At Home

by Gore Vidal

  But, plainly, the voices he once heard persist in memory, and now he has put them down. From youth, he tells us, he had got into the habit of taking down conversations. He had begun with his father’s friend Thomas Mann, who came to call on the family at Bryn Mawr. “I kept staring with fascination at the back of Thomas Mann. The stars were beginning to shine and a mist hung over the hockey field. His head rose from his shoulders like a moss-grown rock and the words he was uttering spread from his skull like antlers.” Among those words: “ ‘The fatal thing,’ he said, ‘is that Tolstoy had no irony. It is a miracle that he managed to write as well as he did. Irony in a novel is like the salt in a pea soup. It gives the flavor, the nuance. Without the salt it is insipid.’ ” This is echt Mann, for whom food was always a metaphor, and the heavier the food the heavier the metaphor. “After he left I went to my bedroom and wrote it all down, and this was the first of the dialogues that I scribbled faithfully in my notebooks.”

  Prokosch glimpsed “an abyss at the core of greatness” in Mann. The abyss or vastation or, simply, Weltschmerz was to be a recurring theme in Prokosch’s own travels among Heine’s foreign cities: “It was a journey in search of the artist as a hero, as an enigma, as a martyr, as a revelation, and finally as a fragment of humanity.”

  While an undergraduate at Haverford, Prokosch and a culture-vulture classmate spent a summer in Paris, where they called on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The ladies were just back from Spain. Gertrude relates: “The Goyas were very nice and the El Grecos were more than adequate but I felt no rapport with the Murillos or the Zurbaráns. Alice said that she profoundly distrusted the Zurbaráns but we trusted Mallorca when we came to Mallorca.” As for Paris, Gertrude confessed that in the early days, “there were moments when I was homesick but they gradually grew less frequent. I still had friends in America and I wrote them some letters and we ate cornbread with molasses and apple pie on Sundays and on certain occasions a bit of cheese with the pie. One has these native habits and it is foolish to defy them….Even Alice who is a gypsy has her own deep Americanism.”

  Prokosch has always had a habit of asking the apparently simple—even simpleminded—question. He asks Gertrude Stein if she has a definite philosophy. This nets him some splendid Stein:

  “A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style…”

  Later Prokosch and friend lie in wait for a style as incarnated by James Joyce at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. Incidentally, it is the friend who is ravished by Stein and Joyce. At this point, Prokosch is still as interested in tennis as in literature; but he has read Ulysses and Mrs. Woolf, and when the reluctant lion is trapped over tea in the shop’s back room, he asks Joyce what he thinks of Virginia Woolf and is told that

  she married her wolfish husband purely in order to change her name. Virginia Stephen is not a name for an exploratory authoress. I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope…and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

  When confronted with the “stream of consciousness,” Joyce’s response is sour: “When I hear the word ‘stream’ uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn’t new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there’s Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon…”

  Prokosch was a good tennis player; at squash, he was a champion. Suddenly, one hears the somewhat surprising voice of Bill Tilden, who had written, “Never change a winning game, and always change a losing one,” a maxim that must be reversed when applied to art. “One day I finally cornered Bill Tilden…” Prokosch got the master to autograph one of his books on tennis. Tilden had also written two novels, which Prokosch had read. Tilden dismisses them as “perfect trash. I always yearned to become a novelist. But I didn’t have it in me. Just rubbish, that’s all they are.” But for Tilden—and the young Prokosch—tennis was an art form, too. Unhappily, the Tilden that Prokosch met was at the end of his career: “My legs are giving way. Will the last act be tragic?”

  * * *

  For Prokosch there were two golden ages, divided by the war: Cambridge at the end of the thirties and Rome at the end of the forties. He seems to have enjoyed his literary success without ever having taken on the persona of the great author. Also, surprisingly, Dr. Prokosch has never taught school; never sought prizes or foundation grants; never played at literary politics. He seems to have been more interested in the works or voices of others than in himself as a person (as opposed to himself as a writer), a characteristic that tends to put him outside contemporary American literature; and contemporary American literature, sensing this indifference to the games careerists play, extruded him entirely from the canon. He was like no one else, anyway. He had always been a kind of expatriate at a time when the drums of America First had begun to beat their somewhat ragged martial tattoo. Finally, he was dedicated to literature in a way hard for his contemporaries to grasp as they pretended to be boxers or bullfighters—not to mention bullshitters, Zelda Fitzgerald’s nice phrase for the huge hollow Hemingway who had set the tone for a generation that only now is beginning to get truly lost. Hail, Amnesia!

  Prokosch went his own way; and listened to his voices. At Cambridge he invites an ancient don to tea. The old man tells him, “You are rather naïve to have written a masterpiece. I agree with the critics. The Asiatics is a little masterpiece. But is your air of simplicity just a part of your cunning, or is your cunning just an aspect of your inner simplicity?” Although this is the sort of self-serving conversation that memoirists are prone to include to show how much the famous admired them, I quote the exchange because Prokosch seldom gets this personal about himself; he keeps tributes to his genius at a delicate minimum. Prokosch has no response other than “Both, maybe.” To which Housman (yes, it was he; later to become famous as the TV spokesperson for a Los Angeles bank) replied, “In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.” Prokosch broods on Housman; on Eliot; on beauty…and on Auden.

  Beauty, first. The absolutely relative or relatively absolute nature of beauty was not as firmly established in those prewar days as it is now. It was generally agreed then that beauty was good; and that the good is hard to achieve. “Of this wisdom,” wrote Walter Pater, “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake has most; for it comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, simply for those moments’ sake.” In a way, this is incontrovertible; but the way that Pater put what Prokosch echoes is not our present way. Today all abstract nouns are questioned save those abstractions that are used to measure the ones that have gone out of fashion. We signal and we sign; we structure and we deconstruct; and for a long time a good deal of the century’s philosophy has been a division of logic. Although Prokosch’s idea of beauty in art is very old-fashioned indeed, the way in which he himself deploys his own art is a formidable reminder that beauty, no matter by what sign or name acknowledged, can be a fact whose refutation is a highly risky business even for the most confident literary bureaucrat.

  * * *

  The voice of Auden is the most significant in Prokosch’s memoirs. Auden was his almost exact contemporary. By the time that Prokosch had published his first volume of poems (after the two celebrated novels), Auden was already the most famous young poet in English. From the beginning Prokosch acknowledged not only Auden’s mastery but his own indebtedness to
him. This is a rare thing for a contemporary to do: When it comes to envy and malice, our century’s poets make even the dizziest of American novelists appear serene and charitable.

  Prokosch had fallen under Auden’s spell long before they finally met in New York City at the Yale Club. Auden had just arrived from England. “He wore a pin-striped suit, a wrinkled shirt, and a checkered tie. I had the impression that he had tried to look tidy for the Yale Club. His thick unruly hair was parted far on the right. There was a wart on his right cheek and he cocked his head to the right, so that his body as well as his mind seemed to tilt into the asymmetrical.” Auden asks Prokosch to propose him for American citizenship. Prokosch says he would be delighted. They talk of Delmore Schwartz’s new book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. “Auden listened inquisitively and nodded his head politely. He seemed, by some secret antennalike instinct, to be appraising all the strengths and all the weaknesses in Delmore Schwartz.” But at the mention of Dylan Thomas “he looked irritable and queasy” while a reference to Prokosch’s recent book of poems, The Carnival, and its debt to early Auden, appeared to trouble Auden with “the ambivalence of my admiration and his politeness was fringed with little tentacles of hostility.”

  And I suddenly realized that there were four of us at the table: two speakers and two listeners who were hiding behind the speakers, each with his own hidden attitudes and doubts and suspicions. And abruptly, as we glanced across the table uneasily, we were engulfed in a silence of mutual shyness and distrust.

  I said, “Tell me, Wystan. Why did you decide to escape to America?”

  “Escape! What in the world makes you think it was an escape? It was not an escape. And what’s more, it was not a decision. It was an instinct, a desire. Please don’t try to intellectualize. One has impulses and instincts. There was no yearning to escape. And there was nothing that remotely resembled a decision!”

  Although Prokosch tells us nothing of his own private life, he does describe a Turkish bath in Forty-second Street where “I was repelled by the cockroaches and the smell of secretions but intrigued by the atmosphere of silence and cunning.

  “As I sat in the steam room I caught sight of Wystan Auden. He looked like a naked sea beast as he prowled through the steam, and his skin looked phosphorescent under the damp electric bulb.” Auden’s voice is now from a nightmare. “He rambled on wildly, as though secretly distraught.” He compares the steam room to Kafka; talks of Dostoevsky: “All is focused on obsession. All this vice all around us, there’s a touch of lunacy, isn’t there? It’s so mad and ridiculous in its Dostoevskyan fashion. To extreme sickness,’ said Pascal, ‘one must apply extreme remedies.’ ” Very clever, of course, but what did he mean by extreme remedies?

  He clutched at the marble slab, as though seized with a fit of dizziness, then faded into the steam like a fog-bound vessel.

  Years later Prokosch sees Auden, alone at a café in Venice. Prokosch begins:

  “I’ve been to see the de Chiricos.”

  “Ah, you’ve been to see the de Chiricos,” said Auden remotely.

  “They were very disappointing,” I said, blowing a smoke ring.

  “Oh, I see. They were disappointing,” said Auden sarcastically.

  “Almost sinisterly so,” I muttered, half-imploringly.

  “Indeed. Were they really? Almost sinisterly so!” He perked up a bit. His teeth protruded slightly.

  I had an unerring knack for always saying the wrong thing to Auden. Whatever I wanted to say, however simple or sincere, the moment I opened my mouth it sounded gauche, vapid, insolent.

  He seemed somehow to revel in this air of mutual embarrassment. He seemed to swell up into a sleek, didactic majesty.

  I said, “Venice has changed.”

  “Venice,” he snorted, “is constantly changing. With all that sky and water, how can it keep from changing incessantly?”

  “I used to think of Tiepolo whenever I thought of Venice.”

  “Of Tiepolo. How interesting. So it reminded you of Tiepolo?”

  “But I now think of Tintoretto. It has a beard, like Tintoretto.”

  “A beard. Yes. I see. Like Tintoretto. How very amusing.”

  Perhaps he was drunk. Impossible to be sure. He had already started on his desolate journey downward. The wrinkles were deepening, the pouches were thickening. The eyelids looked scaly and shifty, reptilian. Even the eyes were no longer the old Auden eyes, which used to be quick and alert as hummingbirds. They had turned into eyes that seemed to gloat over a malady, to brood over some accumulating inner calamity.

  “Tintoretto,” he said, with an accusatory precision. He seemed to ponder over the word, to linger over its contours. He cocked his head a little, as though looking for a new perspective. His hair was very tousled and his fingernails were purple. He stared across the piazza with an air of agitation.

  And for an instant I caught that old familiar whiff of a festering unhappiness….There was something almost regal in this massive, drunken misery. I felt almost reconciled to this grim, penultimate Auden. I yearned to cry out, “Come, let’s drop all this pretense! Let’s be friends after all! Let’s forgive and forget!”

  But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. He slumped back in his chair. He seemed to catch on the wing this momentary impulse in me and all of a sudden he seemed to be listening to a voice in the distance and the folds of his face took on a ruinous splendour. This quick, molten beauty was the last glimpse I had of him. It was like a quick shaft of lightning on a war-shattered landscape.

  I said, “Well, goodbye. It was nice to see you, Wystan.”

  “Yes. Of course. Tintoretto. It’s odd about Tintoretto…”

  I must say it takes guts to record such a scene at one’s expense.

  * * *

  The Santayana voice that Prokosch records is not at all the voice that I heard. The old man says to Prokosch, “One must always, without necessarily being a pessimist, be prepared for the worst. For the end of what we call our Western civilization—I include the Athenian—and all that grandeur of Christian romanticism.”

  His head sagged a little. His eyes began to water. His voice rose imperceptibly, as though for a final effort. “We are sailing ever deeper into the dark, uncharted waters. The lights in the lighthouses are beginning to go out. Is there anything to guide us? Is there anyone worth listening to? I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m cold with terror….”

  I fear that my Santayana was a stoic like me, and I could not imagine him cold with terror at the thought of civilization’s end. Even at eighty-five, the clear black eyes did not water but shone as bright and as hard as obsidian. When I said to him, with youthful despair, that the world had never been in so terrible a state, Santayana could not have been more brisk, or chilling. “My own lifetime has been spent in a longer period of peace and security than that of almost anyone I could conceive of in the European past.” When I spoke with horror and revulsion of the possibility that Italy…bella Italia…might go communist in the next month’s election, Santayana looked positively gleeful. “Oh, let them! Let them try it! They’ve tried everything else, so why not communism? After all, who knows what new loyalties will emerge as they become part of a—of a wolf pack.” I was sickened and revolted by his sangfroid, by his cynicism, by his, yes, blancmange. I was also much amused by his response to my sad comment on the speed with which literary reputations were lost in Amnesia. “It would be insufferable,” he said swiftly, “if they were not.” Could he have heard time’s winged wastebasket hovering near?

  * * *

  Among Prokosch’s voices there are some marvelously comical ones, including Lady Cunard and Hemingway in deadly combat for the mucho-macho drawing-room championship award. An exchange between Edith Sitwell and Edmund Wilson is also splendid. It is 1948 or 1949. The Sitwells are being lionized by tout New York.

  The butler slid past with
a tray of boiled shrimps. Edmund Wilson approached the sofa with a glass in his hand. He plucked a shrimp from the tray and dipped it in the mayonnaise. He held it in the air as he sipped his whisky. I watched with frozen horror as the shrimp slid from its toothpick and gracefully landed on Miss Sitwell’s coiffure. But Miss Sitwell ignored it and continued with serenity.

  “It is always the incantatory element which basically appeals to me…”

  “ ‘The Hollow Men’ is pure incantation,” said Edmund Wilson. He kept peering at the shrimp with a scrupulous curiosity. “I heard Eliot read it aloud once. It was a marvel of rhythmicality.”

  “Even in Dryden,” said Miss Sitwell, “there is a sense of abracadabra…”

  I kept staring at the shrimp with a feverish fascination. It lay poised on Miss Sitwell like an amulet of ivory. I visualized it in terms of the Victorian, the Elizabethan, the Gothic. I suddenly began rather to like Edith Sitwell.

  I suddenly began rather to admire Frederic Prokosch twenty years ago when he visited me on the Hudson River where I lived. I took him to a party attended by a number of hicks and hacks and hoods from a nearby outpost of Academe. Naturally, they regarded Prokosch with contempt. They knew that he had once been famous in Amnesia but they had forgotten why. Anyway, Auden had won. And Auden had said that there can only be one poet per epoch.