Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  To do this of course, one must have formidable artists. I think I would always rather read the notebooks of Matisse than the essays of Roger Fry—and a look at Fry’s paintings in their room at Kings hasn’t disabused me. (Though I would also rather read Hindemith on music than E. M. Forster; an artist has to be in his own art, for this kind of authority.) To have a fan’s passion for an art, or even like Fry to help disseminate and explain its new forms, is a kind of hostess function, never to be confused with an artist’s data on art’s essences.

  Literary criticism has yet another confusion at its very heart, in that anyone talking about the medium seriously is in effect using it—and had better have the powers of the artist as well. This often convinces literary critics that they are artists. It convinces me that artists are the best of them. Only the artist can be trusted never to confuse essences with statuses. And every judgment he makes involves him. This is true of the most minor review or conversational flight. He has no light words.

  The French understand this. To the end that some become exaggerates of it, as the later Sartre becomes the art-spider who must cling to the corpus of Genet for his energy while his own work in art dwindles, appendage to that suddenly monster second head. (At a certain point in that sort of game, perhaps there is no turning back.) Yet when we say then “But au fond, he was always philosophe,” something is added. We are subscribing then to the abiding continuum of human thought.

  When I was sixteen, Jules Romains seemed to me both boring and mysteriously seductive; I sensed that he was part of some luminous tradition my own hadn’t prepared me for. A few years on, Gide bowled me over, above all for his seriousness; for his hairsplittings in the realm of orthodoxy I cared nothing. What was this temper of mind that suited me down to the ground though I might war with its contents? Or feel outside it, as with Simone Weil, whose atmosphere I nevertheless recognized to the point of shock—for I was no religieuse.

  I had been a philosophy student though, happy to deliver a paper on any closed system, from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea to a flirt with Kant and Hegel—always holding my breath in wait for that wonderful, acolyte moment when I would see the angel-plan spread out before me, and could hope to believe. Spinoza, as a Jew and hence somehow already in my blood, didn’t interest me—perhaps here as elsewhere I always had a taste for Christian boys. Mystics like Jacob Boehme drew me, but uneasily, as half on the road to art and artists like Blake. In the French attitude what I had found was what the world had long recognized as a perfect agar in which critique could nourish endlessly: the spirit of rational inquiry, in a religious temperament. It was my air. I too wanted to lay my life on a line.

  But did I want that same air for art?

  English after all was my language and spirit. Once past Spenser, or midway in Shakespeare, the air turns Protestant. Since Dr. Johnson, a large part of literary talk had been just that—talk, coffee-house common-sensical, with heaven around the corner in Grub Street. Then had come the message of Matthew Arnold’s muscular speeches—we must cope—then Ruskin’s sentimentality of the chaste, and Pater’s watered-down Marcus Aurelius—a whole silly-season of flowers set in a dry sink. Shaw had been a journalist, D.H. Lawrence a bitter heckler; though coping was glorious at times, nothing I saw in English criticism matched the high, tonally fixed seriousness of the French. But the language itself was a fountain to be leaned upon, not formless but forming—always literally more words in it than French, looser, more open to change, yet not as heavy-spawning as German. A fine wool of a language, English, to which cockle-burrs can cling, yet which still has the watercolor vowels and voice-syrups of a Romance tongue. Its writers of the twentieth century have leaned on it like a rationale. And I with them. It suited what we like to think is our lawlessness.

  Yet somewhere is a thought-continuum we too yearn for and must have. Nowadays the phrase “He’s a renaissance man” is slang. Said not as if we are the forceful owners of a world on the way to knowing everything, but like men who wish that all knowledge once again was one. Or that one man—each—could have a “universal” portion of it. We think of Goethe, the poet-dramatist and novelist of Elective Affinities who could also discover the intermaxillary bone in man and quarrel with Newton over their theories of light, as able to do this, aside from his gifts, only because he lived at a time when the intellectual life could be the size of a duke’s court, under smaller astronomies than we shall see again. But because knowledge is “larger” now, and no part of the world is sealed to it, must this be the end of seeing the connection of art, philosophy, and yes, science—as real as they ever were in that smaller continuum? Surely the closer interconnection of the physical world is telling us otherwise. In death and life.

  I begin to see that agnosticism is a pale life unless, like any other religion, it is lived. Because I broke through the egg at the chickhole marked Art, doesn’t preclude a temperament as religious as the churched, or an inquiry as rational as—the rational. In my work, it begins to seem to me, I am no longer the “novelist” or “short-story writer” which the American mode likes to have me. Nor even a writer only, though for passports and pickpockets that will do. I am the thing being written at the time. I am this one, now.

  Going back over one’s work, one can see from earliest times certain para-forms emerging. If one is crazy, these are idées fixes; if one is sane these are systemic views. A mind is not given but makes itself, out of whatever is at hand and sticking-tape—and is not a private possession, but an offering. Every “essay” I had ever written was in effect a way of telling what was offered to whom. I had always had to write everything, no matter the subject, as if my life depended on it. Of course—it does.

  My father once gave me a fine sled, a Flexible Flyer. Though he’d often seen me ride bellywhopper on the old one, now for some reason, perhaps because I was a girl, he knotted two thick ropes through the steering wing of the new sled, one to the hole in each side. Once he had done this, I took to sliding down our steep hill sitting up holding the reins—which earned me the jeering name “High Coachman.” I persisted. I liked the view.

  About the same time, the Irish “Director” (an actor I imagine) whom the Mt. Neboh Sunday School hired every year to stage its elaborate children’s musical, had a chat with my mother. As a fair ballet student since I was six, I was trying out for the star part—and for the blue spotlight on the rose-sequined tutu. Poor man, he couldn’t tell her that my long ten-year-old bones and solemn face, plus a certain soft-shoe expertise I had concealed from her and the ballet-mistress, made me a cinch for the comedy trick—or that the other part was always slated for the President of the Congregation’s little blond cuddly. “Why do they all want the classic stuff!” he said, clutching his bald spot. “When she can tapdance to hellandgone!”

  So now and then I say a funny thing in the forum. I have since learned how serious the comedy trick can be. But my taste for the High Coachman view remains.

  This then is my vita. I have no light words.

  But outside the “work,” the words turn different, differently.

  Anti-criticism is the one great dialectic tradition within which an artist can afford to be. Men who go to war for their convictions too often become the monster they meet.

  Yet, in art, surely one doesn’t fight the human soldier but the killer-process? Surely no one critic is digne enough to be the great enemy. And the killer-spirit may invade from anywhere. In the arts, nowadays it seems not to come huge on all fours, breathing false flame from fine nostrils. Rather, it tends to inhabit small, wan people, bilious with desolation, whose demon keeps them building matchstick bridges across the bloody flux.

  In anti-criticism, I begin to see there are only two causes for going to war:

  The proposed or predicted “death” of an art, or of some part of it. The setting up of “boundaries” which an art “must” have.

  Neither of these propositions understands the very nature of art. The nature of the killer-spirit i
s that it will always find a dead art, or a caged one, more examinable.

  Anti-criticism has therefore only two positives:

  Art has no law-and-order per se—being a way to it. In art, death does not die—is not a dying.

  During my first teaching year, I was asked to inaugurate a series of lectures on the novel to be given by experts in their fields: Leon Edel on James, James Clifford on Pamela, etc. It was suggested I speak on the novel generally. “But I haven’t yet written one!” I stammered. That didn’t seem to be a prerequisite.

  I spoke from the one point of view I thought I could contribute—a writer’s. My tone—which struck the note for all work of this kind I would do later—was personal. For a writer, the editorial “we” is a falsehood. We have only “I.”

  I often wonder why people are always being so much more solicitous about the novel, than of other forms of literary expression—always giving out greatly exaggerated rumors of its death, always rushing to resuscitate it, somewhat in the way worthy matrons used to rush hot soup to that rather deplorable family at the end of the town. Meanwhile, look around you. Poets are often still reduced to reading each other; Broadway is always complaining about the dearth of good plays, yet no one ever seriously proclaims the death of either drama or verse. No, the truth of the matter is that the novel has only lately become respectable, worthy of being talked about in the universities. The kind of people who in their hearts still believe that “real” knowledge can’t reside in the specious world of the imagination, who will pay lip service to poetry and drama because these have been going on long enough to have anthropological value—(you know: the kind of man who would be ashamed to say aloud that he never reads a poem or sees a play, but who tells you virtuously that he “has no time for novels”)—these people sometimes manage to make us feel that the novel, like that deplorable family, might, for its own good, be better dead. The truth of the matter is that the novel is as protean as any other form of expression. Like them, it does die sometimes—but, take heart—only, like them, when it becomes too respectable, in being the thing done at that time. Then lo, one day another changeling is found under a cabbage leaf somewhere—in Dublin or in Mississippi. …

  I’d like to tell about some particular novels and what I got from them at certain times.

  One of the first things we are told is that novels are useful as an accessory to history. By this people usually mean that when we read a novel written in a vanished era, or retrospectively about it, we can acquire, and painlessly too, first a mass of concrete data on how people lived in those days—the cut of their clothes and their manners, the slant of their architecture, the cadence of their speech—and secondly, a much more amorphous mass of data known as the “spirit of the age.” The first kind of data, the concrete, might be thought of as the “Did they or did they not have bathrooms, and what kind?” department—certainly it would be for our era—the second kind of data, the “What did they say to themselves in the mirror when they were shaving”—that is, in the event that they shaved. The first category I won’t belabor; certainly novels do provide a great deal of such material, in my mind, although the account books and all the other minutiae that people leave behind them do this in more detail, and although the novel—and this is important—always provides such material “by the way.” The second category—the “spirit of the age” and how a novel interprets that, bears more explanation and examination. For the fact is that novels, good novels, are not accessory to history but in themselves a very special kind of history, in which the people always take precedence over the era. Such novels don’t tell us how people lived and thought, but how some people did so, and—as it happened—at a certain time. They do give us the spirit of the age, but only as subsidiary to the “spirit of human beings.” No doubt this is why certain people regard novels as untrustworthy.

  The truth is that a good novel, like any work of art, is not an accessory to anything. It stands alone. For two reasons. First—it is an artistic attempt as opposed to an inclusive one; it abstracts from the world to compose a world of its own; it does not attempt to give all the facts but the pattern of some of them. Second—no matter how deceptively objective in method, the novel always has a stance. It is rooted in the peculiar semantics of a special kind of mind—one sensitive to the overtones of facts and to the overtones of people—and to the odd sonorities produced when these two combine. Its comments on the history of human beings are always, in the highest sense, prejudicial—no doubt why I regard them as so trustworthy.

  I might say a word here about modern so-called “historical” novels, and about the special dissatisfaction I get from them. By this I mean the novel not written in a past era, or fairly close to it—within say two or three generations—but the novel which goes back an untouchable distance to recreate an era that the author can know only through other people’s facts and other people’s books. Some time ago, when a friend gave me for comment his new “historical” novel—one that had taken four years of research, and in the writing of which I knew there would be considerable ability, I accepted it with a sinking feeling and protected myself by saying, “You mustn’t mind in case I don’t enthuse; I’ve a blind spot somewhere, or else my standards are inexcusably lofty—anyway, about the only historical novels I want to read are War and Peace, Henry Esmond, and The Virginians.” He looked at me blankly and said: “But of course they aren’t really historical. The Napoleonic wars were only 25 years before Tolstoi was born, and as for Thackeray—the period is only background for the people!” And of course he was right—it was I who was confused.

  But I think I know now why the modern “historical” novel, no matter how exquisitely recreative of detail, usually sets my teeth on edge in some indefinable way. It is because this kind of novel is almost always an accessory to history—the era takes precedence over the people. Therefore the novelist, not being concerned primarily with his characters, cannot really imagine the truth about them as people—they remain lay figures, however beautifully reanimated and dressed. Such novels also violate those other tenets of which I have spoken. In them, the writer doesn’t venture to compose a world out of the flux close to him, but plumps for a world already long since composed for him. Thus he tends not to use freely his own sense of proportion; his canvas is at once enormously wide and tempting—think of all that wonderfully available material; how can one leave any of it out?—and at the same time his choices, set within limits not imposed by himself, do not have the tension of suspense—because, after all, history tells us things did turn out a certain way. Above all, he can’t use, except retrospectively, the superb struggle of values still under question. No, his era becomes his hero, either in itself or in some post hoc analogy with ours, and that is not enough for me. I am very prejudiced. I think novels should end up in the libraries, not begin in them. That’s why I look blank when someone says, “Ah, you’re researching, are you?”

  Yet, nevertheless, all novels worthy of serious study are in their sense historical. In that respect, they attempt a number of daring things, although all of these may not be present in one novel. First, the novel attempts to write the story of a person or a group of persons. Whether it is their inner or their outer story, or some combination thereof, varies with the literary fashions and predilections of both the writer and his day. Sometimes a novel tries only to particularize these individuals, so that they live for us. At other times, it may also so generalize these individuals that, no matter what their “period” is, we identify with them—we recognize some continuity in the human psyche that we and they share. For isn’t it a peculiar fact that although we make many formal surface protestations over our inability to “change human nature,” at heart we love to see its very sameness explored? We love to see the old striations picked over again, reassembled in the light of another mind. The process entertains and instructs us with our own foibles, sometimes it comforts us—“there, but for the grace of God, go I,” and sometimes it inspires us—“there, in t
he grace of human beings, I go too.”

  And, because no individual can be totally divorced from his situation in time and circumstance, the novel, sometimes inadvertently but more often not, gives a picture of his period. A great novel often does all three: the individual story, the human identification, the era. Parenthetically, the great subject of the novel in our day is the relationship of the individual to his time—to political time, dimensional or psychological time, to “no time left.” But no matter how the focus of the novel shifts, no matter what subject it prefers in one decade or another, it shares, with poetry and drama, the great advantage of all art over the assemblage of literal fact. It makes use of the fact, in any or all assemblages of them, but it dares beyond the fact. Like all art, the novel’s obligation to reality is obscure. It can therefore be more real than real.

  Let me tell you briefly about four novels. I did not choose them because they are necessarily great ones, or because they clearly contain one or more of the elements of which I have spoken—any good novel does. In fact, I thought I had chosen them at random, out of the genial but practical impulse which leads us to press a book on a person, saying “Read this. You must read this”—and which has caused me to buy copies of these four rather often. Purposely, these are novels written well in the past. You know all about the others. These have settled down; they have perspective or in one case are ignored. They span almost exactly one hundred years. After I chose them I saw that, if taken chronologically, they do show certain changes in the focus of the novel. Since, also quite by accident, they happen to be respectively English, Russian, Italian and American, they show, by chance in a comparative sense, that enormous versatility which causes some to say that the novel is the art-form of the middle class, and causes others to question whether it can strictly be called a form at all. I cannot synopsize these books for you, because no good piece of fiction can be in any very useful way; I can only say what I perhaps might if I were lending you them.