Whoring After the New Thing

Griffin, Bryan F.

Bryan F. Griffin WHORING AFTER THE NEW THING E.L. Doctorow and the Anxiety of Critical Reception. "Loon Lake* tells us about love and sex and money and desire," wept young Christopher...

...Arnold knew what the Doctorows can never know, that in order to discover art in their own time, artists require "great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the human soul...
...Doctorow sulkily, inadvertently giving away a closely guarded trade secret...
...Doctorow was very much the New Thing...
...Styron, "often have curious subconscious significance...
...Still, when Mr...
...Burgess that a serious man values ideas and reason above all else, "in and for themselves, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumph may obtain for him" (or for anyone else...
...and if nobody around here is talking too raucously about the literature of stupidity, it is only because people around here are so extraordinarily polite...
...Though he didn't know it, this is what Mr...
...Doctorow can turn the stuff out by the yard, when he's in the mood, and he always is...
...And Mr...
...it was...
...Doctorow constitutes remarkably barren ground, intellectually and artistically, well, that is the point of the whole exercise: Empty art exists so that empty critics will have some place to hang their hats...
...They have come so far precisely because they have so little information...
...Doctorow's popular reputation can survive only so long as he doesn't pretend to know what he's writing about...
...And if they are not especially deep New Things-if their newness was all they ever had to offer in the first place-they quickly become vulnerable, and then scared: "In order to have enough things to talk about," frets the Establishment's representative, "I may finally have to become an educated man.'' And then, in a sudden explosion of shy-making candor: "My career astonishes me...
...Oh abso-lutely," replied the novelist, wagging his intellectual tail and smiling helpfully...
...Doctorow remembers Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, as the one American authpr who "really holds up in my mind as someone very important,'' which must be a source of enormous comfort to the ghost of Nathaniel Hawthorne...
...Doctorow was "one of the bravest and most interesting of modern American novelists," but most of the real excitement seemed to be over...
...This society is based on extortion, and you can have anything you want if you have a power base...
...Pretty soon Mr...
...That's why they were all so relieved to see Loon Lake: "It is a book I want to discuss and argue about with my friends,'' confessed Robert Towers of the New York Times, breaking out the faded balloons...
...But I would have done it if I had to...
...that gives me pleasure...
...So I started writing about the wall...
...Even Mr...
...This sounded pretty good to Mr...
...Joe is able to resolve his doubts by discussing them with a friendly clergyman-"red apoplectic face I know the feeling Father but you're no father of mine he is on his hands and knees on the stone he is gasping for breath You want your money I scream take your f--king money"-but the experience marks him for the next 252 pages as a boy without punctuation...
...He was glad, however, to have the information: "The choices of names," announced Mr...
...Doctorow was talking about when he told the editor of the Nation that the text of a book, rather than the author's intention, was the proper focus of literary criticism...
...Some people pretend to enjoy this kind of thing-it has "hypnotic force," if you work at Time magazine-and Mr...
...Publishers Weekly muttered something about "a splendid achievement," and the New York Review of Books noted dutifully that Mr...
...Concentrically expanding ripples of implication," he said...
...To be sure, Ragtime wasn't a particularly good book-but then, its author had never pretended that it was...
...As many periods as possible, please, particularly in the middle of what should be sentences, but nothing else...
...The equation, then, is a simple one: If we cannot speak of "moral splendour" and Loon Lake with the same breath, then we will not find a connection between E.L...
...Doctorow, and things would never be the same again: "It tells us as much about ourselves as Theodore Dreiser did," sobbed the disillusioned lad, and nobody had the heart to ask the little chap to please speak for himself...
...As truth feeds beauty, so does intellect feed talent...
...Doctorow to say that he does seem to be a bit of a type, or to suggest that he resembles, in many ways, the sort of lower-middlebrowed, middle-aged English teacher who is likely to write scatological political novels in his spare time...
...By the same token, ability itself is only as real as the intellectual and moral guidance it receives: "Talent," as Lowell said, "is that which is within a man's power...
...A series of interviews can reveal a lot about the mental and spiritual equipment a writer brings to the job...
...The passage becomes even more awe-inspiring when we realize that it is intended to represent a monologue by the late Emma Goldman, who was, in real life, the author of such works as The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, which means that she was not a fundamental illiterate...
...And it's an extremely satisfactory orgasm," said Mr...
...There was another long pause, and then the reviewer suggested that Mr...
...Sheed to insist that he stand up in front of the class and admit that Edgar Doctorow is a rather tacky novelist, completely devoid of talent...
...Apparently Mr...
...In any event, Matthew Arnold was no longer arpund, and Loon Lake was, and there was excitement in the air...
...Doctorow arrived, so to speak, in an intellectual vacuum, and the consequences were predictable and instantaneous...
...He also meets an alcoholic expert in Oriental religions who wants to murder the millionaire oppressor, and since the expert is also a poet, the happy encounter gives Mr...
...He sounds an awful lot like Mr...
...Still, nobody was too terribly surprised when the Post finally got around to reviewing the book and discovered that it was just as dazzling as the paper had been predicting...
...Here you don't know who's talking so that's one more convention out the window," explained Mr...
...An old man gave me two dollars and told me to go home...
...I ran after the departing train...
...In my case it was writing...
...Lehmann-Haupt had finally surrendered his innocence to a new novel by E.L...
...It reminded the Village Voice of Dostoevsky, and of course it reminded "Newsweek of The Great Gatsby (everything reminds Newsweek of The Great Gatsby...
...The second gimmick is slightly more subtle in nature, but when handled properly, it can impart a grim and pseudo-ironic mood to every page in the book, and that's what we're after in this business...
...In any case, Mr...
...duality contained within a circle.'' The tension in the literary community was almost palpable...
...They are successful, in certain circles, not because they have anything to do with the purposes of art, but because they happen to serve the political, cultural, and professional ambitions of other people...
...Prescott have been awful: He helped to create the beast, so to speak, and now he must keep feeding the creature in order to preserve a certain reputation...
...By Jove, "the implications seem endless," roared Mr...
...a Philistine...
...Now, Professor Doctorow may have been "reckless and irresponsible" when it came to writing books, but he knew a good thing when he saw one, and he scampered right back into his study to work up another big load of "rage and frustration and despair.'' But let him tell it in his own words: "I was in my study staring at the wall...
...Doctorow, who sat down at the typewriter, "began to type something," and "didn't even know what it was...
...It may have seemed like a good joke at the office, but the consequences for Mr...
...Knorr, "evokes in his readers an 'anxiety of critical reception,' a fear on our part that we might not be getting all of his signals, as if to balance off his own 'anxiety of influence.' " For some reason all of this anxiety made Mr...
...If Robert Towers of the Times was willing to admit that the alcoholic Orientalist was "a singularly undistinguished poet," that was all he was willing to admit: "Whether Doctorow intended him to be so is not clear," said Mr...
...There was blood...
...Doctorow had long nursed visions of literary grandeur-"I thought of myself as a writer for many years before I wrote a thing"-but he was having trouble getting the critical horses excited, perhaps because of his insistence on "writing without knowing what you're going to write about...
...You travel from orgasm to political organization along an arbitrary morpheme," says Anthony Burgess, perhaps disapprovingly...
...I borrowed the rest...
...This caused a brief flurry of confusion in the American petroleum industry, but it turned out to be an empty threat, and calm was soon restored to the pumping stations...
...Too much, sometimes: It was Doctorow himself who recently told an interviewer that Loon Lake was an "accessible" effort because "anyone who watches television news for five minutes knows how to read this book...
...The New York Times Book Review tried to keep things going by saying that Mr...
...Vonnegut...
...In the neck, in the shoulder...
...There will be a very large number of people," predicted Mr...
...A comparison with Moby Dick may seem excessive," said the Post's determined reviewer, "but that's the league Doctorow is playing in...
...Vonnegut wasn't speaking for the rest of the faculty, but he might as well have been...
...Styron's ramblings didn't seem to have much to do with books, he was at least making more sense than poor Mr...
...Talent is divisible from intellect only in theory, rarely in fact: Literary intelligence cannot really be said to exist without the presence of the complementary talent that gives it form...
...Styron told a female interviewer that he was also making what he insisted was "an interesting side point," which was that "there was a lot of sexual frustration existing on the cultural scene in the late '40s...
...If Matthew Arnold had been in the room he might have reminded Mr...
...It is not necessarily a criticism of Mr...
...An awed silence fell upon the room, and we all stared guiltily at our feet, trying to forget about our vectors, and not succeeding...
...Which was exactly the right thing to say...
...What we are talking'about, of course, is party-fiction...
...Freud and other "fictionalized" characters...
...Styron was telling the world that he "was plainly trying to work on several levels in terms of sex," as if the world cared much...
...Nobody could figure out what all that courage had to do with anything, but the New York Review of Books had already ruled that Mr...
...Doctorow was already scheduled to hype his forthcoming novel at a $ 10-a-ticket'' Washington Post Book and Author Luncheon'' to be held in October, and those same twisted souls were still making snide remarks when the Post proceeded to feature not one, or two, but three adoring articles about the author of Loon Lake...
...By this time in Knorr was almost in tears, but he didn't know how to stop: "the natural affinities among historical recurrences-to speak in Vico and Joyce's terms-are ultimately part of the rhetoric of fictional and biographical characterization," hewhispered helplessly, "of a self s justification for its own vectors...
...It was an occasion for dancing in the streets, because Loon Lake was, among other things, "an odd cross" between The Grapes of Wrath and-you guessed it-The Great Gatsby...
...It was for Berkman and the revolution...
...The editor of the Nation kept pestering him about Loon Lake, and Mr...
...He said great writing needs the power of the man but it also needs the power of the moment...
...Like almost everybody else in the faculty lounge, Mr...
...Nobody trusted themselves to say anything, and after a few minutes Mr...
...Doctorow, on the other hand, almost never goes away...
...Knorr worry about "the value of literary scholarship," because, you see, such scholarship was really "a dismantling and reconstruction of an individual work within all of the possible modes of allusion: synchronic (contemporary), diachronic (historical), metachronic (archetypal), literary (imaginative variations of the archetypal), and non-literary (documentary...
...Doctorow did so with characteristic gusto, revealing, among other things, that it was only after the end of the Second World War that "Reagan's life began to attach to the nonfictive structure of things...
...On the other hand, some of the juniors and seniors can remember a time when Wilfrid Sheed wrote real criticism, a time when he was still able to say that "cultural conservatism is becoming in an older writer...
...It would be asking too much of Mr...
...Doctorow's Loon Lake...
...He thinks that James Baldwin and Norman Mailer are great writers, and he publishes his own work in Playboy magazine...
...Doctorow is "a connoisseur of American literary myth," the sort of connoisseur who spends his afternoons "swimming securely in the main current of American literature'' (apparently without getting wet...
...Suddenly the juices began to flow, and it was almost like old times...
...Doctorow that they asked him to write an analysis of the moral character of Ronald Reagan...
...it was better than Ragtimel Why, it was so good that some people knew it was good even before they'd had a chance to look at it: The Washington Star, for instance, somehow guessed back in the middle of the summer that Loon Lake would be ' 'September's leading fiction title...
...Doctorow was "a magician...
...It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people...
...To an unhappy visitor from the real world, the reason for all the excitement would not have been immediately apparent...
...The very words summoned up images of the Golden Age, and once more the cry went up: Find Doctorow...
...It is Doctorow's way...
...Styron was very close to the cultural scene in those days: "I mean girls just weren't putting out yet in those years, right...
...His images haunt you," chanted the girls from Vogue: ''words crash up against each other like loose atoms...
...all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity...
...And where words exist without purpose, there is excruciating boredom...
...Doctorow's novels constitute a picture of "nothing less than 20th- century America itself,'' and that "our stock of imaginings is increased, and the American experience has itself a new legend," chances are he'd rather not be taken too seriously (people who talk about "imaginings" and "the American experience' ' almost never want to be taken seriously...
...It was for the attentat...
...Presumably Mr...
...In the end, it was left to Anthony Burgess to give the game away, and he did so in the pages of Saturday Review...
...Perhaps he was thinking of Peter Prescott of Newsweek, who has managed to persuade himself that E.L...
...But if certain boys and girls in the back row were making fools of themselves, it wasn't entirely the fault of Mr...
...We only had money for one ticket...
...Doctorow an opportunity, to unload some of his unused words, which he is only too happy to do: Come with me Compute with me Computerized she prints out me Commingling with me she becomes me Coming she is coming is she Coming she is a comrade of mine Comrades come all over comrades Communists come upon communists Hi...
...Under the circumstances, this must have come as something of a surprise to Mr...
...Towers sounded a bit nervous, it was because so many of the best people had pleaded prior engagements...
...On the contrary, he had taken pains to persuade all his friends that he'd really wanted his Event to appeal to semi-educated, "working-class" people: He didn't like literary elitism, he said, and he was eager to restore the "popular interest" in fiction (or anyway, in Edgar Doctorow's fiction...
...Harris explained gently, "nor do I expect that it will receive the corroboration of time...
...It was better than War and Peace . . . it was the best book anyone had ever written...
...and lo, when they saw him he carried in his arms a big new book, and it was a scatological novel of politics called Loon Lake, and it was good...
...Doctorow finally got mad and said that his book was "discontinuous and mind-blowing...
...Doctorow, and he was pretty damn sure he'd assaulted it: Hell, "I think it has now been torpedoed," guffawed the talkative fellow, who added that he'd also torpedoed "the basic compact between narrator and reader...
...I was also noting the big money and the heavy praise some of my contemporaries were getting for their books, and I would think, 'Well, s--t, I'm going to have to study writing harder.' " And so he did, in a manner of speaking: "What the hell," he says today, looking back on it all: "I was building a power base anyway, with sleazo paperbacks...
...The saga of Edgar Doctorow is as representative as its hero...
...This conviction constituted an apparently insurmountable obstacle to popular success until late in 1970, when Mr...
...And so forth, for two pages...
...Styron had awarded the same first name to two of his "central victim-oppressor figures...
...Also "skillful," and "alive with passion, brutality, power, violence and corrupting success," which are all good things to be alive with, over at the Post...
...Doctorow's Rosenberg book...
...Doctorow's Ragtime was "a splendid book to talk about-a big, party-sized idea...
...Eventually Joe joins a carnival to find those parts of himself which he has not already found, but his studies are soon interrupted by a party of unenlightened workingmen who proceed to rape and then murder the carnival's Fat Lady...
...Just like Mr...
...That is the tragic lot of the professional critic, and it is one reason why so many nice guys end up-in Mr...
...The editor noted, with some satisfaction, that the novelist always qualified his comments about his own work with an "anyway, that's my theory," or an "as I see it...
...Doctorow recalled a little while ago...
...One of my working principles," he explained recently, "is not to know too clearly or too objectively what I'm doing...
...I saw him on television the other night, and he said most good artists were stupid about everything but their arts...
...Docto-row's "old Matthew Arnold idea" was really nothing but a new Edgar Doctorow idea dressed up in a better man's clothes...
...Styron: "Yes...
...One man's pleasure can easily be another man's boredom, and by this time people were getting pretty sick of the rather peculiar arrangement between the Nation and Mr...
...Doctorow's sentences were "the verbal equivalent of ragtime...
...He is serving as head critic for the Book-of-the-Month Club these days, and Loon Lake is one half of a Double Selection...
...The mythmaker is also a terribly sensitive fellow, of course, and he gets a chance to exhibit great wads of his sensitivity when he suddenly finds himself reminiscing about Joe's first crush: I was enraged by the flaws of her, the unnatural cleft of her left hip, one buttock was actually atrophied, the raised veins behind the knees, the hanging breasts like deflated balloons, the yellowed face with loosened folds of skin at the neck, rising in parallel rows as she turned her head from me this stinking Hungarian hag this thieving crone bitch with the gall to think she had me for her toy boy her lover chuffing now like a f--king steam engine I brought the tears to her eyes she would acknowledge nothing she resisted . . . the lying c--t in the Pine Grove Actually, Wilfrid Sheed has an excuse, of sorts...
...His first hit was, as he recalls with some excitement, "an Alternate Selection for Literary Guild," and his first Publishing Event was "a Primary Selection for Literary Guild, Saturday Review Book Club, and Book Find Club...
...Towers, shutting his eyes tight and pretending it was too dark to see anything...
...Still, there are limits to tolerance, and if Mr...
...Apparently Mr...
...Find Doctorow, and praise him, and all may yet be as it was on the campus of Philistia...
...Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed- Still with this dullness was he cursedDull-beyond all conception-dull...
...Vonnegut, who had managed to get sex and literature all mixed up with the American space program: "It's a tremendous space f--k, and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress that fact...
...It's true that trick novelists tend to attract trick reviewers...
...Things were beginning to get a little scary, but just then the bell rang and everybody had to sit down in their assigned seats...
...No one has written a book quite like it,'' confirmed the Review, crumpling up the note...
...I understand," he concluded sweetly, "that there are certain frequencies with which you can make a person involuntarily s--t with sound...
...Ragtime reminds me of Hart Crane's The Bridge," grumbled Stanley Kauffmann, and the party was complete...
...I want to stop being clumsy offstage...
...This went on for a while, and the nice woman from the Post began to get a little desperate...
...If he whores after the new thing, he will only get it wrong and wind up praising the latest charlatans, the floozies of the New...
...Doctorow suddenly decided to revise an old manuscript about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Americans who were executed in 1953 for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviets...
...And while Professor Doctorow is acquainting himself with the thought of Matthew Arnold, he might note that genuine artists "do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their ego, nor of the coming poet...
...Unfortunately, he is a teacher with a difference: In 1975, one of his novels accidentally turned into a particularly raucous Publishing Event, and some folks are still celebrating...
...And when they do, honest writers and critics must be ready to take advantage of the fleeting opportunity to throw open the windows and clean up the mess and make the place habitable again...
...This one had the feeling that the Doctorow style was "like a chorus of the blues played by Dizzy Gillespie," and he was especially hard hit by certain enchanting passages written "in a kind of semilyric computer-ese...
...Loon Lake itself is not a particularly interesting novel...
...Not just to some pages, mind you: to every page...
...Burgess wouldn't have liked that at all...
...Well, our Joe has problems of an intimate nature ("alone at night in the spread of warmth waking to the warm pool of undeniable satisfaction p-d from my infant c--k into the flat world of the sheet and only when it turned cold and chafed my thighs did I admit to being awake, mama, oh mama"), and he also suffers from religious doubts, which come to a head one afternoon as he is, in his boyish way, robbing the church poorbox: "God the Father the Son and That Other One really p.....g them off with my existence I twist turn kick the Father has b-s they don't cut off their own b- s they don't go that far the son of a bitch-spungo...
...I became enraged with her...
...Some of the students were better writers than others (Styron had the largest vocabulary), and some were more repulsive than others (Coover wrote a series of explicit short stories about raping small girls), but they all shared a common attitude towards life: They didn't like it much...
...In the stylistic sense-as distinct from the political sense-Doctorow's big novel relied for its impact upon two very old tricks (or three, if we are mean enough to count the inevitable presence of Dr...
...Cried Mr...
...Yes," said the novelist, "absolutely...
...People were beginning to get a bit annoyed, especially when Mr...
...It is extraordinarily hard to love literature if you hate life, which may be why the Vonneguts of our time have such a hard time describing what they like to think of as their creative processes: "It isn't really up to me," maintains Mr...
...Prescott got to feeling silly, so he said that the book was "more deeply felt than all but a few contemporary American novels...
...It had been a hard-fought battle, but Mr...
...Everybody was just about to go back to sleep when the reviewer from Time magazine raised his Bryan F. Griffin is an essayist and writer of short fiction...
...He planned to shoot Frick and take his own life at his trial...
...It was this book that became the Publishing Event of 1975, and it was this book that really started all the trouble...
...The dumping must be done more or less at random (chronology is definitely out), and if you're the sort of stick-in-the-mud who insists on cluttering up the book with any real development of character or plot, it's a good idea to conceal such development from the more persistent readers by tucking it away among a series of long paragraphs of detailed descriptions of supremely uninteresting localities...
...By the time it was all over, the Rosenberg novel had become, in the hushed words of movie critic Stanley Kauffmann, "the best American political novel in a generation," and it stayed that way for more than ten days, thus establishing a new record...
...Alfred Kazin pointed the way when he devoted a recent column to an analysis of "Doctorow's intellectual shortcomings...
...Doctorow had anything particularly interesting to say, but because he was so darn good at "expanding the resources of the genre.'' Mr...
...And if a new book by E.L...
...Five or ten years ago, Mr...
...Like all excessively familiar objects, it is rather difficult to describe...
...Vonnegut, like Mr...
...In the end, it is this immunity from intellectual promotion that links them most securely together as a single historical and artistic unit...
...And no one's mentioned it," he added indignantly, sticking his finger into the heart of the matter...
...Vonnegut, in the manner of one confiding a little-known fact of English literature...
...The poet Shelley must have seen Mr...
...Decided" may be too strong a word: "I sat down at the typewriter recklessly and irresponsibly, full of rage and frustration and despair, and just to do something, almost in mockery of the pretense of writing, I began to type something," Mr...
...Vonnegut told Playboy magazine recently, "is to crawl out of the envying, life-hating mood of the Great Depression at last...
...This was success, in Mr...
...anything else is cosmetics anyway...
...Mr...
...They took the gun...
...It was in a house built in 1906...
...Replied Mr...
...It is a delicate subject, and we don't want to be too rude, but . . . well, put it this way: None of these guys-Doctorow, Vonnegut, Heller, Styron, etc.-is ever going to make Head of the Department...
...Nothing quite like it has ever been written," muttered Mr...
...After all, "it's better to be ahead of a reader than behind him," said Mr...
...Styron if his latest book could be seen as a sequel to the previous book, "in the sense that they deal with two levels of slavery...
...Doctorow was somehow "superior to most of his American fellow-novelists," not because Mr...
...Towers, a little louder now...
...Sontag, just daring anybody to poke fun at her reading habits...
...A tone, a mood, an atmosphere, a texture, a poetry, a felt and meditated vision of how things go with us," hummed the Nation's reviewer, which is Critic Talk for ' 'I can't think of the word I want, but by Gosh this a favorable review...
...It's all quite simple, really, almost as simple as unbuttoning the top buttons of your Bloom-ingdale's work shirt: First you put tape over the punctuation keys on your typewriter, and then you add a shot of the reliable old Sophisticated Irony, and before you know it, you too can turn out paragraphs positively pregnant with well-hidden significance and concentrated boredom...
...Doctorow and literary purpose...
...Vonnegut likes to recall that although he "wasted eight years building model airplanes and [masturbating]," he nevertheless found time to read some science fiction: "conservative stuff-H.G...
...There is no attempt at historical, narrative, or psychological coherence, and accordingly there is no real plot (which is perhaps just as well...
...The memory must haunt him still: It was a slow day at Newsweek, and Mr...
...Doctorow typed and raged and despaired just as hard as he knew how, and after a little while he came out, grinning from ear to ear and carrying a big new book called Ragtime...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...The way to do this is to drop any event of significance (particularly if it's violent, and it always is) right into the middle of a paragraph of unrelated trivia, so that the Awful Thing seems no more or less important than the everyday things which surround it...
...If there is a certain sameness to these professorial musings, it is only because there is a certain sameness to the professors...
...The editors of the paper finally crossed the line when they printed a two-page tribute to Loon Lake by still another English teacher...
...Doctorow is pretty standard stuff in other ways as well: He has, in Alfred Kazin's phrase, "a nostalgic, deeply felt revulsion against capitalism," and so of course he also has long grey hair and a beard and a National Book Critics Circle Award...
...The two have other things in common as well: They were both fascinated, as young boys, by the sight of little girls urinating, and they both have exactly the same prose style...
...Doctorow started talking about "accomo-dating the complexity of fiction, which as a mode of thought is intuitive, metaphysical, mythic...
...The statement betrays a fundamental misconception about the nature of talent, and it is a rather popular misconception...
...Doctorow's college, let it be known that the Rosenberg book was "a nearly perfect piece of art...
...that so far as the present age can supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them...
...Kurt Vonnegut came back to sum up the situation: "I get more respect for Truman Capote as the years go by," he said, "probably because, he's becoming genuinely wiser all the time...
...Alas, Joe, like his creator, is a rather dull and ill-educated boy: I climbed firescapes and watched old women struggle into their corsets, I joined a gang and carried a penknife I had sharpened like an Arab, like a Dago, I stuck it in the vegetable peddler's horse, I stuck it in a feeb with a watermelon head, I slit awnings with it, I played peg with it, I robbed little kids with it, I took a girl on the roof with it and got her to take off her clothes with it, and so on...
...Which leaves us with Mr...
...Neither did anybody else, of course, but Mr...
...Ragtime was a typical example of the novel sans emphasis, which is to say that it was an example of the novel that seeks, or happens, to render all human experience meaningless simply by virtue of an aggressively monotonous prose style...
...Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else is having such trouble doing it...
...Men ran in...
...his theories about his books are no more qualified than anyone else's...
...His plea raises certain awkward questions about the intellectual stature of the school as a whole, and in addressing those questions we may expose the core of the problem...
...Kurt Vonnegut was enrolled in the school, as were Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, William Styron, and a few others...
...Plinkaplink," said the Times...
...If Mr...
...He would be well-advised to take empty-lessons from William Styron, who's an old hand at the game...
...As a matter of fact, the editors were so high on Mr...
...She pointed out that there was enormous significance in the fact that Mr...
...Even the Reviewers who were hired To do the work of his reviewing With adamantine nerves, grew tired;- Gaping and torpid they retired, To dream of what they should be doing...
...Frick collapsed...
...Vonnegut with considerable enthusiasm...
...Yin and Yang...
...Like everybody else on the American literary campus, he likes to dress up in manly footgear and laborers' trousers and lovingly pressed, unbuttoned work shirts, and when it is time for photographs he appears in uniform and smiles quizzically at the cameras in a sardonic, working-class sort of way...
...There were scattered bursts of applause, and the speaker got to his feet...
...The experience also did something funny to Michael Kernan of the Washington Post, who received the Unmitigated Gall Award for saying that "the sentences are clean and tight, even if they don't have any commas in them, and sometimes no periods...
...Doctorow makes it quite clear," reported the editor, "that...
...He knew what our century does not: that genuine art can grow and survive only in those forests where talented intelligence seeks moral splendour, and that such forests are not so common as we think...
...Vonnegut: "I want to stop being stupid in real life...
...There was a long silence, followed by a little chatter about slavery, and then the reviewer asked if the book had anything to do with oppression...
...Pop-philosopher Susan Sontag handed the boy a dry copy of the New York Review of Books, and tried to persuade him that she'd liked Loon Lake even more than he had: "the best American book / have read in several years," sniffed Ms...
...Doctorow is a storyteller, a mythmaker," wails Newsweek, sounding just a bit desperate about the whole thing...
...Styron's central theme might be that of "victims turning into oppressors...
...The trouble with typewriter-art, of course, is that typewriters have good days and bad days: "I wasn't even getting reviewed," recalls Mr...
...Vonnegut believed him: "I started out writing for a large audience," recalled one of the best living writers, "and if I did a lousy job, I caught a lot of s--t in twenty-four hours...
...Sheed starts saying that Mr...
...Burgess was convinced that Mr...
...hand and asked if he could get any extra credit for saying that' 'Loon Lake tantalizes long after it is ended...
...By an astonishing coincidence, the poet was also once attacked by a pack of wild dogs, just like Joe...
...and Mr...
...The implications were indeed endless, and the competition to produce the most sweeping statement about Loon Lake lasted far into the night...
...It is all part of the same elixir, which is what Charles Rollin meant to imply when he said, almost three centuries ago, that "talents constitute our very essence...
...It was also everybody else's way, about 15 years ago, and unfortunately for Mr...
...How could anybody have come this far with so little information, with such garbled ideas of what other writers have said ?'' Mr...
...He had a knife...
...That's exactly what he is, as a matter of fact: a fifty-year-old English teacher who likes to write scatological political novels...
...Styron, "I think that's a very good analogy.'' He went on to say some complimentary things about .black holes, and pretty soon his interviewer was encouraged to ask him if he was making a "universal statement about sin in the human condition...
...Doctorow's characters would like to talk with one another about all the piles of accumulated symbolism, but things are just too hectic: A female aviator who looks a lot like Amelia Earhart keeps landing and taking off from the estate in her hydroplane (her search for "higher altitudes" corresponds to the poet's search for "the ineffable in Zen," according to Towers of the Times), and Joe himself has to steal a Mercedes and rescue the gun moll and get a job in an auto plant so that he can organize the workers to bring social democracy to the Adirondacks...
...Burgess didn't say for what purpose this thing was being done, but he didn't much care, either: "I am happy to learn that Loon Lake is already a popular book," he continued artlessly, "in that it is a Book of the Month Club choice and eighty-odd thousand copies have already been printed...
...Part of the trick for people my age," Mr...
...Which is what the genuine critic Jonathan Raban was talking about five years ago when he said that Mr...
...It is not quite true, as Alfred Kazin says, that "Doctorow the novelist is not so smart as he is talented...
...Outsiders observed that Mr...
...We needed money for a railroad ticket and for a gun...
...The talent of a great soul is great because the soul is great, and the talent of a small soul can never outgrow its parent...
...Well, Mr...
...Nobody was quite sure what that meant, but it sounded awfully sexy, and so a few weeks later the Nation decided to print an entire fictive chapter from Loon Lake, which was a pretty big step for all concerned: "As far as we can determine," said the editors, "The Nation has never published an excerpt from a novel.'' There was an awed silence which threatened to become embarrassing until the fellows remembered to explain that Mr...
...Doctorow's blushing publishers, as they passed a note to the New York Review of Books...
...Doctorow, but he kept a straight face about it: ' 'Write the book you find yourself writing," the nearly perfect artist told an interviewer, "and after it's done you look around for a rationale for it.'' Mr...
...Burgess was-happy because "serious students of the novel" (for which read ' 'Anthony Burgess") "must recognize here a bracing technical liberation," and-thank goodness-"such a recognition is being forced upon a readership probably happier with Princess Daisy...
...Naturally he winds up on the enormous estate of a millionaire oppressor of the workers, where he is set upon and almost eaten by a pack of wild and presumably capitalistic dogs, and then-please sit still, this is very serious- then he runs into a union-busting gangster named Crapo and his lovely and talented gun moll Clara, who take turns teaching him how to oppress workers...
...Plink a plink, a-plink-plink, a-plink-plink.'' Everybody got the giggles, and the big Event was adjourned until the following week...
...Vonnegut, as if that were something to complain about...
...Doctorow and his colleagues give too many more interviews, those limits will almost certainly be tested...
...Oh, sure, there were a few un-Melville-like flaws, but on the whole the book was "one verbally dazzling solo performance after another," because Mr...
...Doctorow's: But we were in New York and we had no money...
...It is poorly written, and hardly structured, but there is nothing especially new or shocking in its awfulness...
...I hope they will quickly get around to reading it.'' And if Mr...
...But then, even the mildest attacks of literacy can prove fatal to a publishing event, and Ragtime was more than an event: It was the sum total of all human experience to date...
...Doctorow, and he didn't make a peep when Partisan Review announced that the whole world was "in awe" of the way in which he "managed to handle historical figures fictively...
...contemplative stasis, acquisitive action...
...Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, who's easily forgotten, but he wrote Jekyll and Hyde," explains Mr...
...Doctorow didn't have to look very far, either: The editors of Contemporary Literary Criticism were ready with the suggestion that his "major fictive concerns" might be "the cyclical nature of history and ways of knowing...
...And now we see that the question answers itself...
...The New York Review of Books figured it was '' a combination of Pynchon, Edward Gorey, and William Appleman Williams," and the New Yorker thought it was "not unlike Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts' " (which was odd, because Publishing Events usually remind the New Yorker of something by Celine...
...It was more than good, it was fine, as fine as War and Peace...
...The Washington papers were joined in their astonishing prescience by the editors of the Nation, who predicted that current thinking about "the tools of contemporary political repression" would be "enriched by the forthcoming publication of an important new work of the literary imagination, E.L...
...He said only one person was needed for the job...
...Tantalizing," repeated Robert Towers of the New York Times Book Review thoughtfully...
...But then, that is the fate of all conscientiously new things: They become Old Things almost before they know it...
...There are, however, periodic references to the melodramatic adventures of a boy named Joe, who runs away from home to visit the Great Depression...
...This makes Joe very angry, in a symbolic sort of way: "I felt betrayed by her, as by life itself, the human pretense...
...Then I started writing about the house itself...
...Sheed wasn't referring to himself...
...Doctorow coming: Peter was dull...
...The year is not half spent," he continued happily, "and a better American novel may yet appear, but I doubt it...
...The whole room seemed to be swaying: "You can never be sure what you saw," shrieked the literary dancers, "mind can hardly keep up with matter...
...Doctorow must have suspected that he'd said a bit too much, because by the time the next interviewer showed up he'd changed his mind: If Loon Lake was a "confusing" book, well, that was okay, because, "you know, a little confusion isn't a bad thing...
...As a matter of fact, he was attached to a whole school of New Things, all of whom spent their time writing scatological political epics and issuing vague statements about the arrogance of power...
...And I was off and running...
...How would the taxpayers feel if they found out that they were buying orgasms'for a few thousand freaks within a mile of the launch pad...
...Loon Lake* tells us about love and sex and money and desire," wept young Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times, and the older boys and girls winked knowingly at one another...
...It can be done the other way around, too: Trivia may be unloaded haphazardly onto non-trivia, but it's not quite so much fun that way, because it means you have to write out all that important stuff before you can get to the trivia...
...I come to work every morning and I see what words come out of the typewriter...
...Fascinating," he added somewhat tentatively, and everybody nodded...
...Doctorow did it before and he can do it again...
...A few overeducated louts started to do just that, and an embarrassing situation was only averted by the noisy arrival of some subsidiary philosophers from Vogue magazine, who began dancing around a fashionable little pot and insisting that Mr...
...Vonnegut's original enquiry: How could these fellows have come so far, "with so little information...
...Well, he'd repeated the magic word, and before anybody knew what was happening the reviewer was asking him if he would please "compare this periodic density of evil to the new concept of black holes in physics.'' Yes indeedy, said Mr...
...And suddenly there was a kind of light...
...Styron, "I guess it can...
...He was right, of course: Such people are always with us, always bored out of their skulls, and always ready for another party...
...Doctorow is an astonishing novelist," said Mr...
...Critic Walter Knorr delivered the invocation: "Doctorow," said Mr...
...In my nostrils, mixed with the sharp fume of booze, was an organic stench, a bitter foul smell of burning nerves, and s--t and scum...
...Doctorow was . . . a'n editorial advisor to the Nation...
...And a month before they'd even assigned the book for review, the literary astrologers from the Washington Post just knew that Loon Lake would turn out to be "dazzling...
...And so the wise men went to find Doctorow...
...Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who also teaches English at Mr...
...Every now and then he remembers that he's supposed to be an English teacher, and the consequences can be absolutely catastrophic, as they were the other day when he brought the conversation around to his only subject, politics and literature...
...We have forgotten the wisdom, as we have forgotten Charles Rollin...
...It was all a little sad, but the cheers from this quarter were deafening: After all, if things improve offstage, it stands to reason that they'll get a little better onstage as well...
...Towers, and all hell broke loose...
...Doctorow "transmuted emanations of historical events into novel-istic meditations," which meant that he wrote leftist political novels...
...And that's when I put on embroidered underwear and walked 14th Street...
...Concluding on a rather bizarre note, the man of the people explained that he wanted his book to be "accessible" to gas station attendants...
...he was at first Dull,-oh, so dull-so very dull...
...They took the knife...
...It's the old Matthew Arnold idea," he declared airily...
...Which just goes to show how cynical some people can be when it comes to art...
...Lately he has been spending a lot of time giving interviews, and in those interviews he generally talks about "fictional renderings of experience," and "integrating fiction into people's lives," and that kind of thing- pretty standard stuff, in other words...
...Publishing Events...
...I embraced him at the station...
...Doctorow, there are no new sights to be pointed out during the hike: Loon Lake is merely one more in a thinning line of "grotesque socio-erotic epics," and as such it is-we hate to say it-more than a little old hat...
...The red-faced fellow tried to cover up his slip with some fast chatter about "epistemological agonies" and "convincing spacetime continua," but it was an awkward moment for all concerned: The unavoidable implication was that Anthony Burgess was only happy when readers were not, and for a minute it looked as though "serious students of the novel," like fans of Princess Daisy, might be far more interested in sales figures and 'technical liberations" than in real books or genuine ideas...
...But then he would have gone on to point out that "the man who regards the possession of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself, something which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is...
...Understandably annoyed, our English cousins fought back through novelist Graham Greene, who ran out into the front yard, said that Kurt Vonnegut was "one of the best living American writers," and then ran back inside and slammed the door, giggling all the while...
...What we are talking about, not to put too fine a point on it, is literary intelligence, or the lack of it...
...but that an age wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty supply such, and an age of spiritual discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and delightfully affected by them.'' Which is to say that Mr...
...Raban, "who know little, and care less, about either the novel or history, who will see Ragtime as the most dazzlingly sophisticated exploration of both the novel and history that they have ever read...
...The book was "a brilliant achievement," and "the best contemporary novel" the partisan reviewer had stumbled across in one heck of a long time...
...Ragtime...
...Styron was pleasantly surprised: "I hadn't even thought of it until you mentioned it...
...If Loon Lake is not a particularly interesting book, it is because its creator is not a particularly interesting man...
...The convention of the consistent, identifiable narrative is one of the last conventions that can be assaulted," said Mr...
...Recently a wayward book reviewer from the Washington Post asked Mr...
...Doctorow is one of those timid American male writers who is afraid to use a grown-up word where a four-letter one will do, and if the result is undeniably sleazy, it is also undeniably stale-much more likely to elicit a surreptitious yawn than a disciplinary grimace...
...Doctorow's slightly strained cover story had been forgotten by the end of 1980, and all that remained was the vague memory of past days of glory...
...Over and over, a dozen different times in a dozen different places, he called on writers to "remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and greatness of their own times...
...It is, to be sure, a determinedly squalid book (much more so than Ragtime), but it is surprisingly old-fashioned in its squalor: Mr...
...Yes," replied Mr...
...Edgar Laurence Doctorow is not, after all, a particularly impressive figure, intellectually or otherwise...
...He barged into Frick's office in Pittsburgh and shot the bastard three times...
...Doctorow, had his very own collection of "big money" and "heavy praise...
...Momentarily distracted by the unexpected presence of so many commas, the lad catches a glimpse of a naked girl whizzing by in a private train (an extremely common sight during the Great Depression) and takes off in hot pursuit...
...It wasn't exactly a new tune (five years earlier the same teacher had been saying that Ragtime-was "cool, hard, controlled," and "all we could ask for in the way of texture, mood, character and despair"), but this time the gang had gone too far: Someone finally looked at the small print and discovered that Mr...
...I do not believe this book will snap open surprisingly to the exertion of our minds," Mr...
...His latest hero and heroine, for example, "would have had it beautifully made on the sexual level had there not been a madness in their relationship," and so forth...
...Vonnegut's terms: "If we aren't the establishment," he remembers saying at the time, "I don't know who is...
...He stabbed Frick in the leg...
...There was an uncomfortable silence, and then everybody went scurrying over to look at William Styron, who was talking, as so often before, about Sex and the American Novel...
...Everybody glanced at the excerpt and nodded politely and tried to move on to other things, but the editor of the Nation was waiting for them in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, where he was interviewing . . . E.L...
...That's the sad thing about parties: They must always come to an end...
...And indeed, it must have been an extremely old Matthew Arnold idea, since, as every freshman is supposed to know, Arnold spent the whole of his adult life attacking the concept...
...I didn't even know what it was...
...The computers of my paperback publishers began to notice that some of my sleazo books were being reordered," and the rest is history...
...The first gimmick is creaky but always effective: no punctuation, other than the period...
...Well, of course not: Mr...
...The novelist Mark Harris, for instance, sent his regrets in the form of a superb essay in the New Republic: He was sure, he said, that Loon Lake would give the kids ' 'plenty of work looking up allusions and interpreting symbols and writing papers describing their findings," but he didn't want to join in the fun...
...But then, Prescott of Newsweek also has a vested interest in the matter: He has never been able to live down some hasty remarks he made ten years ago about Mr...
...Inevitably, the whole exercise gets most embarrassing when the boys try to talk about real books and real writers...
...Doctorow's timing couldn't have been better: Nobody had published a mockery of the pretense of writing for several days, and there hadn't been a sympathetic book out about the Rosenbergs for more than a month...
...Doctorow was "one of the most courageous and interesting writers around," and it was hard to imagine him writing anything "lacking in courage and interest...
...as beauty defines truth, so does ability serve thought...
...Sheed's characteristically graceful phrase-"whoring after the new thing.'' What they never seem to realize is that, in our century, the New Thing is always the same New Thing: Fall for it once, and you're stuck for life...
...Vonnegut went away again...
...Doctorow was indeed "one of the bravest and most interesting of modern American novelists," and it would have been tacky to ask too many questions...

Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1


 
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