let them see you without the rictus.) Otherwise, the statue is admirable: flowing bronze cape, helmetlike bronze hair perhaps not so much harder than the actual hair it depicts, and vintage bronze microphone with its base tipped, as if to make a kind of dance partner with James Brown, who is not shown in a dancing pose but nonetheless appears lithe, pert, ready.