Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  And the reasons I have, so to speak, fallen out of love with Forster are the very reasons she is still in thrall to him. A novelist, as she says, is both psychologist and metaphysician (and social historian). That is why we become most attached to those novels which give us an adequate account of the way the world seems to us. Novelists interpret us, and when we “choose” a novelist we are really choosing a version of ourselves. The same is true of essayists. What I no longer choose to choose among Forster’s ideas is “Only Connect,” which signifies, of course, “personal relationships.” When I said in my remarks on Maurice that it devalued “the large humanistic statement to know that its sources are narrowly personal,” I was not referring to Forster’s novelistic imagination (of course the women in his novels are women and not disguised male homosexuals), but to his liberalism. We are now unambiguously apprised of Forster’s homosexuality, and Maurice makes it shudderingly plain that Forster considered homosexuality to be an affliction, the ineradicable mark of a fated few. To use language grown shabby from repetition, he regarded himself as part of an oppressed minority; and, applying Only Connect, he could stand in for and champion other oppressed minorities—Indians under English colonialism, for instance, who suffered from the English public-school mentality precisely as he had suffered from it. But this, after all, is a compromised liberalism. There is nothing admirable in it; it is devalued by the presence of the vested interest. It is no trick, after all, for a Jew to be against anti-Semitism, or for a homosexual to be against censorship of homosexual novels. The passion behind the commitment may be pure, but the commitment is not so much a philosophy of liberalism as it is of self-preservation. Morality must apply some more accessible standard than personal hurt. In Howards End Mr. Wilcox, disapproving of Helen’s affair with Leonard Bast, gets his nose rubbed in a reminder of his own affair, long ago, with Mrs. Bast: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But suppose the gander has had no sauce? I am not a homosexual; if I had been in England in 1935, should I not have been disturbed by the law that interfered with the untrammeled publication of Boy, as Forster was? (See his essay “Liberty in England.”) Liberalism, to be the real thing, ought to be disinterested.

  But the inadequacy of Only Connect—that it is not disinterested—is not the whole of my charge against “personal relationships” as the ultimate moral standard. Deciding your behavior person by person (Forster was apparently the inventor of an early form of situation ethics) seems to me a localized, partial, highly contingent, catch-as-catch-can sort of morality. “This is my friend; I love him; therefore I will not kill him” is, in my view, inferior to saying, once and for all, “Thou shalt not kill.” The reason is not simply that the overall Commandment is relatively more efficient than figuring it out one person at a time as you go along, but also that it is more reliable. “This is my friend; I love him” can too easily turn into “This was my friend; now I hate him.” And if that is all there is to it, if there is no larger motive than “personal relationships” to govern human behavior, one might as well kill him. It is not only that “Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State” (though the single example Forster can think of to illustrate this possibility is Brutus and Cassius vis-à-vis Caesar, not exactly the sort of situation that one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis)—it is also, as Forster himself recognizes, that love and loyalty can run counter to themselves; in short, they rot. They are “a matter for the heart, which signs no documents.” That is why, taking up—as Forster himself does—the question of reliability, and writing about these matters on stone some four thousand years before Forster, Moses thought that having it down on a document might not be a bad idea. “But reliability,” Forster sensibly answers Moses, “is not a matter of contract—that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and the world of business relationships.” It is also one of the differences between personal relationships and universal ethics. To Forster, Moses comes out a businessman with a contract, and in the same essay (we are still in “What I Believe”) he says he prefers Montaigne and Erasmus. “My temple stands,” he asserts, “not upon Mount Moriah but in that Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted.” It is not a very great distance from an Elysian Field that makes no distinction between innocents and murderers (for we have a right to take the persons Forster calls “immoral” at their most extreme) to the ou-boum of the Marabar Caves, which swallows up both good and evil into one of the unknown black holes of the universe, similarly without distinction. The problem with Forster’s “personal relationships”—or, to use Mrs. F.’s term, his personal loyalties—is that they tend to slip away at the first intrusion of something spooky or ineffably cosmic—of something, in brief, that suggests his notion of Religion, which is pagan in the sense of fearfulness, imbued with the uncanniness of lacrimae rerum, un-human, without relation to the world of men. When Mrs. Moore in the cave hears the ou-boum of nothingness, she “lost all interest, even in Aziz [who had become her good friend], and the affectionate and sincere words that she had spoken to him seemed no longer hers but the air’s.”

  Mrs. Moore in the Marabar Caves is obviously an extreme example of the dissolution of a friendship. But Forster, as we know, is fond of extremes, so it is not too much to say that Mrs. Moore is also an extreme example of someone who—quoting Mrs. F. quoting Forster—“hate[s] the idea of causes.” Her hatred of causes does not strengthen her in friendship. She betrays her friend by losing interest in him, because the universe has shown her that it is impersonal, and that friendship and betrayal and loss are all the same to it. She has no “cause”—no motivation, no ideal contract—that restricts her from betraying her friend. Forster’s dedication to personal relationships without contract is doomed to work only very rarely, not only because friendship succeeds only very rarely, but because it is, in a world of friends and non-friends, not enough. “Do not lie about your friend, whom you love” is, in moral distance, a light-year from “Do not tell lies about anyone at all”—or, as it is more commonly formulated, “Do not bear false witness.” A contractual, or communal, ethics, when violated, at least leaves the standard intact. A catch-as-catch-can ethics, based on your feelings for your friend, leaves everything in a shambles when it is violated.

  A case can of course be made that Forster’s ethics of privacy derives through Romanticism with its discovery of the Individual from Nonconformism with its emphasis on regulating personal morality through conscience. Whatever their sources, though, the moral and political positions that emerge from “What I Believe” seem to me to be disturbingly partial. They may do a certain credit to the sensibility of a hurt man who knows enough to be thoughtful about the hurts of others, but they fail of universal application. Forster never comes head-on against the problem of how to get the “bloods” to behave less callously. Or, rather, he dodges the problem by loading it: by giving Mr. Wilcox an old affair to hide, by making Maurice a homosexual. His whole men turn out not to be whole at all; Forster appears incapable of accepting the principle of not hurting without first making a hurt felt. His humanity goes from wound to wound. His politics, his morality, ultimately his liberalism, all signify the humanism of cripples. It is too thin. The thugs escape.

  The difficulty, I think, is that Mrs. F. mixes up these specific questions raised by Forster’s political and moral positions with a general analysis of the novelistic imagination. Her description of the “miracle” of the Active imagination is superb and very nearly complete, but I am puzzled about why she has introduced it. My judgment on Forster’s humanism does not lead logically to any judgment on his capacity to imagine. If I believe, as I do, that Forster’s sense of himself as a kind of martyr taints the candor of his liberalism with a hidden self-interest, how does this relate to Mrs. F.’s notion that I somehow also believe the novels to be homosexual disguises? They are obviously not homosexual disguises. Nothing in what I wrote suggested they might be. That there are in Forster’s ficti
on men with homosexual tendencies has always been clear and is now clearer. A pair of obvious examples: Ricky and Ansell, Aziz and Fielding. Revisited in the aftermath of Maurice (I have, for instance, been rereading A Passage to India), they have new resonances; so does the passionate “friend” in the essay called “Notes on the English Character” (1920), who is an adumbration of Aziz as Forster himself in that essay is an adumbration of Fielding. As for Forster’s use of the word “friend”: until some industrious clod of a graduate student gives us the definitive concordance for that word in Forster’s oeuvre, we shall not know how often he intended it wistfully and how often straightforwardly. But until we get the concordance, we will have to rely on impressions—and my impression is that it is a word Forster most often uses wistfully. I feel certain—it is an impression—that the friend for whom Forster would betray his country is thought of wistfully. When you betray your country, that is treason, a capital offense. Betraying your country for your friend, you die. I quote Mrs. F. quoting Maurice in a passage she herself calls “the epitome of the homosexual ‘friend’ ”: “He could die for such a friend . . . they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing.” Maurice would betray his country for such a friend; Forster is largely indistinguishable from Maurice; and yet Mrs. F. writes, “I don’t believe you can imagine him to mean by ‘friend’ anything different from what you or I or anyone would mean by it.” My impression is otherwise.

  But all this is about friendship between men. Against the rest—Mrs. F.’s catalogue of “love, courtship, marriage, sisterhood, fatherhood, sonhood”—nothing can be insinuated. Forster believed, as I have said, in Demeter, the most domestic of all the goddesses.

  So two cheers for Forster’s Friendship. “Two cheers are quite enough,” Forster remarked of Democracy, saving his third for “Love the Beloved Republic.” If, as Mrs. F. asserts, I do not love Forster enough for what he has done, it is not because I fail to celebrate his novelistic imagination, but rather because I would dislike living in his Republic, where personal relationships govern (one might dare to say seethe) and there are no communal contracts. I save half my third cheer for the Covenant; and the other half, following Forster in all his novels but the last, for Demeter.

  _____________

  1 E. M. Forster, Maurice (W. W. Norton & Co., 1971).

  Book review published in Commentary, December 1971.

  2 So successfully “veiled,” in fact, that Lionel Trilling, who had published a critical volume on Forster’s fiction as early as 1943, commented to me in a 1972 letter that “it wasn’t until I had finished my book on Forster that I came to the explicit realization that he was homosexual. I’m not sure whether this was because of a particular obtuseness on my part or because . . . homosexuality hadn’t yet formulated itself as an issue in the culture. When the realization did come, it at first didn’t seem of crucial importance, but that view soon began to change.” The two did not meet until after the publication of Trilling’s book. In the wake of that “slight personal acquaintance,” Trilling explained, his view “changed radically.”

  3 Letter published in Commentary, May 1972.

  Truman Capote Reconsidered

  Time at length becomes justice. A useful if obscure-sounding literary aphorism, just this moment invented. What it signifies is merely this: if a writer lives long enough, he may himself eventually put behind him the work that brought him early fame, and which the world ought to have put aside in the first place.

  I remember reading somewhere not long ago a comment by Truman Capote on his first novel: it was written, he said, by somebody else.

  Cruel time fleshes out this interesting, only seemingly banal, remark: who is this tiny-fingered flaccid man, with molasses eyes and eunuch’s voice, looking like an old caricature of Aeolus, the puff-cheeked little god of wind? We see him now and then on television talk shows, wearing a hayseed hat, curling his fine feet, his tongue on his lip like a soft fly, genially telling dog stories. Or we read about the vast celebrity parties he is master of, to which whole populations of the famous come, in majestic array of might and mind. Or we hear of him in New Orleans some months ago, in the company of Princess Radziwill, observing the Rolling Stones and their congregations, with what secret thoughts print will soon make plain. Or we catch him out as a cabal-sniffing inquisitor in Playboy, confiding in an interview how “other backgrounds” are not being “given a chance” because of the “predominance of the Jewish Mafia” in American letters. Or, back on television again, we learn from him about the psychology of criminals—which inadvertently lets us in a little on the psychology of people who are attracted to the psychology of criminals. Or we discuss, for months, his puzzling coinage “nonfiction novel,” as if some new theory of literature had broken on the world—what he means, it turns out on publication, is the spawn of garden-variety interview journalism, only with this out: he is not to be held morally accountable for it.

  (He is not even to be held accountable for his first non-nonfiction novel: it was written by Somebody Else.)

  Were all these non-qualities implicit in that long-ago Somebody Else—that boy whose portrait on the back cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms became even more celebrated than the prose inside? Who can forget that boy?—languid but sovereign, lolling in the turn of a curved sofa in bow tie and tattersall vest, with tender mouth and such strange elf-cold eyes. Like everyone else whose youth we have memorized and who has had the bad luck to turn up on television afterward, he was bound to fatten up going toward fifty; and like everyone else who has made some money and gained some ease in the world, he was bound to lose that princely look of the furious dreamer.

  On the face of it he was bound to become Somebody Else, in short: not only distant physically from the Dorian Gray of the memorable photograph, and not simply psychologically distant according to the chasm between twenty-three and forty-eight, and not merely (though this chiefly) distant from the sort of redolent prose craft that carried Other Voices, Other Rooms to its swift reputation. An even more radical distancing appears to intervene.

  It’s not only ourselves growing old that makes us into Somebody Else: it’s the smell of the times too, the invisible but palpable force called Zeitgeist, which is something different from growth, and more capricious. Books change because we change, but no internal reasons, however inexorable, are enough to account for a book’s turning to dust twenty-four years afterward. Other Voices, Other Rooms is now only dust—glass dust, a heap of glitter, but dust all the same.

  Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief of Knopf, some time ago in Publishers Weekly took shrewd notice of how the life expectancy of books is affected: Solzhenitsyn, he said, can write as he does, and succeed at it, because in Russia they do not yet know that the nineteenth century is dead.

  A century, even a quarter of a century, dies around a book; and then the book lies there, a shaming thing because it shows us how much worse we once were to have liked it; and something else too: it demonstrates exactly how the world seems to shake off what it does not need, old books, old notions of aesthetics, old mind-forms, our own included. The world to the eager eye is a tree constantly pruning itself, and writers are the first to be lopped off. All this means something different from saying merely that a book has dated. All sorts of masterpieces are dated, in every imaginable detail, and yet survive with all their powers. Other Voices, Other Rooms is of course dated, and in crucial ways: it would be enough to mention that its Southern family has two black retainers, an old man and his granddaughter, and that when he dies the old man is buried under a tree on the family property, the way one would bury a well-loved dog, and that the granddaughter, having gone north for a new life, is gang-raped on the way, and comes back to the white family’s kitchen for love and safety. . . . In Harlem now, and in Washington, Watts, Detroit, Newark, and New Rochelle, they are dancing on the grave of this poetry. It was intolerable poetry then too, poetry of the proud, noble, but defective primitive, but went not so much unno
ticed as disbelieved; and disbelief is no failing in an aesthetic confection. Even then no one thought Jesus Fever, the old man, and Zoo, the kitchen servant, any more real than the figures on a wedding cake; such figures are, however vulgar, useful to signify outright the fundamental nature of the enterprise. Dated matter in a novel (these signals of locale and wont) disposes of itself—gets eaten up, like the little sugar pair, who are not meant to outlive the afternoon. Dated matter in a novel is not meant to outlive the Zeitgeist, which can last a long time, often much longer than its actual components, digesting everything at hand.

  But Other Voices, Other Rooms is not a dead and empty book because Zoo is, in today’s understanding, the progenitrix of black militancy, or because the times that appeared to welcome its particular sensibility are now lost. Indeed, the reason “dated matter” has so little effect on Other Voices, Other Rooms is that it is a timeless book, as every autonomous act of craft is intended to be. A jug, after all, is a jug, whether bought last week at the five-and-dime or unearthed at Knossos: its meaning is self-contained—it has a shape, handles, a lip to pour. And Other Voices, Other Rooms has a meaning that is similarly self-contained: Subjectivity, images aflash on a single mind, a moment fashioned with no reference to society, a thing aside from judgment. One can judge it as well made or not well made; but one cannot judge it as one judges a deed.

  And this is why it is not really possible to turn to the Zeitgeist to account for Other Voices, Other Rooms’ present emptiness. In fiction in the last several years there have been two clearly recognizable drives: to shake off the final vestiges of narration as a mechanism to be viewed seriatim, and to achieve an autonomous art—“where characters,” William Gass explains in a remark derived from Gnosticism in general and from MacLeish in particular, “unlike ourselves, freed from existence, can shine like essence, and purely Be.” The atmosphere of our most recent moments—Gass’s sentence is their credo—ought both to repulse and retrieve Other Voices, Other Rooms: it begins deep in narrative like Dickens (a boy setting out on his own to find the father he has never seen), but ends in Being, and shines like “essence,” which I take to be, like Tao or satori, recognizable when you have it but otherwise undefinable—and not, surely, accessible, like a deed, to judgment.