I can tell
you, taking eleven years to write one book is a killer financially,
a blow to the base of the skull mentally and physically, hell for
your family, a slovenly imposition upon all concerned—in short, an
inexcusable performance verging on shameful. Nevertheless, that was
how long it took me to write one book, a novel called A Man in Full. Eleven years. My children grew up
thinking that was all I did: write, and never finish, a book called
A Man in Full.
Why did it take me so long? Not having
access to Dr. Freud’s emergency night-line number, I won’t try to
get into matters I don’t understand. I will only mention one thing
I know cost me years. I committed the sin of hubris. I was going to
cram the world into that novel, all of
it.
Off I went to Japan on the most
expensive trip of my life, because this book was going to embrace
the entire globe. I returned with only two bits of information that
I think might add to my fellow Americans’ knowledge of the Far
East. First, living in a house with shoji screens for walls is even
more beautiful than looking at one in a coffee-table book, but you
can hear everything. Everything. Second,
never try to treat two Japanese businessmen to three hours of
whiskey and small talk in a Tokyo hostess bar, the updated version
of the geisha house, with only $900 in your pocket. When the check
comes, you will be, by American standards, horribly embarrassed
and, by Japanese standards, terminally humiliated. Tenninally.
This book was also going to tell you
everything you could possibly want to know about the American art
world, from the still-booming (it was 1988 when I started out) art
market at the top to the life of all the wretched, squirming,
wriggling, desperate unknown artists at the bottom. I spent
months—months!—in the lower depths. It seems
that all the art schools, from the Rhode Island School of Design on
the East Coast to the California Institute of the Arts on the West
Coast, tell their students, quite accurately, that first they must
catch on with a gallery in New York. After that, they can go be
artists anywhere they want; but unless they first get their tickets
punched in New York, their careers will go nowhere. So they come
pouring into New York’s nether reaches literally by the tens of
thousands, succeeding mainly in driving up each other’s rents in
filthy, airless, treeless, grassless, rotting old sweatshop
districts with names like SoHo, NoHo, Dumbo, TriBeCa, and Wevar,
the only slums in the world inhabited chiefly by young white people
with masters of fine arts degrees. Interesting … and completely
irrelevant to the story of A Man in
Full.
The book was also going to go behind
the TV screen and lay bare the world of television news; and in due
course I developed a plot twist in which a network magazine show
would undertake an elaborate sting operation in order to trap three
soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who are suspects in a
murder case. So now I spent another eternity busying myself with
network-news practices in New York and Army life at Fort Bragg and
on the gaudy strip outside it, Bragg Boulevard. Eventually I did
get something out of all this effort, a novella called Ambush at Fort Bragg that may be found elsewhere in
these pages (175-245). But what did it have to do with A Man in Full, whose action takes place in Georgia and
California? Nothing.
God knows it took me long enough to do
the reporting on matters that did turn out
to bear directly upon A Man in Full:
Southern plantation life today, commercial real estate development,
banking and bankruptcy, the modern working class, prison life,
Asian immigrants, black professional and political life in Atlanta,
Atlanta’s social structure, manners, and mores, plus those of the
7-Eleven Land east of Oakland, California. I went to see the Santa
Rita jail in Alameda County, California; duet apartments in
Pittsburg, California; Sikhs and Eritreans in Oakland; and
Vietnamese in Oakland and in Chamblee, Georgia, which is an old,
erstwhile-rural town just east of Atlanta now swollen with Asian
and Mexican immigrants. My Vietnamese did all right, but my Sikhs
made it into only four paragraphs in the entire book; my Eritreans,
only one.
I emphasize these reporting stints for
a reason beyond trying to explain why the novel took me so long. In
1973, while I was still exclusively a writer of nonfiction,
fourteen years before I published my first novel, I wrote an essay
on what was known back then as “the New Journalism.” In it, I said
that the American novel was in bad shape, languishing from an
otherworldly preciousness, but that there was “a tremendous future
for a sort of novel that will be called the journalistic novel or
perhaps documentary novel,” a novel “of intense social realism
based upon the same painstaking reporting that goes into the New
Journalism.”
In 1987 I published my first novel,
The Bonfire of the Vanities, with the hope
of proving my point. Did I? Only others can answer that question.
All I can say is that I was sufficiently emboldened by the novel’s
reception to write an essay for Harper’s
entitled “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast.” I argued that by now
the American novel had deteriorated into a “weak, pale, tabescent”
condition so grave, its very survival depended on somehow sending
“a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas”—I had already identified Zola as
the giant of the journalistic or documentary novel—“out into this
wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hogstomping Baroque country of ours
to reclaim it as a literary property.” Since that was precisely
what I had done in “documenting” (Zola’s term) and then writing
The Bonfire of the Vanities, I shouldn’t
have been surprised when some people found my words self-serving.
Nevertheless, that was what I believed, and, in any case, I was
already deep into the reporting for what I hoped would be another
novel of Zolaesque realism, A Man in
Full.
As the years went by—two, four, five,
eight, ten, and, finally, eleven—the suspense intensified. Not, I
hasten to add, in the world outside, which seems to be able to
successfully contain its excitement, if any, in such matters, but
in me; the suspense down in my solar plexus, I assure you, was
terrific. The years had been mounting, and given my own preaching
about realism or “naturalism” (another of Zola’s terms), so had the
stakes. My publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, upped them a bit
more by announcing a first printing of 1.2 million for my new book
when it finally came out in November 1998.
My first inkling of how A Man in Full might be received by critics came when
Vanity Fair assigned the writer David Kamp
to do a story on The Man Who Spent Eleven Years Writing One Book
and got hold of a Xeroxed copy of most of the 2,300-page
manuscript. Kamp’s lead went:
“He strides through the vestibule, a
lean, courtly figure resplendent in—
“No, no no! No
scene setting! To the chase: is the book any good?
“Relax, it is. The 11-year wait since
The Bonfire of the Vanities was worrisome,
but the new one, which is called A Man in
Full, works quickly to allay fears that Tom Wolfe had only
one decent novel in him … Lovely to have you back,
sir.”
So I relaxed, for the first time in
weeks. What ensued was all that a man who had just spent eleven
years writing one book could dare hope for.
Before I continue with this story—and
it is a story with a plot—and the plot soon thickens—please let me
assure you of one thing: I realize as clearly as anyone else how
unseemly it is for a writer to be anything but insouciant about
book reviews, publicity, and sales figures. Rimbaud set the bar for
insouciance about as high as it is ever likely to go when, in his
early thirties, finding himself hailed by critics as the most
important poet in France, he replied, “Merde pour
la poésie.” But Arnold Bennett, the British novelist, author
of a wildly successful book, The Old Wives’
Tale (1908), wasn’t half bad, either, when he said, “I don’t
read my reviews, I measure them.” So please believe me when I say I
am only going into these crass matters—reviews, publicity, sales—in
the case of A Man in Full because they are
essential to understanding our story.
First, the reviews. Every publication
that people immediately check to gauge a new book’s success or
failure was generous with praise, more generous, to tell the truth,
than I could have ever hoped, starting with gauge number one, the
all-important New York Times Book Review.
Over the years I’ve come off well in the Times now and then, and I’ve taken my drubbings, but
this round, I must say, went my way. The reviewer, Michael Lewis,
wrote: “The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as
anything written—not merely by a contemporary American novelist but
by any American novelist”; and he added:
“The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the
same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.” In The Wall Street Journal Andrew Ferguson called it “a
masterpiece” and “a greater achievement than ‘Bonfire’: richer,
deeper, more touching and more humane.” In Newsweek Malcolm Jones said: “Right now, no
writer—reporter or novelist—is getting it [the Zeitgeist] on paper
better than Tom Wolfe.” In the daily New York
Times, Michiko Kakutani didn’t care for the book’s ending,
but in light of what she had to say about the rest of A Man in Full, I certainly couldn’t complain. The
pièce de résistance, however, was a long
review and profile by the highly respected Paul Gray in
Time, not to mention my picture, which was
on the magazine’s cover. “No summary of A Man in
Full,” wrote Gray, “can do justice to the novel’s ethical
nuances and hell-bent pacing, its social sweep and intricate
interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric
sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of
people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have
thought that banking and real estate transactions could be the
stuff of gripping fiction?”
On second thought, I have to mention
that cover of Time, after all. Honestly, I
do blush easily, and I pledge you my word that I go into the
following only because it is essential to understanding what other
people were about to do. In any field in the United States, the
news that So-and-so “made the cover of Time”
has always had a unique ring to it; and over the preceding two
decades the picture of a novelist on the cover of Time had become a rarity. But there I was, not only on
the cover, but on the cover wearing a white double-breasted suit
and vest and a white homburg and holding a pair of white kid gloves
in one hand and a white walking stick in the other. The headline
said in big letters: TOM WOLFE WRITES AGAIN. Beneath, in smaller
letters, it said: “The novelist with the white stuff is back with
A Man in Full. More than a million copies,
before anyone has read a word!” Not only that, for the first time
in its history Time printed its logo, the
famous TIME, in white against a white background, with only a gray
undershading to let you know the four letters were even there. The
entire cover, graphics and all, became an overture to “the novelist
with the white stuff.” I didn’t realize it at that moment, but this
was premonition music, as they say in cinema circles, for what was
about to occur.
And sales? This is the most
embarrassing subject of all for me to be talking about, and I do
apologize, but I have no choice; as we are about to see,
others insisted on bringing it up. Sales of
A Man in Full skyrocketed from the moment it
reached the stores. The Wall Street Journal
ran a feature on the book’s depiction of the city of Atlanta with
the headline “Tom Wolfe Burns Down Atlanta,” and former Atlanta
mayor Sam Massell announced he was withdrawing an invitation to me
to speak before a business group, the Buckhead Coalition. So I
didn’t know what to expect when I reached Atlanta on my book tour
the following week. They were waiting for me—in lines at the
bookstores. My first night in town, at the Borders bookstore in
Buckhead, I signed books for 2,300 people in four hours. Borders is
a vast place, but the line spilled out onto the sidewalk on Lenox
Road. The book sold so rapidly, it didn’t have to climb its way up
the New York Times bestseller list. It
jumped on at number one and stayed at number one for ten weeks,
throughout the Christmas season and well beyond. It sold in
hardcover like a paperback bestseller, at a rate three to four
times that of the usual number-one bestselling hardcover. Not only
did the huge first printing sell out, but so did seven subsequent
editions of 25,000 each.
It’s uncomfortable being compelled to
sum things up so baldly, but here, in as few words as possible, is
what we have: a critically acclaimed novel selling at an
astonishing clip in a blaze of publicity. The scene is now set for
the extraordinary thing that happened next. I have searched, and I
can come up with nothing else like it in all the annals of American
literature. Three big-name American novelists, heavy with age and
literary prestige—John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving—rose
up to denounce A Man in Full. Three famous
old novelists rousing themselves from their niches in literary
history to declare a particular new novel anathema—if anything even
remotely comparable had ever occurred before, it had certainly
escaped my attention.
John Updike, who was sixty-six, went on
for four pages in The New Yorker before
concluding with considerable solemnity that A Man
in Full was not to be taken as literature but as
“entertainment,” not even—he continued, as if to make sure his
readers understood the crucial distinction between a pleasant
experience and the higher things—not even “literature in a modest
aspirant form.” Furthermore, its author was not a novelist but a
“journalist.” Henry James, said Updike, has taught us that
literature must be “exquisite,” and this journalist, Wolfe, had
“failed to be exquisite.” Norman Mailer, who was seventy-five, went
on for six pages in The New York Review of
Books—six pages in a newspaper-size journal dense with
print—to reach the verdict that A Man in
Full was not to be taken as literature but as a
“Mega-bestseller.” Furthermore, its author was not a novelist but a
“journalist” who “no longer belongs to us (if indeed he ever did!)”
but has moved away and now “lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the
Mega-bestsellers.”
“Us?” I remember
saying to myself. “Did he say us? Who is
us?”
Frankly, I was amazed, not that the two
of them didn’t approve, but that at this stage of their lives they
had taken the time. “My God, those two old
piles of bones!” I said to the reporters who began clamoring for
interviews. “They’re my age!”
I was sixty-eight. I knew how it must have drained them. How could they have
spent those untold hours, ground out those thousands and
thousands of words—the two old codgers had
gone on for pages—pages!—to review a novel?
How could our two senior citizens have found the energy in those
exhausted carcasses of theirs? In interviews Updike was already
complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was
appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two
canes, one for each rusted-out hip.
The way John Irving, who was
fifty-seven, joined his fellow oldsters in this obsession with
A Man in Full did not involve such
debilitating toil, but his emotional toll may have been even
greater. Irving threw a temper tantrum on television.
He was in Toronto appearing on the show
Hot Type, plugging a book about how he had
retreaded his novel The Cider House Rules
for the movies, when Hot Type’s adept and
provocative young host, Evan Solomon, brought up A
Man in Full, knowing full well the rise it had gotten out of
Updike and Mailer. I found the next five minutes riveting when I
got a glimpse later on videotape. Irving’s face turned red. His
sexagenarian jowls shuddered. He began bleeping. It was all the
show’s technicians could do to hit the bleep button fast enough.
“Wolfe’s problem is, he can’t bleeping write! He’s not a writer! Just
crack one of his bleeping books! Try to read one bleeping sentence!
You’ll gag before you can finish it! He doesn’t even write
literature—he writes … yak! He doesn’t write
novels—he writes journalistic hyperbole! You
couldn’t teach that bleeping bleep to bleeping freshmen in a
bleeping freshman English class!”—and on and on in that mode. It
was spellbinding. I don’t pretend to be a lip reader, but it took
no particular expertise to decode bleepos that began with such
bitterly lower-lip-bitten fs. Evan Solomon
kept covering his face with his hand and smiling at the same time,
as if to say, “How can the old coot make such a spectacle of
himself—but, wow, it’s wonderful television!”
Evan liked it so much, in fact, he
called and asked me if I would like to appear on Hot Type and respond. I told him if he would be so kind
as to come to New York for the taping, I’d be delighted. So he did,
and the tape rolled, and he asked me:
“One of the foremost novelists in the
United States, John Irving, says you simply can’t write. You’re not
a writer. Does that make you feel bad?”
“Bad?” I heard myself saying. “Why
should I feel bad? Now I’ve got all
three.”
All three?
“Larry, Curly, and Moe. Updike, Mailer,
and Irving. My three stooges.”
Stooges?
Seemed like the right word to me. A
stooge is literally a straight man who feeds lines to the lead
actor in a play. My three stooges were so upset by A Man in Full, they were feeding me lines I couldn’t
have dreamed up if they had asked me to write the script for
them.
“Are you saying they’re envious of your
success? Is that all it is?”
By no means. Granted, the allergens for
jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the
same time as A Man in Full, and theirs had
sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor.
“Irving is a great admirer of Dickens,” I told Evan. “I think he
would like to be compared to Dickens. But what writer does he see
now, in the last year, constantly compared to Dickens? Not John
Irving, but Tom Wolfe. It must gnaw at him terribly.” And who was
it who had “made the cover of Time”? Knowing
my three stooges, that all by itself would have been enough to send
them ballistic. “It must gall them a bit that everyone—even them—is
talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.” But no, I
didn’t think it was jealousy in the simple sense of displeasure at
a rival’s success.
Did I think there was any personal
animosity at work here, any old scores that hadn’t been
settled?
Oh, people had suggested that, but I
didn’t think so. Years ago, when I was a reporter for the New York
Herald Tribune, back before I had ever
written a book, I had reviewed a novel of Mailer’s, An American Dream, and called it a clumsy
paint-by-the-numbers knockoff of Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment. (Which it was, or else Jung’s concept of
synchronicity is truer than he ever knew.) About that same time, I
had made fun of Updike in a couple of newspaper articles. (One, it
so happens, is available on pages 255-87 of the book before you.)
But all that was decades ago. With Irving the screen was an
absolute blank. We had no old scores, settled or
otherwise.
Then what was it?
Something much more obvious, I told
Evan. A Man in Full had frightened them.
They were shaken. It was as simple as that. A Man
in Full was an example—an alarmingly visible one—of a
possible, indeed, the likely new direction in late-twentieth- and
early-twenty-first-century literature: the intensely realistic
novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the
social reality of America today, right now—a revolution in content
rather than form—that was about to sweep the arts in America, a
revolution that would soon make many prestigious artists, such as
our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.
All three had risen up as one to make
not merely an accusation but a plea. The plea was that A Man in Full be regarded as … out of
bounds. Each cry was the same. Each of our seniors had
cried: “Anathema!”
Updike had said: Look, we’re not
dealing with literature here, not even “literature in a modest
aspirant form,” but, rather, “entertainment.” Irving had said:
Look, we’re not even dealing with a novel here, much less
literature, we’re dealing with “journalistic hyperbole,” with
“yak,” with bleep. Mailer had said: Look, we’re not dealing with
any sort of legitimate creature here, but with a bastard, a
“Mega-bestseller” whose dissolute creator “no longer belongs to us
(if indeed he ever did!).” Us. And who was
us? Why, us was we
who belong to “the literary world,” in Mailer’s terminology.
A Man in Full and its author inhabited
another place entirely, “the King Kong Kingdom of the
Mega-bestsellers.” In other words, Wolfe and his accursed book were
… beyond the pale, a pale (originally synecdoche for fence) being an area of permissible conduct with
definite boundaries. That which is beyond the pale does
not count … and us members of the literary
world do not have to be measured by it.
Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Zola, Ibsen, and Shaw, not to mention
Mark Twain, all of whom were enormously popular in their own
day—Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Zola published their novels
serially in magazines—Ibsen and Shaw gloried
in their box-office appeal—all would have been highly amused by
this attempt to place literature here on this side of the fence and
entertainment and popularity over there on the other. How could my
three stooges ever have maneuvered themselves into such a ludicrous
position? That wasn’t hard to explain. You only had to think of the
sort of novels they had been writing.
The novel Mailer had on the market at
the time A Man in Full was published was an
autobiography of Jesus—yes, an autobiography of Jesus—called
The Gospel According to the Son. The book
Updike had just published, Bech at Bay,
consisted of stories about a seventy-something writer named Bech
who is irritable about the sagging status of the man of letters in
America. Updike’s novel before that, like Mailer’s autobiography of
Jesus, was a fantasy, Toward the End of
Time, about a small town north of Boston in the year 2020
following a war between the United States and China. Irving’s last
novel, A Widow for One Year (1996), had been
about two neurotic writers who seemed unable to get out of a house
in Bridgehampton, Long Island. As the pages wore on, I kept waiting
for them to kindly make it into town, just once, even though
town—I’ve been there—is only a two-block strip along a two-lane
highway. At one point the two of them … leave the house! They get
in a car! They’re driving through a nearby hamlet called
Sagaponack, a lovely little Hamptons Rural Chic retreat—I’ve been
there, too—and I’m begging them to please
stop—park next to the SUVs and German sedans and have a soda at the
general store there on Sagg Main—take a look, just one look, at a
$125,000 show-circuit hunter pony in the pasture over there at the
Topping Riding School— do something—anything—to show that you’re connected to the here and
now, that you actually exist where the author claims you exist, on
Long Island, U.S.A.! But they don’t listen … they just drift on,
encapsulated in their neurasthenia … and disappear behind the walls
of another timeless, abstract house …
So was I saying that John Irving was
untalented, just the way he said I was untalented?
“Not at all,” I told Evan. “John Irving
is a talented writer. Norman Mailer is a talented writer. John
Updike is a talented writer. All I’m saying is that they’ve wasted
their careers by not engaging the life around them,” by turning
their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a
fabulous moment in history. Instead of going out into the world,
instead of plunging into the (to me) irresistibly lurid carnival of
American life today in the here and now, instead of striding out
with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into
the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up
octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn,
retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned
inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e.,
“the literary world,” or such wholly ghostly stuff as the presumed
thoughts of Jesus.
But how could I say that about Mailer?
asked Evan. What about The Executioner’s
Song, Mailer’s 1979 novel based on the Gary Gilmore case (in
which a convicted murderer insisted, to the distress of
antideath-penalty activists, on becoming the first American
executed by the state in more than ten years)?
I wouldn’t say
that about The Executioner’s Song, I told
him. “That book should have taught Norman a lesson, but obviously
it didn’t.”
Mailer’s career had been floundering
for the better part of a decade when one day a remarkable Santa
Claus named Lawrence Schiller turned up. With him he had bales of
transcripts of interviews he had done with Gary Gilmore, his
family, and other people involved in Gilmore’s life and
internationally publicized death. He had visited Gilmore in jail
many times and had witnessed his execution. Schiller was a
photographer who had developed into a reporter with an unusual
specialty. He amassed material for books on hot topics and then
looked for writers to write them in co-ventures. Mailer took
Schiller’s reportorial gold mine and wrote what turned out to be
the only good novel he would ever write after his first,
The Naked and the Dead, back in 1948.
Schiller said later that he interviewed “close to a hundred people
over a year-and-a-half period and prepared all that material … He
[Mailer] never interviewed any of the people or was at any of the
events.” Why Mailer hadn’t drawn the obvious conclusion and headed
out into the country himself as a reporter before doing his next
novel, or at least signed up with Schiller again, instead of
writing the ghostly novels that were to follow, I can’t
imagine.
For that matter, what on earth prompted
John Irving to spend more than four years writing a 633-page novel
set in India, A Son of the Circus , and
publish it (in 1994) with a preface that said: “This isn’t a novel
about India. I don’t know India. I was only there once, for less
than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the country’s
foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me”? I don’t know India. It was true—which only makes it
odder. A Son of the Circus, all 633 pages of
it, is not a novel about India or any other place in this world. It
sank without a trace.
Since my interview with Evan Solomon,
John Updike has published a new novel, Gertrude and
Claudius, yet another otherworldly story, this one about
what transpired in Hamlet’s family prior to the events depicted in
Shakespeare’s play. It was received congenially, respectfully,
collegially by … us … in the
literary world … and then, dismayingly, it dropped off the
radar. Us was one thing; they, the book-reading public, were quite another.
They lost interest so completely, so
rapidly, that The New York Times ran a story
about it, also mentioning other highly “literary” writers whose
current novels, likewise duly praised by us,
had suffered the same fate. Since the others (Saul Bellow was one)
were about the same age as Updike, the Times
raised the question of whether or not it might be a generational
matter, a case of older writers no longer resonating with a younger
audience.
But Updike had his own unique analysis:
it was the readers’ fault. Their “tastes have coarsened,” he said
in an interview. “People read less, they’re less comfortable with
the written word. They’re less comfortable with novels. They don’t
have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to
appreciate things like irony and allusions. It’s sad.” The airport
bookstores didn’t stock anything one could characterize as
literature, he said, and when one got on the airplane, people were
reading not literature but the trash sold at the airport
bookstores. With a Twilight of the Gods resignation, he told of how
it used to be, back before readers became what they are today,
i.e., coarse, dumb, and dumber. “When I was a boy, the bestselling
books were often the books that were on your piano teacher’s shelf
… Someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel
Prize—winning author of high intent. You don’t feel that now. I
don’t feel that we have the merger of serious and pop—it’s gone,
dissolving … The kind of readers that would make it worthwhile to
print a literary writer are dwindling.”
Were my eyes deceiving me? Was this man
actually saying that the lack of interest in the “literary” novel
in the year 2000 was the readers’ fault? He,
John Updike, was a victim of a new cultural disease, Reader
Failure? And he was invoking the name of John Steinbeck, who wrote
in a happier time, back when Updike’s piano teacher read great
writers? How could he risk even mentioning
Steinbeck—unless he actually does consciously and willfully regard
himself as my stooge, a straight man whose role is to feed me such
lines?
The crowning triumph of Steinbeck’s
career was The Grapes of Wrath, his novel of
the Great Depression of the 1930s, published in 1939. He had
already written a bestseller, Tortilla Flat
(1935), and sold it to the movies, plus the highly praised and
reasonably well-selling In Dubious Battle
(1936), and was completing Of Mice and Men,
which became an even bigger bestseller in 1937 and subsequently a
play and a hit movie, when he accepted an assignment from the
San Francisco News to write a series of
newspaper articles on the Okies, who were pouring into California
from the drought-stricken Southwest, seeking work on California’s
sprawling agribusiness farms. Steinbeck was not interested in the
money or the journalism but in amassing material for what he
envisioned as a “big book,” a novel on a grander scale than the
comparatively spare books he had written so far. He bought an old
pie truck, as he called it, stocked it with food and blankets, and
prepared to do his fieldwork, his documenting: studying the Okies,
who were living in squatters’ camps and working for wages as low as
12½ cents a day. At the time, the existence of the camps was not
public knowledge, much less the appalling conditions in which the
Okies lived.
Steinbeck was fascinated by the
“organismal” theory of a biologist friend, William Emerson Ritter,
who believed that the individual human inevitably lived, without
knowing it, as part of a larger social organism, after the manner
of the multiunit “superorganisms” known to marine biology, and that
the whole was inevitably greater than the sum of its parts. For the
same reason, no single organism could be understood without
observing and comprehending the entire colony. (Which is to say,
Ritter was a half century ahead in what is currently one of the
hottest fields in science, “sociobiology.”)
So Steinbeck headed out into the farm
country in his pie truck and toured the camps day after day,
documenting the entire “organismal” complex and looking for the
individual “organisms” that would bring the whole alive in story
form. It was at a squatters’ camp in the San Joaquin Valley that he
came across a man, his wife, and their three children living in a
lean-to made of willow reeds and flattened tin cans and sleeping
under a piece of carpet. The wife had just given birth to a dead
child, her second stillbirth in a year. Their degradation gave him
the idea for the tragedy of the Joad family. He conceived of the
Joads as types, as specimens, as a cluster of people representing
the whole experience of the Okies, and yet Ma Joad and her
rebellious son Tom come to life in the pages of The
Grapes of Wrath as two of the most compelling individuals in
American fiction. Without departing from the Zolaesque naturalism
of his approach, Steinbeck manages by book’s end to make Tom the
embodiment of the Okies’ will not only to live but to fight back.
Ma Joad and Tom became the soul, in Ritter’s terminology, of the
whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The Grapes of Wrath is a textbook American demonstration
of Zola’s method of writing the novel: leaving the study, going out
into the world, documenting society, linking individual psychology
to its social context, giving yourself fuel enough for the maximum
exercise of your power as a writer—thereby absorbing the reader
totally.
And Steinbeck is
the name Updike invokes to explain the failure of two novels of
fantasy and a third set in that crack between the toes of
contemporary life, “the literary world”?
I doubt that many people even down in
that crack would dispute the proposition that the stature of the
American novel has declined steadily since its palmy days, which
were before the Second World War. The great period ran from the
publication of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie in 1900 to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath in 1939. This was the age of John Dos Passos, Edith
Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Sherwood Anderson, Willa
Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston,
Thomas Wolfe, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, James M. Cain, John
O’Hara, and William Faulkner. It was the period in which American
fiction not only began to be taken seriously in Europe for the
first time but also began to influence European writers. Sartre was
so impressed by Dos Passos that he wrote his World War II trilogy,
The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and
Iron in the Soul, in unabashed emulation of
Dos Passos’s great trilogy, U.S.A.
What is the vein that runs from Dreiser
to Steinbeck? It was Alfred Kazin, writing in 1942 in his critical
literary history of the period, On Native
Grounds, who first isolated “the greatest single fact about
our modern American literature—our writers’ absorption in every
last detail of their American world together with their deep and
subtle alienation from it.”
Their “absorption in every last detail
of their American world” never varied, no matter what their mood.
Steinbeck may have felt angry when he wrote The
Grapes of Wrath, Dreiser may have felt disillusioned when he
wrote Sister Carrie, Sinclair Lewis seemed
to have a Menckenesque sense of the absurdity of the spectacle all
around him when he wrote Main Street,
Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and
Arrowsmith, for which he became the first
American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. But all immersed
themselves wholeheartedly in that spectacle, relished “every last
detail” of it, and recognized the importance of going beyond the
confines of their own personal experience to get novelistic
material … Dreiser based the plot of Sister
Carrie on the sexual liaisons of one of his sisters, but his
work as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and
New York provided the book’s rich fabric. Lewis went forth
Zola-style (and Steinbeck-style) as a reporter (using 5 x 8 cards)
to gather material not only for Babbitt and
Elmer Gantry but also for Main Street, which was about the town, Sauk Centre,
Minnesota, where he grew up. Like Balzac, Dickens, Zola, and Mark
Twain, they mocked, attacked, laid bare the society around them,
but always as members of it. They unmasked and shocked the
bourgeoisie, but never from the point of view of “artists” coming
from a different world. As Kazin put it, “They were participants in
a common experience” who “gave the American novel over to the
widest possible democracy of subject and theme” and had a
“compelling interest in people, Americans, of all
varieties.”
In his Nobel acceptance speech in
Stockholm in 1930, Sinclair Lewis exhorted his fellow American
novelists to “give America a literature worthy of her vastness.”
Can anyone imagine my three stooges expressing any such sentiment?
Can anyone imagine them even wondering if America is due anything
at all from writers? And what’s all this about “vastness”
anyway—literature as geography?
Unless they have been keeping it to
themselves, my three stooges haven’t a clue as to why their
“literary world” is in such a decline—or why they themselves have
become so insular, effete, and irrelevant. And here we come upon
the supreme irony of American literary history so far. In the
twentieth century the United States outstripped Europe in every
respect save one. In matters “intellectual,” as I mentioned on
pages 113-30 herein, we remained sweaty little colonials forever
trying to keep up with Europe and, above all, with France. In the
1830s Balzac, Stendhal, and Dickens had introduced the novel of
intense everyday realism—of petits faits
vrais, in Stendhal’s phrase; of “naturalism,” in Zola’s—to
bring alive in story form the new condition of Europe in the wake
of the French and Industrial Revolutions. This became the “modern”
approach to art, so much so that in 1863 even Baudelaire, whose
influence would eventually be something quite different, went into
raptures (in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life”) about a
painter named Constantine Guys who delighted in leaving the studio,
observing the promiscuous hurly-burly of the Paris streets, the
sporting fields, the wartime battlefronts, recording with
meticulous care the clothing, the uniforms, the coaches, the
carriages, horses, weapons, hairdos, expressions, and gestures of
the moment. No longer was the timeless, classical, high-minded
approach to art sufficient unto itself, said Baudelaire. To capture
the beauty of modern life the artist had to know how to combine the
sublime with the intensely real, with Stendhal’s petits faits vrais of the here and now.
This approach elevated literature to a
plateau from which it is impossible to back down without
sacrificing the medium’s full power—and losing much of its
audience. But intellectual fashion was another matter. As Europe’s
reigning intellectual fashion, naturalism lasted barely fifty
years. The intellectual historian Arnold Hauser recounts how in
1891 a French journalist, Jules Huret, asked sixty-four prominent
French writers whether or not they thought naturalism remained a
vital literary tradition and, if not, what would take its place.
Overwhelmingly they characterized naturalism as dead, finished, and
expressed enthusiasm for the new Symbolist poetry, the work of
Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and, above all, Symbolism’s
progenitor, Constantine Guys’s old fan, Baudelaire. It is at this
point that poetry, if it is to be considered serious, becomes
difficult. The serious poet begins to make his work hard to
understand in order to show that he is elevating himself above the
rabble, which is now known of course as the bourgeoisie. He is
writing for what the French critic Catulle Mendès referred to as “a
charming aristocracy,” “an elite in this age of democracy.” There
was something vulgar and common about harping on “meaning.” Poetry
existed to produce wafts of sensibility, Mallarméstyle. Exquisite
wafts; “exquisite” became a very important word. That fashion has
never weakened; it has only grown stronger and spread throughout
the West. Today all “serious” poets are hard for the reader—any
reader—to understand, although some are more “accessible” than
others. I love this word “accessible.” It is as if serious poets
live in caves. Some you can reach in your 4 x 4 off-road SUV. Some
you can get only within several hundred yards of by vehicle; the
rest of the way it’s hand over hand up a hanging vine. Some you
can’t reach at all; you can only admire them from a great distance.
Today Edgar Allan Poe, far from being accepted for publication in
any self-respecting universiy literary quarterly, would be working
for Thompson Creative, the company that specializes in radio
jingles. It is at this point also that the “literary world” is
created, to be inhabited exclusively by us, by “literary” writers,
as distinct from the writers read by ordinary readers, who, as we
already know, are coarse and deaf to the exquisite music of
allusion and irony.
What we are looking at here in the
France of Mallarmé’s time is a fashion among
self-consciously literary people, which, like a clothing fashion,
exists solely to confer some special status upon the wearer.
Readers were something else again. When Huret published his survey
results in 1891, readers’ tastes had not changed in the slightest.
Zola remained the most popular writer in France (and probably in
the world), and Maupassant was second. In America in the 1890s,
writers like Dreiser and Frank Norris were influenced by French
naturalism, not because it was French and fashionable, but because
it had such power over readers. The only sort of American novelist
who was immediately influenced by French aestheticism was an émigré
like Henry James. James, like Proust, Joyce, and George Meredith,
turned away from this vulgar business of Dickensian characters and
melodramatic plots to the point where, as Hauser puts it, his
characters “seem to move in a vacuum compared with the world of
Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.” James didn’t
even care to vie for the attentions of the coarse herd, which is to
say, plain readers. He became the first great sensibility wafter in
American literature.
It was not until just after the First
World War that there came into being that sweaty colonial, the
American “intellectual,” who would value a James above a Dreiser, a
Dos Passos, or a Sinclair Lewis. It was our colonial intellectuals
who finally managed to transplant the “charming” and “aristocratic”
French distaste for naturalism into American literary circles in
the early 1950s, leading to the supreme and supremely cockeyed
piece of irony I mentioned at the outset.
What happened reminds me of Malcolm
Muggeridge’s marvelous conceit, in another context, of an army that
wins a great victory and then, at the very moment of triumph,
inexplicably runs up a white flag and surrenders to the enemy. No
sooner does the American version of the naturalistic novel emerge
triumphant on the world stage than American intellectuals begin
pronouncing it dead, finished, exhausted, impossible any longer. A
Columbia University English professor, Lionel Trilling, wrote a
highly influential essay in 1948 in which he said that the
realistic novel was no longer a plausible approach and that the day
of the novel of ideas had dawned. It so happened that he had one in
his desk drawer, which was duly published and praised, whereupon it
sank like a stone to the bottom of a pond and vanished.
Nevertheless, the idea caught hold in the universities with a
vengeance. Dreiser, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner probably
didn’t have four years of college between them, but from 1950 on,
the great majority of novelists came out of university writing
programs. Novelists who got going before 1960 still tended toward
realism, although even among them the writer who, like Lewis or
Steinbeck, headed off as a reporter or documenter into unknown
territory had become rare. For the postwar realist the only valid
experience was his own.
After 1960 came the era of young
writers in the universities educated in literary isms, all of which
were variants of French aestheticism, products of the notion that
the only pure art is art not about life but about art itself.
Absurdism, fabulism, minimalism, magic realism—all shared a common
attitude. One way or another the novelist winked at the reader, as
if to say, “You know and I know that this isn’t real. This is
something more sublime: the game of art.” Occasionally a writer
would break off in the middle of a story to identify himself to the
reader as an artist sitting alone in a room doing nothing other
than demonstrating what an artist he is.
By 1980 the slump in the novel as a
form had become noticeable. It was not that strong realistic
fiction had completely vanished. Looking back over the past quarter
century, I can think of any number of wonderful books: James Webb’s
Fields of Fire, in my opinion the finest of
the Vietnam novels; Richard Price’s Clockers, product of a reporting foray into the
underbelly of the drug trade in Union City, New Jersey; Carl
Hiaasen’s Strip Tease, a newspaper
reporter’s romp through end-of-the-century South Florida; Pat
Conroy’s The Great Santini; Louis
Auchincloss’s The Golden Calves; Terry
McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale; Jimmy
Breslin’s Table Money; William Price Fox’s
Ruby Red; Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys; Po Bronson’s Bombardiers. But the young talent that half a century
earlier would have been interested in the naturalistic novel was
being steered in other directions. New fabulists, minimalists,
magic realists, and the like emerged and were duly praised, but
they never excited readers the way the naturalists did. The novel
itself lost the hold it once had on the imagination of college
students and young people generally.
I think it’s safe to say that many of
them have turned to the movies and pushed the novel off into the
margins so far as their interest in art is concerned. The critic
Terry Teachout created quite a stir in 1999 when he wrote an
article for The Wall Street Journal
headlined “How We Get That Story” with the subhead: “Quick: Read a
novel or watch a movie? The battle is over. Movies have won.” He
spoke of “far-reaching changes in the once-privileged place of the
novel in American culture.” “For Americans under the age of 30,” he
wrote, “film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of
artistic expression” when it comes to “serious storytelling.” “It
might even be that movies have superseded novels not because
Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete
artistic technology.” The Nobel-winning novelist Saul Bellow was
sufficiently aroused to write an article for The
New York Times going over Teachout’s piece point by point.
He adopted what has become the familiar fallback position of
novelists today when they gather at writers’ conferences and bring
up the subject, as they inevitably do, of how irrelevant the
popularity of movies and television makes them feel as
storytellers. Well, the argument goes, great novels have always had
small, special (read: “charmingly aristocratic”) audiences. Bellow
cited Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
Melville’s Moby-Dick, and, striking his own
Twilight of the Gods note, the novels of Proust and Joyce, which
“were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be
read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.” What impressed “the
great public” even in the nineteenth century, he argued, was a
minor novel like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But if
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a minor accomplishment
in a literary sense (an eminently disputable proposition to
anyone—Tolstoy, for example, or Edmund Wilson—who has actually read
it), our Götterdämmerungisch novelists must
still face up to the fact that the same “great public” also adored
Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Zola.
I felt flattered, up to a point,
anyway, when Teachout singled out The Bonfire of
the Vanities and A Man in Full and
said that not even novels like these could stem the movies’
victorious tide. As I mentioned at the outset, it is others—not me—who insist on bringing up my sales
figures, and Terry Teachout is one of them. In order to make his
point, he felt compelled (by the best of intentions, I am sure) to
jigger the figures and imply that A Man in
Full did not do as well as The Bonfire of
the Vanities in the marketplace, when in fact it sold almost
50 percent more, placing it rather high up, I haven’t been able to
avoid noticing (and once more I blush), on the list of bestselling
American novels of the twentieth century, along with The Bonfire of the Vanities. And yet I don’t dispute for
a moment his central thesis: “For Americans under the age of 30,
film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of
artistic expression.” Over the past ten months I have made a tour
of American universities doing the reporting for a novel I am now
writing, and I can tell you that college students, at least, are
excited not by new novelists but by new movie directors. But I
don’t think Teachout understands why.
Today it is the movie directors and
producers, not the novelists, who are themselves excited by the
lurid carnival of American life at this moment, in the here and
now, in all its varieties. It is the movie directors and producers,
not the novelists, who can’t wait to head out into that raucous
rout, like the Dreisers, Lewises, and Steinbecks of the first half
of the twentieth century, and see it for themselves. It is the
movie directors and producers, not the novelists, who today have
the instincts of reporters, the curiosity, the vitality, the
joie de vivre, the drive, the energy to
tackle any subject, head out onto any terrain, no matter how far it
may be removed from their own experience—often because it is so far removed from their own experience
and they can’t wait to see it for themselves. As a result, the
movie, not the novel, became the great naturalistic storytelling
medium of the late twentieth century. Movies can be other things,
but they are inherently naturalistic—and I suggest that this is
precisely what their audiences adore most about them: their intense
realism.
Movies are team enterprises, the work
of entire troupes of story creators, scene and wardrobe designers,
technicians, and actors, most of them, even the actors, imbued with
a reportorial zeal, an urge to get things right, and none of them
daunted by their ignorance—this is entirely to their credit—of what
they might be getting into. A producer at United Artists who knew
nothing about the Nashville country music scene importuned a
director, Robert Altman, to make a movie about it. He knew nothing
about it, either, and wasn’t interested at first, but undertook the
project anyway, assembled a team, and got interested. The team
apparently started with written sources such as William Price Fox’s
Ruby Red, headed for Nashville, took a look
for themselves, talked to one and all, and produced Nashville. The director Oliver Stone’s movie,
Platoon, about the war in Vietnam, was based
on his own experience, but thereafter, without the slightest
hesitation, he plunged into subject after subject about which he
knew nothing, including, lately, the world of professional
football, resulting in the extraordinary Any Given
Sunday. The director Francis Ford Coppola knew nothing about
war, let alone about the war in Vietnam, but was nonetheless
determined to make what became Apocalypse
Now. So he signed on a writer who did
know about war, John Milius, assembled a team that spent a year
doing the research and reporting to get it right, and the result
was a masterpiece. The director Spike Lee, famous for his movies
about black life in America, turned to Jimmy Breslin and other
sources to document a largely white world to make Summer of Sam, a brilliant naturalistic movie capturing
New York City’s sweltering Zeitgeist of fear and pornoviolent
excitement during the summer of 1977, when a publicity-crazed
serial killer known as “Son of Sam” was on a rampage.
Terry Teachout argued that movies had
won the battle for a story-hungry young public “because the novel
is an obsolete artistic technology.” Bellow chided Teachout for
“this emphasis on technics that attract the scientific-minded
young,” since to treat the experience of reading a great novel in
technological terms was to miss the point. But I personally find it
highly instructive to treat the naturalistic novel as a piece of
technology. After all, it was an invention—and a rather recent one,
at that. Four specific devices give the naturalistic novel its
“gripping,” “absorbing” quality: (1) scene-by-scene construction,
i.e., telling the story by moving from scene to scene rather than
by resorting to sheer historical narrative; (2) the liberal use of
realistic dialogue, which reveals character in the most immediate
way and resonates more profoundly with the reader than any form of
description; (3) interior point of view, i.e., putting the reader
inside the head of a character and having him view the scene
through his eyes; and (4) the notation of status details, the cues
that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order, how they
are doing in the struggle to maintain or improve their position in
life or in an immediate situation, everything from clothing and
furniture to accents, modes of treating superiors or inferiors,
subtle gestures that show respect or disrespect—“dissing,” to use a
marvelous new piece of late-twentieth-century slang—the entire
complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is
succeeding or failing and has or hasn’t warded off that enemy of
happiness that is more powerful than death:
humiliation.
In using the first two of these
devices, scene-by-scene construction and dialogue, movies have an
obvious advantage; we actually see the scenes and hear the words.
But when it comes to putting the viewer inside the head of a
character or making him aware of life’s complex array of status
details, the movies have been stymied. In attempting to create the
interior point of view, they have tried everything, from the use of
a voice-over that speaks the character’s thoughts, to subtitles
that write them out, to the aside, in which the actor turns toward
the camera in the midst of a scene and simply says what he’s
thinking. They have tried putting the camera on the shoulder of the
actor (Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend), so
that the audience sees him only when he looks in the mirror,
and having him speak his thoughts in
voice-over. But nothing works; nothing in all the motion-picture
arts can put you inside the head, the skin, the central nervous
system of another human being the way a realistic novel can. The
movies are not much better with status details. When it comes time
to deal with social gradations, they are immediately reduced to
gross effects likely to lapse into caricature at any moment: the
house that is too grand or too dreadful, the accent that is too snobbish or too
crude.
Which brings us to another major
shortcoming of the movies as a technology: they have a hard time
explaining … anything. They are a time-driven medium compelled by
their very nature to produce a constant flow of images. Three
movies have been made from things I’ve written, and in each case I
was struck by how helpless perfectly talented people were when it
came time to explain … anything … in the midst of that vital flow,
whether it be the mechanics and aerodynamics of a rocket-assisted
airplane or the ins and outs of racial politics in the Bronx. When
a moviegoer comes away saying, “It wasn’t nearly as good as the
novel,” it is almost always because the movie failed in those three
areas: failed to make him feel that he was inside the minds of the
characters, failed to make him comprehend and feel the status pressures the novel had dealt with,
failed to explain that and other complex
matters the book had been able to illuminate without a moment’s
sacrifice of action or suspense. Why is it that movie versions of
Anna Karenina are invariably disappointing?
After all, Tolstoy put enough action, suspense, and melodrama into
Anna Karenina—think of Vronsky’s disastrous,
melodramatically symbolic steeplechase ride on the mare
Frou-Frou—for ten movies. What is inevitably missing is the play of
thoughts and feelings inside the central nervous systems of the
novel’s six main characters—and Tolstoy’s incomparable symphony of
status concerns, status competition, and class guilt within
Russia’s upper orders. Without those things, which even a writer
far less gifted than Tolstoy can easily introduce, using the
technology of print in a naturalistic novel, Anna
Karenina becomes nothing more than soap opera.
The fact is that young people, very
much including college students, were inveterate moviegoers during
the first half of the twentieth century, too, during the very
heyday of the American novel. I know, because I was one of them. We
probably spent more time at movies than
college students today, because we didn’t have television and the
Internet as other choices. And new movie directors? We followed
them, too, ardently. I can remember the excitement at my
university, Washington and Lee, in Lexington, Virginia, when a
movie called Fear and Desire, directed by a
young man named Stanley Kubrick (and produced by a man who still
went by the name of S. P. Eagle instead of Sam Spiegel), arrived at
the State Theater. But the Steinbecks, Hemingways, Farrells, and
Faulkners were even more exciting. They had it all.
The American novel is dying, not of
obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs … food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty,
unslaked thirsts for … America … as she is
right now. It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to
approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with
a ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million
souls and talk to them and look them in the eye. If the ranks of
such novelists swell, the world—even that effete corner which calls
itself the literary world—will be amazed by how quickly the
American novel comes to life. Food! Food! Feed
me! is the cry of the twenty-first century in literature and
all the so-called serious arts in America. The second half of the
twentieth century was the period when, in a pathetic revolution,
European formalism took over America’s arts, or at least the
non-electronic arts. The revolution of the twenty-first century, if
the arts are to survive, will have a name to which no ism can be easily attached. It will be called “content.”
It will be called life, reality, the pulse of the human
beast.