The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  “The conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Here, fobbed off in one casual phrase, may be the crux: the conventional mental. Wood is too committed a reader not to have registered what he (apparently) can’t bear to credit: the growth of a sensibility through literacy in visual culture, in vernacular and commercial culture, in the culture of music writing and children’s lit, in graffiti and street lore. What’s at stake isn’t a matter of “alternate” or “parallel” literacies, since these others aren’t really separate. They interpenetrate and, ultimately, demand familiarity with the Bloomian sort of core-canonical literacy. (I couldn’t have written my character’s growth into snobbery without Portrait of a Lady and Great Expectations at my back, but James and Dickens were simply not where I boarded the bus.)

  What’s at stake is the matter of unsanctioned journeys into the life of culture. And I don’t believe anyone sanctions any other person’s journey into the life of culture. This is the point where I need to confess that my attention to James Wood, in the years since sending my letter, has been as cursory as it was before that uncomfortable passage (uncomfortable for me; I doubt my letter ruffled his feathers). Earlier I’d been content to sustain a cloudy image of a persuasive new critic who made people excited and nervous by passionately attacking novels that people (including myself) passionately believed in; now I found myself content to revise that in favor of an impression of an unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veiled—barely—a punitive parochialism. It didn’t make me want to read him, so I’m not qualified to make any great pronouncements. I’ve only glanced, over these years, and it may be that my confirmation bias is in play when I do. Here’s what I see in my glances. When Wood praises, he mentions a writer’s higher education, and their overt high-literary influences, a lot. He likes things with certain provenances; I suppose that liking, which makes some people uneasy, is exactly what made me enraged. When he pans, his tone is often passive-aggressive, couched in weariness, even woundedness. Just beneath lies a ferocity which seems to wish to restore order to a disordered world.

  Not that any God had me in mind, but if you’d designed a critic to aggravate me you couldn’t have done better. About books I’m Quakerish, believing every creature eligible to commune face-to-face with the Light; he’s a high priest, handing down sacred mysteries. To one who pines for a borderless literary universe, he looks like a border cop, checking IDs. The irony of Wood’s criticisms of Bloom is that Wood’s own “narcissism of minor difference” looks unmistakable: Wood is a critic whose better angels are at the mercy of his essentialist impulses.

  His postcard to me? I’ve lost it, but can give a reliable paraphrase, since after my outpouring, rather than address what I’d said, Wood spared me just one or two arched-eyebrow lines. It was as though my effort bore an odor of ingratitude. “I’m sorry you felt that way,” he wrote, more or less. “I liked the book so much more than any of your other work.” His tone, it seemed to me, that of an aristocrat who never really expected those below him to understand the function of the social order. He’s not angry, he’s disappointed. Well, that makes two of us.

  On Bad Faith

  My original letter to Wood included the suggestion that he was “in bad faith.” This, the confidante who vetted the letter wanted to challenge. He knew Wood and didn’t believe that was “the explanation” (though he couldn’t propose an alternative). But maybe it was a bridge too far. Reading the above, written eight years after, I see I’ve reached for the same term. What does it mean to me?

  I’m not actually trying to read James Wood’s mind, or to change it now. Whether Wood consciously or unconsciously betrayed a standard he recognizes, or could be made to recognize, doesn’t interest me. His piece is in bad faith. The instant it was published, with its blanketing tone of ruminative mastery, and yet with all it elides or mischaracterizes, it was so—period. It was in bad faith with my novel, and, I’d say, with novels, an enterprise to which Wood believes himself devoted, a belief I’d have no basis for challenging. So let’s call this “resultant bad faith,” a term which spares us the tedium and rage of guessing at the interior lives of those with whom we more than disagree.

  * As for “thinking about God,” was there ever a more naked instance of a critic yearning for a book other than that on his desk? Can Wood’s own negative capability not reach the possibility that in some life dramas “God” never made it to the audition, let alone failed to get onstage? Pity me if you like, but I can’t remember even considering believing in either God or Santa Claus. The debunking was accomplished preemptively, preconsciously. Hence, not a subject in my Bildungsroman. Sorry!

  The American Vicarious

  Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust

  1.

  Halfway through Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West’s eponymous protagonist blurts out:

  Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.

  The passage, so disconcertingly clean and direct that it could remind you of a Hollywood screenwriter’s treatment (that mercenary form in which West would come to specialize, a few years later), perhaps represents the book West suspects he ought to have written, or the book he suspects his reader thinks he ought to have written. That’s to say, a coherently tragic narrative grounded, under an urbane, lightly hard-boiled surface, in comprehensible “values.” The story this paragraph suggests is the sort that might have been nicely handled by a novelist like Horace McCoy, whose They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? could be considered a temperamental cousin to West’s, its metaphor of the dance marathon forming a lucid indictment of the failure of popular imagination to encompass the Great Depression’s dismantling of the American dream.

  Certainly this embodies a part of West’s intention. Lonelyhearts was inspired by glimpses of real letters written to a real advice columnist, and is set in a persuasively scoured and desperate early-’30s Manhattan, rendered with the scalpel precision that was West’s prose standard. And though his books have taken on a timeless value, one measure of his singular value is as a uniquely placed, and uniquely gifted, historical witness, a bridge between literary eras. His was a sensibility that extended the Paris-expatriate, surrealist-drunken sophistication of ’20s literary culture to the material and milieu of Steinbeck, Tom Kromer, Edward Dahlberg, Daniel Fuchs, and other ’30s writers (some explicitly tagged as “proletarian”)—that is, to poverty’s social depredations, with all the accompanying lowered sights, vicarious daydreams, and susceptibility to cults, fads, and games of chance.

  Yet hardly anything in this context prepares us as a reader for a plunge into the nihilistic, hysterical, grotesque-poetic frieze that is the fifty-eight-page “novel” we know as Miss Lonelyhearts. For what that inadequate synopsis implies (“for the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values”) is an approach to depicting fictional characters that is precisely the approach West couldn’t ratify: psychologically rounded, possessed of adequate reserves of self-possession, and capable of making and recognizing a traditional “mistake,” of making a hero’s progress through a typical plot, even if it is to be a tragic one. This isn’t West’s way. The journalist known to us only as “Miss Lonelyhearts,” like his antagonist-editor Shrike, indeed, like every human creature he encounters (including those “profoundly humble” authors of the advice-seeki
ng letters), is a species of chimera, in many ways a mystery to him- or herself. If West’s characters are human, it is only unfortunately so: trapped in a grossly prominent physical form, a creature lusting and suffering in bewildering simultaneity. As far as their “values,” or personalities, these are glimpsed only fleetingly against a screaming sky full of borrowed and inadequate languages and attitudes—commercial, religious, existentialist, therapeutic, criminal.

  West’s characters mostly don’t engage in conversation. In its place they toss blocks of rhetoric, of elegant mockery or despair, at one another like George Herriman’s Ignatz Mouse chucking a brick at Krazy Kat’s head. (In Lonelyhearts it isn’t only the letters but nearly all the characters’ speeches to which it is impossible to make reply.) The comparison of the form of Lonelyhearts to a comic strip isn’t mine but West’s, who intuited that for all his grounding in Dostoyevsky and T. S. Eliot, he needed to find some version of vernacular form to embody his insight that “violence in America is idiomatic.” The novel’s short, sardonically titled chapters persistently end in morbid slapstick and cumulatively take on a slanted, compacted quality, like crashed cars exhibited bumper-to-bumper. Dislodged on the very first page from traditional identification with the travails of Lonelyhearts’s protagonist—on one side by the horrific chorus of the advice-seeking letters themselves, on the other by the preemptive mockery of Shrike—the reader finds any possibility of redemptive self-pity brilliantly undermined. (A critic explained—or complained: “Violence is not only West’s subject, it is his method.”) West’s masterpiece is a mercilessly unsympathetic novel on the theme of sympathy.

  2.

  New York is vertical, Los Angeles horizontal, as well as three thousand miles farther from any grounding in European historical consciousness. The difference between West’s New York novel and The Day of the Locust, his Hollywood apocalypse, mimics these differences of cultural geography and form. Lonelyhearts is defined by stairwells and elevator shafts and basement speakeasies, Locust by the littering of a fundamentally desert landscape with arbitrary architectural monstrosities, with random and flimsy quotations of different building styles, whether for use as temporary movie sets or (barely more permanent) dwellings. Lizards scurry across this ground, and in place of Lonelyhearts’s claustrophobic compression, Locust’s savage attention flits from character to character, leaving more oxygen and sunlight between the comically lumpen human operators—though eventually they’ll crowd together and swarm this landscape like lemmings. Acutely conscious of the double-edged myths of Progress and Manifest Destiny (the diffident Jew Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein converted himself to the imperially urbane “Nathanael West” because, he joked, he’d heard Horace Greeley’s call to “Go West, young man”), West explicitly defines Los Angeles as the place where the American (egalitarian) dream has ended up, first to replicate itself in the synesthetic cartoons of the motion picture industry, and then, under the exposing glare of sunlight, to die.

  Of course it is also six years deeper into the Depression, and no one in Locust would bother, as does Shrike in Lonelyhearts, to puncture unattainable fantasies of luxurious bohemian escape. The inadvertent Californians in Locust have made their last migration, and in this zone of shoddy historical facsimiles history itself seems to have ground to an end. The aspiring painter Tod Hackett, the book’s best hope of a reader surrogate (and West’s best shot at such a thing, in any of the books), a protagonist-watcher who dares both to dream of love and to attempt an artistic encapsulation of what’s before him, can only plan a canvas depicting the gleeful burning of Los Angeles by its cheated inhabitants—in destruction, they might make it their own. West shows the film industry from its margins, the lame cast-off vaudevillians and extras, the aspirants and showbiz parents, grasping intuitively that these figures articulate the brief continuum between manufacturing and merchandising bogus dreams, and lining up to buy them. The pathetically wishful movie scenarios dreamed up by the wannabe-starlet Faye Greener, Tod Hackett’s tormenting love object, are hardly less viable than the sorts of films that West himself ended up dashing off during his facile stints as a studio writer—the point seems to be not simply that anyone could dream such stuff up but that everyone did, simultaneously. Most were buyers, not sellers. West’s diagnosis of the American vicarious anticipates both reality television (where Andy Warhol’s quip about everyone gaining fifteen minutes of fame became a drab processional) and the overturning of the “death tax” (where politicians aroused a righteous populist indignation in favor of the inheritance of fortunes, just on the chance every American would acquire their rightful own). West wouldn’t have wondered what’s the matter with Kansas, and he knew the problem wasn’t limited to Kansas, or Los Angeles, or the ’30s. In 1967 Gilbert Sorrentino discerned The Day of The Locust’s prediction of Ronald Reagan’s future presidency, and this book, a sun-blazed Polaroid of its moment, seems permanently oracular.

  3.

  West’s ultimate subject is the challenge (the low odds, he might insist) of negotiating between on the one hand the ground-zero imperatives and agonies of the body, and on the other the commoditized rhetorics of persuasion, fear, envy, guilt, acquisition, and sacrifice (those voices that George Saunders has nicknamed “The Braindead Megaphone” of late capitalism) in hopes of locating an intimate ground of operation from which an authentic loving gesture might effectively be launched. That he identified this challenge as a baseline twentieth-century American dilemma as early as he did granted him a superb relevance to the future of American literature—the ongoing future, I’d say. In the weeks while I’ve been rereading West, the unfolding of a global financial collapse has many speaking of a “second Great Depression,” the public mechanics of which will certainly be subject to the same forces of transference, denial, and fantasy that West made his obsessive motifs. Last month in suburban Long Island, on the day nicknamed “Black Friday” for its hopes of pushing retail accounts into the black of profit, a tide of bargain-fevered shoppers trampled to death a retail clerk attempting to manage their entry into his store. The newspaper business has almost dissolved beneath a willful tide of “authentic” voices demanding to be heard; its response is nearly as neurotic as Miss Lonelyhearts’s. Which of West’s contemporaries can we imagine weighing in intelligibly on blogging, or viral marketing? (Picture Ernest Hemingway’s blank stare—and he lived a quarter-century longer than West—or F. Scott Fitzgerald in a fetal position.) By applying the magpie aesthetics of surrealism and T. S. Eliot to the “American Grain,” by delving into the popular culture and emerging not with surrender or refusal but with an acid-drenched, double-edged critique, West became the great precursor to Heller, Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Colson Whitehead, and so much else, probably including Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” West died, with his wife, in an automobile collision while returning to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico. His biographer, Jay Martin, gives evidence of the many books West had sketched out to write after Locust; the greatest phantom-limb oeuvre in American fiction.

  —The Believer, 2009

  IX

  THE MAD BROOKLYNITE

  He’s broken our hearts yet again.

  —The Brooklyn Paper, 2011

  I suppose I’m ambivalent about Brooklyn, in a can’t-take-it, can’t-leave-it way. Periodically I “pull a geographical,” to use the addict’s terminology. Yet the witness protection program has never protected me from my own long witnessing.

  Ruckus Flatbush

  The Manhattan Bridge is spring-loaded and cars tilt off like bad pinballs aimed with deranged precision at the Williamsburg Dentist’s Bunker Tower and then score, lighting it up with a honking buzz that makes you need your braces tightened again—rubber-band my jaw and start over. Junior’s a Tang wedding cake permanently on fire, smoke and scorch wreathing from the upper banquet-hall windows. A guy with teeth the size of manhole covers bites into a cheesecake and pastrami on latkes triple-decker and a chunk of translucent pastrami fat falls sizzling of
f the curb melting the black tar and causing a swerving wreck between a block-long mafioso stretch limo and a Philip Guston garbage truck with a real dead cat strapped to its grille. Three siblings in identical bowl cuts emerge blinking from the Department of Health, each with freshly fitted Medicare spectacles, identical plastic frames, three Swifty Lazars in Moe haircuts. Mom tugs them across and they get stranded like ducklings on the median line. The wind smashes the hands of the tower’s clock off line like Dr. Seuss fingers, today is Pluter-day, twenty-five o’clock on Ruckus Flatbush!

  May not be a crack in everything but there surely is in Brooklyn and you’re falling in, scrabbling fingers finding no purchase, help somebody I got wedged in Butt Flash Avenue!

  Serial killer’s picking off the end of the line at the DMV renewal window and nobody notices.

  Harry M. Octopus Institute of Practically Nothing Anyhow. One Year Certificate. One flight up.

  WE FIX U GOOD.

  Third Degree, Fourth Degree, Butt Flash Extension. South Pockmark Avenue. Corner of Pock and Butt.

  Eight-foot-tall man in a perfect Malcolm X suit selling whole leopard skins and persimmon oil and cobra-venom incense and a table of books by some conspiracy wrangler named Napoleon Fung gets hungry for a Jamaican meat patty wrapped in spice bread. Wrap that in a slice of pizza and cough out a chicken bone you didn’t even know was in there. Drumstick bones in an accumulating heap teeter down the subway portal. The city bus skids off Butt Flash, onto Full Time, doomed pedestrians swept in its Soylent Green people-catcher depositing them in a jumble onto the Albeit Squalor Mall escalators, going up!