But if Philip was angry much of the time, there was beneath it all an affecting and abiding gentleness, a real if biting sense of humor, and throughout, a strange vulnerability. One felt that his arduous grappling with the world of men and ideas had caused him anguish, and that a sense of the disparity between the scrupulous demands of his conscience and vision—whether reflected in literature or life—and the excesses and lunacies of modern society had laid actual hands on him, wrenching him with a discomfort that was nearly intolerable. At the same time, I delighted in his ease and pleasure in preparing good food, in being a host for the men and women he respected and chose to charm. He was often a difficult and prickly soul, at once outgoing yet so secretive as to be almost unknowable. I was proud to be a friend, if only because he was a man who, steadfast to the end, held to those principles and ideas that he felt to be liberating, humane, and—Philip, I can almost see you flinch at the word—eternal.
[Speech delivered at a memorial service, Brandeis University, January 1974.]
Remembering Ralph
I first got to know Ralph Ellison back in the early 1960s, when he and Fanny often came up to Connecticut for weekend visits. We had wonderful, rather liquid evenings. Our Virginia and Alabama by way of Oklahoma origins gave us a common ground of interest, and we talked about Southern matters—such things as bird dogs and cars and whiskey and the native cuisine. This is not to say that we shied away from intellectual or social concerns, far from it, but though the civil rights movement was on the horizon we rarely spoke of race and the racial conflict. Neither, for some reason, did we dwell much on literary things. A mutual reticence, I suppose, kept us from talking about our own novels. Which, as I reflect on it, was a great pity, for I really yearned to have the courage to tell him how passionately I admired Invisible Man.
Recently I received a set of the volumes in the new and beautiful Modern Library. I was especially pleased to see that Invisible Man was one of the few novels by a contemporary writer included in this collection. Invisible Man surely deserves its place among the modern classics. It appeared in 1952, a year after my own first novel was published, and I recall that when I first read it I had none of the envy first novelists have for each other, because I realized I was in the presence of one of those amazing books that one can call transforming. A transforming work is one that breaks all the rules and causes you to rearrange your understanding of the world so radically that an important part of you, at least—your conscience or your sensibility, probably both—is never really the same again. Invisible Man is, of course, essentially about the anguish of being black in America, but countless books have been written about that experience, and while many of these have been excellent only a very few have been transforming. The difference between Invisible Man and these others, and what makes it a masterpiece, is that it is a great fable which, though it never loses the particularity of its negritude, is really about the half-madness of the human condition.
Ralph was an artist of the first rank and his artistry is the secret ingredient of the book, really, and the reason why its naked bleakness and manic glee continue so to haunt white people as well as black people and to command our respect and attention. As only a few writers have done—Gogol is one, Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn is another—Ralph, with his musician's sense of tonality, struck the perfect eternal pitch between hilarity and excruciating pain, and the reverberations have been immense and lasting. He will be with us as long as the written word has meaning.
[Sewanee Review, January–March 2009.]
C. Vann Woodward
One of my great strokes of luck was to have known Vann Woodward for a very long time. Forty-six years ago—1954, to be exact—Rose and I had a lunch of crab cakes with Vann in Baltimore, where he was teaching at Johns Hopkins, and for me it was love at first sight. Needless to say, I was not alone in my intense admiration. It was not difficult for anyone with normal human responses to fall under the spell of this beguilingly soft-spoken man, who understood so much about so many matters, and imparted his generous wisdom with so little pretense and such good humor. I say good humor guardedly; while geniality was certainly his dominant mood, he was not put here on earth to spread sweetness and light, as can be demonstrated by virtually every one of his distinguished works. I always awaited with keen pleasure, when I was with him, the withering diatribes that so accurately skewered their target, usually some wretched and worthless politician who posed a momentary danger to the Republic.
Role model is a term of which I'm not particularly fond but I'll use it anyway. Consider, if you will, Vann's amazing physical self, living to the age of ninety-one with such undiminished energy, the mind capable of turning out powerfully discerning and imaginative books and essays that appeared for well over two decades after most of his contemporaries had vanished into the coffins of their Barcaloungers. Who wouldn't want to emulate a man in whom such a mysterious life force seemed to mock triumphantly all our notions about age and aging? Once, not long ago, I tried to fathom the secret, or secrets, of Vann's tireless vitality so humiliating to those of us in our sixties and seventies. For many summers, Vann came up for brief visits on Martha's Vineyard. He and I always scheduled a single long walk together. A couple of summers ago we slogged along the beach in the hot sun for over an hour. As usual he kept up with my pretty steady pace, and at the end of the hike he was scarcely winded despite his eloquent, nearly nonstop analysis of the odious tactics of Kenneth Starr, whom he called, I remember, “a Christian terrorist,” and “a demonstrable moral imbecile.” Back at the house, we had noontime drinks and I then plunged into my inquiry.
“Vann,” I said, “how do you do it? This vigor.”
“Part of it may be this,” he replied, indicating his vodka martini.
“No, seriously,” I continued, “is it your diet? Are you really careful about what you eat?”
“Not particularly,” he said, “…a certain amount of animal fat every day.”
“Then surely,” I persisted, “it's exercise. Do you exercise regularly?”
“Yes,” he said, “regularly every summer I take this walk with you.”
His fellow historians and his students are better equipped than I am to describe and celebrate Vann's contribution to the study of history and to our culture, a gift which is clearly monumental. As for myself, I could not have written much of my work without Vann Woodward's books as guideposts to my own historical awareness. Although Southerners of different generations, or nearly so, we both grew up in states, Arkansas and Virginia, where segregation was a grinding and sinister reality; both of us were from families in which the ownership of slaves had left the stain of remorse. This shared background provided each of us with a reason to try to divine the origins of an appalling dilemma that burdened the society where we were reared. When I first read The Strange Career of Jim Crow, I experienced what some call an epiphany; at last I could discern the provenance of that demented structure of laws which throughout my lifetime had kept a race of people in a virtual replica of bondage. Vann's book was in effect the essential missing link that bound the present to the past. His vision clarified for all time the moral and political breakdown that made a mockery of emancipation and the principle of liberty and justice for all. For one who, like myself, was trying to decipher the conundrum of race and the cruel bequest of slavery, it was a revelation.
Vann's spaciousness of mind—he was, of course, the epitome of the liberated Southerner—allowed him to chastise the citizens of his native region, but he was ever mindful of its sometimes nearly unbearable contradictions. He knew better than almost anyone the power of the traditions that shaped the souls of Southerners, the load of panic, fear, and mistrust that history itself had imposed on Southern minds. Nothing better demonstrated his understanding of this tortured ambiguity than the reflection he made to me soon after he returned from the famous march on Selma in 1965, when he'd joined with other historians to express solidarity with the growing civil rights movement. Tow
ard the end of the procession, the marchers had been set upon by a huge mob of Alabama rednecks, screaming and jeering, their harm and vicious intent forestalled only by the presence of the National Guard. “I was shaken up badly,” Vann said. “But you know something? I looked into those raging white trash faces and I saw myself there, if things had gone another way for me. Part of my heart went out to those people.”
It was a remark I’ve never forgotten, and I'm still not sure whether Vann was aware of how those few wrenching words captured the essence of his own tragic and majestic view of the Southern experience.
I'm only sorry that during his last days I failed to visit him more often in the rather dismal place where he lodged. I say this with the deepest regret if only because, if I had done so, I would have been able to pay back Vann in kind for all the attention he paid to me years ago, in New Haven, when I was locked away on a mental ward. Except for Rose, no one visited me more faithfully or often during those many weeks, and I would await his presence eagerly, looking forward to the hour or so when he would sit in my room, chatting in his soft voice about books and politics and the desperate mediocrity of certain public figures and other poignant topics. Vann did most of the talking; indeed, he was forced into a monologue for I was virtually mute, and I'll always recall how his gentle murmurous voice was a growing consolation, reaching out to me through the fog of my madness. There was such reason there, such calm wisdom, such humor, such sanity. And now, reflecting on those therapeutic hours, I think I can understand how his being there may have worked upon mean effect not dissimilar from that which his noble body of work has had upon the world at large. That is, a voice sane and logical, eloquent, balancing despair with hope, bringing order to the madness of history, teaching us how to live at peace with great events.
[This tribute to Woodward was read at the Academy Dinner Meeting, April 4, 2000.]
It Cannot Be Long
Willie Morris left us much too soon. It seems inconceivable to me that now, after our friendship of nearly thirty-five years, I won't be hearing that soft voice calling me from Jackson, Mississippi, on the telephone. For many years he'd addressed me by the name of the narrator of one of my novels. “Stingo,” I'd hear him say, “this is Willie. Are you in good spirits?” When I'd tell him I was or wasn't, or was somewhere in between, he'd then ask the next most urgent question. For Willie the creatures in God's scheme of things that ranked right next to people in importance were dogs, and he would ask about my golden retriever and black Lab. “How is Tashmoo? And how is Dinah? Give them all my love.” Now that impish and tender voice is gone forever.
In 1965, before I ever met him, Willie extracted from me a long article for the issue of Harper’s commemorating the end of the Civil War. Shortly after this I first laid eyes on Willie in the office at Yale University of the South's greatest historian, C. Vann Woodward, from whom Willie had also enticed an essay for that issue. That afternoon I drove Willie into New York City and we got so passionately engrossed in conversation, as Southerners often do when they first meet, about places and historical events and ancestral connections—in particular, our stumbling upon the realization that my North Carolina–born great-great-uncle had been state treasurer of Mississippi when Willie's great-great-grandfather was governor—we got so hypnotically involved in such talk that I missed the correct toll booth at the Triborough Bridge and drove far into Long Island before the error dawned.
I can't imagine a more glorious time for writers and journalists than the frenzied last years of the ’60s when Willie, a mere kid, was guiding Harper’s Magazine with such consummate skill and imagination, summoning the finest writing talents in America to describe and interpret an unprecedented scene of social upheaval, with the war in Vietnam and racial strife threatening to blow the country apart. In the pages of his magazine Willie orchestrated these themes—and sub-themes like the sexual revolution—with the wise aplomb of an editorial master, and for several golden years his creation was the preeminent journal in the nation, not only its keenest observer of political and social affairs but its most attractive literary showcase.
I was a night person in those days, and Willie too was nocturnal, and I think it was partly our mutual restlessness—two excited Southern nightowls on the prowl in the Big Cave, as he called New York City—that cemented our friendship. We also spent countless evenings together in one or another of our homes in the country north of the city. Needless to say, we shared a great deal of strong drink, which helped us know each other better. What I came to know about Willie, among other things, was that an innate and profound Southernness was the energizing force in his life and what made him tick. Not that he was a professional Southerner—he despised the obvious Dixieland clichés—and he got along well with Yankees; he had a richly and often humorously symbiotic relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, many of whom admired him as much as he did them. It was just that he felt more at home with Southerners, with whom he could share tall tales and indigenous jokes and family anecdotes and hilarious yarns that only the South can provide, and that perhaps only expatriate Southerners can enjoy in their cloying and sometimes desperate homesickness. Even then I had very little doubt that someday Willie would return home to Mississippi.
As I got to know Willie and became a close and devoted friend, I learned certain immutable things about him. I learned that he was unshakably loyal, that he was amazingly punctual about birthdays and commemorations and anniversaries of all sorts, that he drank past healthy limits and that booze sometimes made him maudlin but never mean, that he was wickedly funny, that his country-boy openheartedness and candor masked an encyclopedic knowledge and an elegantly furnished mind, that he was moody and had a streak of dark paranoia that usually evaporated on a comic note, that he was an inveterate trickster and anecdotalist of practical jokes, that his furiously driven literary imagination allowed him to produce several unostentatious masterworks; that in him, finally, there was an essential nobility of spirit—no one ever possessed such a ready and ungrudging heart.
One of Willie's obsessions, aside from dogs, was graveyards. We went to many a burial ground together, from Appomattox to Shiloh. Once, on one of the many visits to Mississippi, he drove me out to a country cemetery some miles from Oxford. We had a few drinks and after a while he took me for a stroll among the headstones. Then, lo and behold, we spied an open book, a novel, propped against a grave marker. It took me a minute to realize that Willie had planted there my first novel, open to its epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne:
And since death must be the Lucina of life…since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos…since our longest sun sets at right descencions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes….
He was obviously delighted at my surprise. For Willie, a son of the South and from the town of Yazoo, death was as fitting, in its place and season, as life—the life in which he achieved so much and gained such glory.
[Oxford American, September/October 1999. The title is an allusion to St. Augustine, Confessions, 11.15.20—a meditation on the brevity of our memories of the departed.]
My Neighbor Arthur
Americans, including writers and artists, are supposed to be compulsively sociable, but I lived for six years as a close neighbor of Arthur Miller's in Roxbury—a rural village then populated with but six hundred souls—before we ever laid eyes on each other. Even then we met in, of all places, the lobby of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich, where we had converged on separate literary missions. Arthur was aware, as I was, of the oddness of our not having met, for in Munich his first words to me were those which Stanley might have wished he had actually used upon encountering Livingstone, i.e., “At Last!” This was in 1961, a short while after he had married Inge Morath, who was accompanying him and who helped make our brief sojourn in Bavaria such a pleasure. Like Eckermann on his first visit to Goethe,* I think I was prepared to find something about A
rthur that was fairly Olympian. I am regrettably susceptible to unsubstantiated opinion, and in New York several years before this an academic gentleman of forlorn mien told me, after I said I was an unfulfilled neighbor of Arthur's, that when I finally met him I would be encountering a man of “sadness and incredible dignity, like Abraham Lincoln.”
This asinine impression derived more, of course, from the general gravity of the Miller oeuvre than from the man. Arthur, I discovered, has as much dignity as the next person but the primary characteristic he shares with Lincoln is that of great height; as for sadness, Arthur manages to conceal his with deftness. The salient feature of Arthur's personality is, as a matter of fact, humor, and his comedic gift is the quality that makes him such buoyant company.
It is a sense of humor born out of the memory of neediness and hard times, and is one that haunts his otherwise intense and rather somber view of life. In the past thirty years I've spent many hours listening to Arthur, at each other's houses in Connecticut or on certain peculiarly conceived trips that have taken us to the globe's far corners—Chile, for example, or Egypt. When I remember Arthur settling back in a deck chair on a luxurious boat cruising the Nile—exclaiming expansively, “What is it that the working class is complaining about?”—I realize that the laughter induced in me by the mock-plutocratic tone has an ambiguous quality owing to my knowledge of his working-class experience and allegiance. Likewise, an exquisitely American perception of the dynamics of class and power overlaid his response to the colossal Pharonic effigies sculpted into the cliffs of Abu-Simbel. They were created, Arthur observed, in precisely the same spirit as that which caused to be erected the various facades of the National City Bank Building and bore the identical intimidating message for their beholders: “We're in charge here. Keep the hell out.” Traveling with Arthur as I have over so many thousands of terrestrial miles has not been like traveling with your run-of-the-mill CEO, say, or a politician. His curiosity is unquenchable, his ability to make associative connections is formidable, and it is all held in equipoise by a marvelous sense of the absurd. However, his pleasure in travel seems provisional. One feels his longing to get back to the Connecticut countryside and to his fine but sensibly proportioned house, where he can look at the woods and fields which he has been looking at serenely for over forty years.
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 56
