The loss of elitism, the loss of bohemianism—the loss, in short, of a universal or unifying agenda or ideology. What, then, remains of the function of the little magazine? Three annual literary anthologies attest to what used to be called “the cultural situation”: O. Henry Prize Stories, edited by William Abrahams; The Best American Short Stories, edited by Shannon Ravanel; and The Pushcart Prize, subtitled Best of the Small Presses and edited, since he founded it a dozen years ago, by Bill Henderson, with the aid of nearly two hundred contributing editors. Of the three, only the last draws solely from the little magazines, collecting poets and essayists along with fiction writers—the whole American writing sound. Multiple chords, but not in open yawping Whitman fashion. The new writers in these volumes epitomize private lives: the secret, the idiosyncratic, nuanced and tendril-like, rife with hints and whispers. Flashes of What Maisie Knew, or the river scene in The Ambassadors. Aloneness. Contemplation and calculation, so many lonesome night-breathings. Every poem, story, essay charged with the solitary. The essay in particular cultivates the voice of the single mind, of an indivisible temperament.
The American essay has been dormant for a long time, though its history is brilliant enough: Emerson to Edmund Wilson. For a long time it hardly recognized itself for what it was, and was often confused with the magazine article—that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap thing. Through the vehicle of the small press, the essay is waking up and turning muscular. It knows that Hazlitt lived.
“They keep the new talents warm,” Trilling rightly said of the little magazines. They still do. They may also keep talents warm that would be better off put on the shelf to cool. More to the point today is not who writes for the small presses, or what their prospects are, but in which genre they are writing. What the small presses keep warm, and alive, are those very forms “the cultural situation” tends to submerge: essay, story, poem.
Published (in somewhat different form) as the Introduction to The Pushcart Prize, XI: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (Pushcart Press, 1986–87)
Of Basilisks and Barometzes
Is reality necessary?
Light-hearted, light-footed reader, do not flee! Our subject is no tough ontological rind. (Philosophers, go home.) It is, rather, the mazy gossamer of make-believe; the desire to be invisible; the longing for strange histories that never were; the urge to slip loose from one’s own life. In short, the overcrowded precincts of nonexistence.
To wit: A celebrated American novelist recently sought to vanish—or, if not precisely to vanish, then to be transformed, as in any tale of magic, from true and accessible being to the arcane grottoes of subterranean fancy. Joyce Carol Oates, casting a spell over her husband’s name—Raymond Smith— became Rosamond Smith, who doesn’t exist. (“I wanted to escape from my own identity,” Rosamond Smith’s inventor explained.) The imaginary Smith instantly signed a contract with a publisher for a first novel. Almost as instantly, the ruse was aborted—it may be that the literary famous are forbidden clandestine play, and too bad. It is easy to find Joyce Carol Oates in any bookshop; but Rosamond Smith has yet to be read, and now never will be. To protest that it makes no difference, that the very same novel will be published anyhow, is not to the point. A book by Rosamond Smith is in no way a book by Joyce Carol Oates, even if the words are identical. We know, after all, what to expect of Joyce Carol Oates, however unexpected her devisings: the imprint of reputation inheres in every phrase. But what kind of writer might Rosamond Smith have turned out to be?
The brief materialization and speedy vaporization of the phantom Smith will leave a melancholy mark in literary history, yet hardly an anomalous one. There are whole phalanxes of nonexistent writers who have written real books—among them Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, George Orwell; and some would even dare to charge Homer, Shakespeare, and David the Psalmist with the scam of attaching phony names to popular hits. Still, the assurance of corporeal authenticity—half a dozen writers more or less in the world—will scarcely shake society. Far more significant are the vast libraries, corridors stretching into infinity, of books that have never been written. We ought to declare our gratitude for these non-existent works on two counts: first, writing that is confined to mere potentiality is in almost all instances reliably superior to words actually on a page. What drudging novelist has not been alarmed by the corruption of a visionary text the moment it begins to creep from the satanically forked nib of a fountain pen, or to solidify on a gelid green screen? And second, if every volume dreamed of were committed to paper (“I could write a book!” cry landlady, doorman, and cabby), our crammed and diminutive planet would have to choose, ecologically speaking, between new publishing houses and new generations.
Non-existent books offer relief in other ways. For example, a disappointed writer whose own novels have sunk into nullity (without the advantage of prior non-existence) can saturate himself in the putative bliss of fame simply by tossing off a romance about an illustrious author of genius. All that is required in such a scheme is to name the glorious works in question; toiling at a facsimile of, say, The Magic Mountain will be superfluous, since the delectable emoluments of acclaim rush in to be relished as early as Chapter Two. Compensation for the ache of mediocrity, no doubt—a notion swiped, I admit, not from the immortal Emerson but from the indispensable Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm deserves to be kept on the kitchen counter along with other household helps; he is as valuable for appeasing the consciences of people who hate giving dinner parties (see his “Hosts and Guests”) as for having produced an actual list of non-existent books. The handful of volumes that he regards as first-rate (there are many more judged inferior though seductive) seems to have sprung mainly from the heads of nonexistent writers who have sprung from the head of Henry James; we are provocatively reminded that the ectoplasmic passions promised in “The Middle Years,” “Shadowmere,” and “The Major Key,” not to mention the magisterial “Beltraffio,” are all grievously beyond our reach.
But if it is a sad thing to know there are books we will never be allowed to read for no better reason than that they do not exist, this does not imply we are to learn nothing of the careers of their spectral authors. Jorge Luis Borges, the century’s most flagrant, ingenious, and industrious compiler of manuscripts that fall short of reality (including their plots, footnotes, and commentaries), is even more intent on fathoming the curious minds of his imaginary scribes. One of these, Jaromir Hladik, author of an unfinished tragedy in verse, is about to be shot by a firing squad; in the final seconds of consciousness his electrified brain is able to revise and complete his play—a full year’s labor—down to its last turn and syllable. Pierre Menard—whose definitive if counterfeit bibliography Borges meticulously catalogues—attempts, in 1934, to rewrite Cervantes’s Don Quixote, though in language painstakingly unaltered from the sixteenth-century original. (“The archaic style of Menard,” Borges pedantically notes, “suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time.”) Borges also introduces a novel by a nonexistent Bombay lawyer named Mir Bahadur Ali, along with an analysis of its publishing history, theology, and mythological derivations. Similarly, he describes the astounding erudition of the non-existent author of “The God of the Labyrinth,” Herbert Quain, who unfortunately died “totally used to failure” at the age of forty. All these writers have in common not only their commanding non-existence, but also their confidence in the power of the insubstantial. As the courageous Hladik puts it, “unreality. . . . is the necessary condition of art.”
It should not be assumed, however, that it is solely authors and books that are eligible for non-existence. Not at all; such a claim would be parochial. One has only to consult Borges’s own Book of Imaginary Beings to encounter chimeras, phoenixes, basilisks, barometzes (the last a kind of vegetable lamb), and the like. As for the geography of non-being—here the terrain is very wide indeed—every sleepless tourist is fami
liar with the Land of Cockaigne; but for directions to such sites as Icaria, Limanora, Amneran Heath, the Waq Archipelago, or Wastepaperland, one must go to the exhaustive Dictionary of Imaginary Places, an encyclopedic work admirably edited by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. The objection may be raised that make-believe creatures and make-believe localities are themselves a branch of the library of nonexistence, and will inevitably be classified as bookish—but that is a tedious and literal-minded quibble. Popefigs’ Island is currently without a single bookshop, and hippogriffs are notorious for fearing librarians.
Of course, it must be conceded that the non-existent—while admittedly necessary—is not always more inviting, original, interesting, or praiseworthy than what is stocked in the more limited warehouse of reality. To be persuaded of this truth, merely recall, from Middlemarch, the desiccated Mr. Casaubon’s huge manuscript volumes: those deadly notes for his appalling “Key to All Mythologies.” Though we may regret that we will never get the chance to read the exquisite “Beltraffio,” or Pierre Menard’s punctilious “Don Quixote,” there are some non-existent books we can well do without.
Published as “The Library of Nonexistent Classics,” The New York Times Book Review, April 12, 1987
The Apprentice’s Pillar
There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over the infancy of W——, fifth in descent from Simon Patterne, of Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a man of solid acquirements and stout ambition. . . .”
On the walls of the large dining room of the T——home at Y——hung blackened ancestral portraits—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men in wigs, uniforms, ribbons, and decorations, and women in their stiff gowns, laces, and powdered hair. At first the T——children were rather alarmed by these painted spectators. . . .2
The family of D——had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the center of their property, where for many generations they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.3
The B——s of Hampshire lived, at the turn of the eighteenth century, in a place called Gavelacre on the banks of the River Test, some eleven miles from Winchester along the old Roman road to the east of Salisbury plain.4
The four passages above—each preoccupied with ancestry, place, family— are all beginnings, the opening sentences of volumes pulled out here and there from the shelves nearest my writing table. Despite their randomness, they are craftily entangled in a didactic trick: two are “true” and two are “false.” Or, to point the riddle more explicitly, a pair of nineteenth-century novels are mixed up with a pair of twentieth-century biographies. Which is transparently which?
Start with literary history. As between biography and the novel, which is the apprentice, which the master? If it is true that the novel in its infancy set out to imitate real life, then one might say that biography’s narrative-of-fact is the first form, the Ur-Gestalt, the predecessor-pattern: Plutarch’s Lives, for instance, engendering Robinson Crusoe. But if biography is the art of organizing a coherent tale out of the chancy scatterings and sunderings of any individual life, then surely biography would seem to be the imitator, and the novel its model.
For a very long time—until the novel took its idiosyncratic and apparently irreversible turn away from supposedly historical narration toward self-illumination (or call it anti-objectivity, jagged, fitful, willfully erratic)— biography and novel were kin, and sometimes more than that. The forms had the occasional habit of converging to near-fusion: certainly a little of one had got into the other. Novel and biography were genetically piebald, or else were designed for mistaken identity, on the style of the Chinese philosopher who awoke one morning in an unsettled condition: “Now I do not know,” he complained, “whether I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
Recall that familiar narrative centered on the incandescent character of a single extraordinary young woman, yet labyrinthine enough to touch also on famine and emigration; the deaths of a father and two sons; three widows; remarriage and a triumphant birth. Is the biblical Book of Ruth novella or biography? Or jump ahead three millennia to Samuel Butler: “When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick.” Who is recording that vivid old man—an autobiographer or a novelist? Is it memory that governs here, or fabrication? If The Way of All Flesh is an autobiography, we are being asked to pretend it is a novel. If it is a novel, we are being asked to pretend it is an autobiography. The motivation is the same: to evoke believability in a story about the perilous span between birth and death.
And still the two forms—two ways of imagining True Being—seem always, in their mutual mirrorings, to have been jealous of each other. The apprentice jealous of the master? The master jealous of the apprentice? A brilliant medieval legend (reincarnated, perhaps, in the virtuoso coinages of Harold Bloom) begins in romantic ambition and ends in bloody envy: the prideful tale of the architect of the castle chapel at Rosslyn, who hopes to erect a pillar so beautiful that it will surpass every other on the face of the earth. In search of inspiration (his is an age of tradition and emulation), he travels through many lands, sketching pillar after comely pillar, but not yet satisfied. At last he arrives in Rome, and there he finds it: a noble pillar of exquisite grace, incontestably lovelier than any other. Ah, but during all the years of his absence, his boy apprentice, a mere sub-mason, has been similarly aspiring to the perfect pillar, and has, in fact, succeeded in constructing it—according to a vision vouchsafed him in a dream, of course. Then the architect, returning home, ready to execute what he beheld in the Holy See, comes upon the apprentice’s pillar, recognizes that it is a supernal conception, grander than any column that ever rose up in all the world before, and instantly bashes in the apprentice’s skull.
The legend, cropping up in various guises throughout Europe, is never in doubt about who killed off whom: it is always the expert who brains the disciple, and not (as in Freud and Bloom) the other way around. In the competitive relations between biography and novel, we are less certain about which did the other in. The novel—like the apprentice—sought at length to go off on its own hook, away from emulation and into the protovisionary. Biography—like the master architect—stuck to received designs. The traditional novel, with its chronological representations and its claim to imitation-of-life, is as remote from contemporary serious writing as the likelihood of a fresh Edda. Should we conclude, then, that biography, which has lasted with its lineaments unchanged since Cain and Abel, and seems as nearly permanent as any form we can imagine, is the ultimate master and victor? On the other hand, metamorphosis is not the same as death (ask any Chinese butterfly), and a case can be made that it is precisely the novel that is the living master, while biography is moribund, or, worse, an exhausted rite doggedly repeating stale configurations, with the spirit dashed out of it. A zombie. Brained.
This may be something we need to sort out, because one of the literary secrets of our time is that we miss the nineteenth-century novel. We miss it intensely, urgently. Simply reading it doesn’t bring it back—we are always aware that it is an excursion, however humanly universal, into lost conventions. No matter that we crave, now and for ourselves, those wholehearted gratifications, moral and technical; we can’t have them. The Zeitgeist is against it. It allows us, to be sure, an inventive diadem or two— the unique prose-creases of Donald Barthelme, say—but it withholds a Middlemarch or a Great Expectations of our own.
Hence our unslakable infatuation with the rich-blooded old novel’s royal cousin. Biography alone delivers the chance to read and write “linear” lives, and caters to our natural inquisitiveness about pedigree, locality, ancestral cause-and-effect, genetic and adoptive influences, orphans turning into heiresses, generational unfol
ding. With genius as its frequent subject, biography is the one remaining form that can—old-fashioned thought!— inspire. Biography contrives to let us see the world elapse, as in the three acts of a play: it draws us to the hurdles, hidings, underminings, regenerations and full clockwork of a life. If there is covert instruction in it, it is chiefly the precept of chronicle—the idea that every life is not only a trajectory but also a teleology, that every character, intuitively addressed, will press out the passionate ichor of “theme.” What we continue to prize in biography is the honest constancy of its narrative ripeness: the trustworthy satisfactions of a still-coherent form, the ancient name of which is Story.
As for determining finally whether biography vis-a-vis the novel is vitally intact or fractured—is, in short, master or apprentice—observe that the architect of Rosslyn destroyed his uppity sub-mason, but never the work of art itself. The apprentice’s pillar stands, even now, sublime.
The Egoist, George Meredith, 1879.
Leo Tolstoy, Ernest J. Simmons, 1946.
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen, 1811.
Ivy: The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hilary Spurling, 1984.
Published as “Where Orphans Can Still Become Heiresses,” The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1987
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