The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  All these attitudes and atmospheres fell away no earlier than sixty or seventy years into the twentieth century: it took that long for nineteenth-century literary sensibilities to ebb. Modernism hardly contradicted these impressions; it confirmed and augmented them. But by the 1970s, the novel as the holy vessel of imagination (itself having deposed poetry) was undone. Magazines dropped fiction. Notions of journalism as the equal of imaginative writing took hold ("the nonfiction novel," pioneered by Truman Capote, replicated by Norman Mailer). Bohemians who had been willing enough to endure the romantic penury of cold-water walkups while sneering at popular entertainment were displaced by beatniks who were themselves popular entertainment. Walt Whitman was transmogrified into Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. From beat you were to infer beatific, and the New Age of faux mysticism (via hallucinogens) had begun. New theories leveled the literary terrain—so that, visiting Yale a decade or so ago, I was startled to encounter a young professor of English deconstructing a hamburger advertisement with the same gravity as an earlier professoriat would have devoted to a discussion of Paradise Lost.

  With such radical (and representative) changes in the culture, and with High Art in the form of the novel having lost its centrality, the nature of ambition too was bound to alter. This is not to say that young writers today are no longer driven—and some may even be possessed—by the strenuous forces of literary ambition. Zeal, after all, is a constant, and so must be the pool, or the sea, of born writers. But the great engines of technology lure striving talents to television and Hollywood, or to the lighter varieties of theater, or (especially) to the prompt gratifications and high-velocity fame of the magazines, where topical articles generate buzz and gather no moss. The sworn novelists, who, despite the devourings of the hour, continue to revere the novel (the novel as moss, with its leisurely accretions of character and incident, its disclosures of secrets, its landscapes and cityscapes and mindscapes, its idiosyncratic particularisms of language and insight)—these sworn novelists remain on the scene, if not on the rise.

  Still, there is a difference. The altars are gone. The priests are dead. Writers and artists of all kinds are no longer publicly or privately abashed by the rewards of commerce. The arbiters of literary culture have either departed (few remember Irving Howe, say, or Randall Jarrell) or have devolved into popular celebrities, half sage, half buffoon.

  When I began Trust, close to fifty years ago, ambition meant what James Joyce had pronounced it to be, in a mantra that has inflamed generations: silence, exile, and cunning. Silence and exile were self-explanatory: the novelist was to be shut away in belief—self-belief, perhaps—and also in the monkish conviction that Literature was All. But cunning implied something more than mere guile. It hinted at power, power sublime and supernal, the holy power of language and its cadences—the sentence, the phrase, and ultimately, primordially, the word: the germ of being. As chosen sibyl of the word, I was scornful of so-called writers who produced "drafts," in the shape of an imperfect spew to be returned to later, in order, as one novelist described it, "to polish the verbal surface." The verbal surface! The word could no more be defined by its surface than the sea could be fathomed by its coastline; and I could no more abandon a sentence, even temporarily, than I could skip a substantial interval of breathing with a promise to make up for it afterward. Until the sentence, the phrase, the word were as satisfactorily woven as the weaver's shuttle could thread them, I would not tread further: in Henry James's formulation, "the finer thread, the tighter weave." Or recall Jacob's struggle with the angel: "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." Until I felt its nimbus, I would not let any cluster of words go.

  It was slow work, and it owed more to Henry James than it did to the angel of Genesis. I kept on my writing table (a worn old hand-me-down, three feet by one and a half, that I had acquired at age eight) a copy of The Ambassadors, as a kind of talisman. I kept it there not so much for the sake of James's late prose (though it often seemed that his penchant for intrusively interlocutory adverbs seeped into my fountain pen's rubber ink bladder) as for the scent of ambition: the worldliness of his characters, the visual brilliance of his long scenes, the seductiveness of his betrayals, the veiled innocence of his young women, the subtlety of his moral conundrums, and not least his debt to human possibility, and also to human taint. His muse was tragic; and so was mine. What James felt in his worship of Balzac was what I suffered in my fealty to James: Balzac appeared to him "so multitudinous, so complex, so far-spreading, so suggestive, so portentous— ... such misty edges and far reverberations—that the imagination, oppressed and overwhelmed, shrinks from any attempt to grasp it whole." Yet it was just this multitudinousness, this complexity, this far-spreadingness I was after. I named my novel Trust with biting intent: it was to denote a vast and cynical irony. I meant to map every species of ¿fotrust—between parent and child; between husband and wife; between lovers; between Europe and America; between Christians and Jews; between God and man; in politics and in history. Before the term Holocaust was put to use or even known, the death camps entered Trust; in 1957, scarcely a decade after the ovens had cooled, who could fail to address them? (Many did.) Enoch Vand, my protagonist's stepfather, confronting the goddess Geopolitica, records the names of the victims in masses of ledgers:

  And he could not confess for the sake of whom or what he dug down deep in those awesome volumes, sifting their name-burdened and number-laden leaves as soil is spaded and weighed in search of sunken graves and bones time-turned to stone—he could not say or tell.... Enoch leaned brooding among the paper remnants of the damned: the lists and questionnaires, the numbers and their nemeses; every table spread with the worms' feast; the room a registry and bursary for smoke and cinders. Over it all his goddess hung. If she wore a pair of bucklers for her breasts, they gleamed for him and shimmered sound like struck cymbals; if slow vein-blood drooped like pendants from her gored ears, they seemed to him jewels more gradual than pearls—she formed herself out of the slaughter, the scarves and winds of smoke met to make her hair, the cinders clustered to make her thighs; she was war, death, blood, perpetual misbirths; she came up enlightened from that slaughter like a swimmer from the towering water-wall with his glorified face; she came up an angel from that slaughter and the fire-whitened cinders of those names. She came up Europa.

  And elsewhere, the meditation of a refugee from Vienna, reduced in exile to a servant:

  Grit is one of the eternals. The chimneys heave their laden bladders, the grit is spawned out of a domestic cloud in the lowest air, the black footless ants appear on the sill. Brush away, mop away, empty buckets with zeal; grit returns. Everything is flux; grit is forever. Futility is day after day. Time is not what we suppose, moments in an infinite queue, but rather a heavy sense that we have been here before, only with hope, and are here again, only without it. "Your luck will not change," says Time, "give up, the world has concerns of its own," says Time, "woe cannot be shared," says Time, "regret above all is terrifyingly individual." And Time says, "Take no comfort in your metaphysics of the immortality of the race. When your species has evolved out of recognition grit will be unspoiled. There will always be grit. It alone endures. It is greater than humanity."

  But it is not greater than humanity; it is the same. We join the particles in their dance on the sill. It is the magnificent Criminal plan, to shove us into the side of a hill, mulch us until we are dissolved into something more useful but less spectacular than before, and send us out again in the form of a cinder for some churl of a descendant to catch in his eye, cursing.... Who can revere a universe which will take that lovely marvel, man (after all the fierce mathematics that went into him, aeons of fish straining toward the dry, gill into lung, paw into the violinist's and the dentist's hand), and turn him into a carbon speck?

  Of course none of this can be construed as Jamesian. Perhaps, after all, such passages carry, rather, the spirit of Ecclesiastes (or, as some may say, the Book of Fustian). In any case, Tru
st in its voraciousness went everywhere. It went into verses and puns; its population proliferated—lawyers, editors, diplomats, nannies, colonels, schoolgirls; it grew limbs of metaphor and Medusa-heads of dialogue; it wandered toward the lyrical-mystical in an apostrophe to a tree. It set out, in raw competitiveness, to rival the burgeoning sexual openness of the late fifties—and also to deride, twenty years in advance of it, William Gass's 1976 dictum that women "lack that blood-congested genital drive" that is at the root of style. An early reviewer, writing not in unstinting praise, nevertheless acknowledged "evidence of extraordinary ambition in the scope of the novel," and remarked that "the long visionary account of the love-making between the heroine's father and a young woman surpasses anything Mailer has ever done, indeed is managed with the ingenuity and resourcefulness of a French cineaste." To be fair, this same reviewer "frankly confessed] that the novel gave me little pleasure."

  Recently I reread—for the first time since high school—William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham. Here was a novel that gave me great pleasure: the prose plain and direct, the characters lifelike, engaging, trustworthy, the plotting realistically plausible and gratifyingly suspenseful. All the same, when you compare Howells with James, the disparity of mind and sensibility—what each man aspired to, or could attain—arouses a perplexity. How could these two have been, as they were, literary companions? Howells occupies a few well-spent hours; * James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life. That seizure, I suppose, points to the kind of ambition I fastened on in my twenties. In those years my hungriest uncle (hungry in every sense: one of five, he was the only one who attempted to feed his family by means of his pen) was still living: he was a poet. Matchless in three languages, he chose to make his mark in Hebrew. His poetry was complex, visionary, hugely erudite, with, here and there, noble biblical resonances and classical turns that recalled, to an eminent literary critic, Milton and Shelley. Some of my uncle's work he himself rendered into English; but when any eagerly willing translator approached him, he drove the hapless volunteer off with arrogant scorn; he recognized no peer; he had a consciousness of anointment. I will wait, he announced, a thousand years for the right translator! Today my uncle is unknown; his life's achievement is in blackest obscurity.

  That superannuated consciousness of anointment has also long been obscured—to speak of it now is likely to induce derision. But surely Joyce had it, unalloyed, in writing Ulysses, and particularly in the esoteric labors of Finnegans Wake; and James

  had it, shadowed in his final years by the failure of his New York Edition, designed to consolidate his stature; and among contemporary American writers it can be descried in Updike, Roth, and Bellow—all of whom began in the penumbra of nineteenth-century literary ambition, which has long masqueraded as modernism.

  Trust was written in that same penumbra, with that same consciousness of anointment, though its shadowy fate, despite a handful of paperback reissues over the years, mostly resembles that of my uncle's grandly bedizened stanzas. Nearly four decades have passed since my first novel first saw print. Perhaps my style has grown plainer as I have grown older; perhaps not. But surely I have acquiesced in the alterations of the common literary culture.

  And here it is needful to recall a hiatus—a cut that fell like an ax. Sometime in the seventies, the old ambition was routed by an invader called the nouveau roman. Its name was French because its inventors and original practitioners were French: most prominently, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Their idea of the novel turned out to be nothing more than a fad, a brutalizing one, touted by a few influential American critics writing in advanced periodicals with the intention of shaming the traditional novel out of existence. I cannot now reconstruct or characterize this "new novel," except out of a wash of ebbing memory. It was icily detached; it was "objective" and unsentimental; it cared more for space and time than for stories or souls; its bloodless aesthetic was minutely deadpan; its dialogue tended to be expressed in arid aperçus; often it read like a stilted translation of Roland Barthes. And finally it was repudiated by its chief American promulgator, who, as if by imperial fiat, rehabilitated what had been, as if by imperial fiat, imposed. For fiction writers who resisted being drawn into the tide of literary pronouncements from above (or who were temperamentally alien to it), it was an enervating and marginalizing season.

  Ephemeral though they were, these new pieties and prescriptions did throw a light on the nature of the old ambition. The nouveau roman arrived as an extension of cultural power by a coterie of celebrated literary figures determined to wield it. The introduction of literary philosophies from abroad aimed to force an avant-garde: those who declined to follow were dismissed as either obsolete or mediocre. As God had been declared dead by certain theologians, so now was the novel—the novel as it had been understood and illumined from, say, Tolstoy to E. M. Forster, or from Virginia Woolf to Faulkner; or, in any event, before Robbe-Grillet. But the old ambition of the penumbra had been hammered out of the self, bare of any desire for social or cultural hegemony. It asserted its conviction of hard-won ownership, from which derived its authority; but it was the authority of innerness, of interior powers wrested out of language itself. By contrast, it was critical will alone that fueled the nouveau roman. The novels of its fashionable American disciples were critics' novels. No one can say that they died with a whimper—even a whimper requires a pulse.

  If I press on in homage to the old ambition, I intend more than praise for writers' limitless appetite. I am thinking of readers. Here, then, is a very long paragraph, written in 1909:

  I was returning home by the fields. It was midsummer; the hay harvest was over, and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers—red, white and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white ox-eye daisies with their bright yellow centers and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms, tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow, red and pink scabious; plantains with faintly scented, neatly arranged purple, slightly pink-tinged blossoms; cornflowers, bright blue in the sunshine and while still young, but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate quickly withering almond-scented dodder flowers. I gathered a large nosegay of these different flowers, and was going home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a beautiful thistle plant of the crimson kind, which in our neighborhood they call "Tartar," and carefully avoid when mowing—and if they do happen to cut it down, throw out from among the grass from fear of pricking their hands. Thinking to pick this thistle and put it in the center of my nosegay, I climbed down into the ditch, and, after driving away a velvety humble-bee that had penetrated deep into one of the flowers and...

  But the paragraph, though it goes on well beyond this, must be interrupted. It is the start of Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, in Aylmer Maude's translation. (My uncle's poetry was composed rather in this vein.) I interrupt the paragraph for two reasons—first, because of what must appear to be gargantuan hubris: what is a passage from Tolstoy, the pinnacle of all novelists, doing here, in these ruminations on an emphatically inconspicuous work by an emphatically unnoticed young writer holed up almost half a century ago in a little house at the farthest margin of the Bronx? It is precisely for the sake of hubris that it is here. Without it, how can I lay out the untamed lustful graspingness, the secret tough-hearted avarice, of the old ambition?

  More than twenty years ago, in an essay called "The Lesson of the Master," I bitterly excoriated that ambition:

  The true Lesson of the Master, then, is, simply, never to venerate what is complete, burnished, whole, in its grand organic flowering or finish—never to look toward the admirable and dazzling end; never to be ravished by the goal; never to worship ripe Art or the ripened artist; but instead to seek to be young while young, primitive while primitive, ungainly while ungainly—to look for crudeness and rudeness, to husband one's own stupidity or ungenius.

&nb
sp; There is this mixup most of us have between ourselves and what we admire or triumphantly cherish. We see this mixup, this mishap, this mishmash, most often in writers: the writer of a new generation ravished by the genius writer of a classical generation, who begins to dream herself, or himself, as powerful, vigorous and original—as if being filled up by the genius writer's images, scenes, and stratagems were the same as having the capacity to pull off the identical magic.... If I were twenty-two now, I would not undertake a cannibalisti-cally ambitious Jamesian novel to begin with; I would look into the eyes of Henry James at twenty-two.... It is not to the Master in his fullness I would give my awed, stricken, desperate fealty, but to the faltering, imperfect, dreaming youth.

  All this I now repudiate and recant. There is too much humility in it—and humility is for the aging, not for the young. Obsequiousness at any age is an ugly thing, and ugliest in that early time of youthful hope. At twenty-two one ought to be a literary voluptuary; one ought to cannibalize the world.

  Hence my second reason for breaking off a luxuriant Tolstoyan scene. It is because of the contemporary reader's impatience. The old ambition had reflected back to it readers who were equally covetous—but as the old ambition has faded, so has readers' craving: recognizable bookish voluptuaries and print-cannibals are rare. Readers nowadays will hardly tolerate long blocks of print unbroken by dialogue or action, and if there are to be long blocks of print at all, they must be in familiar, speedy, colloquial, undemanding prose. Are cinema and television to blame? In part. Novelists have learned much from visual technology, especially the skill of rapid juxtaposition. But film itself is heir to the more contemplative old ambition: what else is "panning," whether of a landscape or a human face? When film is on occasion gazeful, meticulous, attentive to the silent naming of things seen, its debt to the word is keenest.