Literature Reconsidered
Stillman, J. Whitney
"Literature Reconsidered" Very few writers can be considered the world's greatest writer. In fact, at the present time, only one writer is the world's greatest. There are over three billion people on this planet, yet it has...
...At the heart of literature is the creative .1, t, which is legal in this country...
...But there-'s no Sanhedrin in New York...
...In her shop, the girls kept boasting about their successes...
...Some of the emotions that only poetry can express are rapture, despair, and birthday greetings...
...Another of Singer's liabilities from our point-of view is that he fails to deal with the real world as we know it—the intercollegiate greek-letter fraternity system...
...Bashevis" remains an enigma, but John Paul Jones had three names, none of them any good...
...That's what is most important, of course...
...Unfortunately, novels are by definition too long to be much good...
...Although Singer has kept his old morals and prejudices, he does not write like a modern man, choosing instead to use a pen...
...Many people are highly skeptical of religion...
...Women have the same appetites as we do—maybe bigger...
...This is because the conclusion has been left out...
...Can it be prevented...
...Yet literature has an undeniable effect on the quality of books we read...
...From the Bible's first half, Singer takes much of the style and structure of his stories, adding the best parts of several other styles...
...Why couldn't she do what Mme...
...The reference to a woman in Texas shows that Singer's work is deep in the American grain...
...Then one time at the Cafe Royal Zelig met a Polish refugee named Max...
...Civilized man's only choice is to learn to overcome jealousy...
...Bovary, Anna Karenina, or your [the narrator's] Hadassa and Clara did...
...It can be found in Singer's recent collection, A Crown of Feathers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which includes both the story's conclusion and the events leading up to it...
...You write like a modern man, but here . you are with the old morals and prejudices...
...Singer, however, has also made scientific discoveries, comparable to the work Charles Darwin did in this field...
...Lately, I lost patience with everything: with Genia's guilt and with what we call culture...
...They are frequently set in Warsaw and peopled with a sophisticated Yiddish intelligentsia...
...The most recent ones tend to deal with his experiences since he came to this country in 1935...
...He insisted on painting his portrait, which when completed makes him look "half ape, half crocodile...
...In the letters to the editor, a .woman wrote that her cat had been run over by a car and she had buried it buestill it came to visit her every, night...
...One night we sat down and actually wrote out a whole list of candidates...
...Don't laugh, but Genia demanded my help in getting a lover...
...The emotional highpoint of his history—told as if he were in an intense, marathon kind of psychiatric interview—is when Zelig blurts out to the narrator that his wife Genia has been having an affair with the same Max...
...Have I an Electra complex...
...At first their rendezvous had a "just us girls" flavor but soon they were spending all their time together and as the months went on Zelig started feeling unsettled by it...
...And do animals possess it, too...
...Over a movie house hung a billboard of a half-naked woman four stories high, lit up by spotlights—her hair disheveled, her eyes wild, her legs spread out, a gun in each hand...
...You know our milieu...
...1 mean allowed by law...
...There are any number of reasons for this...
...I would now like to share some of my findings with the reading, public...
...After a laborious survey of local libraries and pharmacies, I have found Isaac Bashevis Singer to be the world's greatest writer...
...I'm as far from that sort of madness as Heaven is from Hell...
...This is not necessarily so...
...James said that the short story should be dramatized, but then it would be a short play...
...I can't make a fetish out of plays on Broadway and Picasso's paintings...
...One of the . principal characters, Zelig Fingerbein, is a frustrated poet who likes to compare himself with the great romantics ("In my circumstances, Lord Byron would have become a landlord, too...
...Beer, bourbon, and diet soft drinks have all been neglected in Singer's work...
...Frequent literary or philosophical references, the device of short sentences, the imagery drawn from modernist painting, somber parapsychological speculations, his idea of using interesting subject matter...
...The judge, the lawyer, and the murderer all nurture the same ideas, read the same books, visit the same nightclubs, talk the same gibberish...
...Perhaps he meant that authors should only write short stories on January 6, and use the rest of the year to collect material...
...coed at one of our American universities: "There was Genia," Zelig Fingerbein—her husband —tells the story's narrator, "walking around like a sort of holy virgin...
...Zelig took advantage of his opportunities to break the seventh Commandment (Sixth in some books...
...In this he differs from Darwin...
...From their point of view, Singer's devotion to the Ten Commandments seems garish, not quite right, or in poor taste...
...Yet men tend to be more overweight...
...Still, there are emotions that only a poem can express...
...He also seems to be a homosexual: "When Genia spoke to him, he pretended not to hear...
...The woman's cat died there...
...nibbled a piece of apple cake, and looked into an, occult magazine...
...Some people don't think of it much—and others not at all...
...This type of story, with its seedy roues and Cervantic philosophers, perhaps most closely resembles what life is believed to be like in the hereafter...
...This of course was a very unsettling experience, but I did not want to embarrass my host, so I chose to overlook it...
...He looked at me reproachfully...
...Yet "Singer" was the surname of a famous American industrialist, and many distinguished Americans have been called "Isaac...
...I also began to realize that my so-called adventures aroused a new desire in her...
...Although old-fashioned in the medieval sense, he is in other ways very much a man of our time (the subject of sex is often mentioned in his work...
...Besides, the author's middle name begins with the letter B. The story was too good to overlook...
...Zelig couldn't stand Max, but Genia seemed jealous of the attention he paidher husband...
...A Quotation from Klopstock," "The Magazine," and "A Friend of Kafka" are all representative...
...Zelig tells the narrator that it doesn't matter...
...They talk and talk...
...Half his face was green, the other red—like a modern painting...
...Using the sophisticated techniques of the so-called new criticism, I have made a study of Singer's fiction...
...In Dunster and Adams Houses of Harvard University—and probably elsewhere—many young women students, some with marks in the A's, spend their dinner hours worrying, out loud, over similar questions: "Am I repressed, frigid...
...almost empty...
...She got in the habit of accepting Max's many invitations while Zelig refukd thern...
...However, Max is more operator than painter, and comes up with every sort of pretext to visit the Fingerbeins...
...Singer has the ability to represent sensual impressions dramatically and tersely, so that he doesn't become boring about them (in this regard he is unique among New Yorker writers...
...The first and so far predominant type of Singer story stems from the world of his youth, particularly the years he spent in the small, virtually medieval, Polish village of Bilgoray as it held off—quite successfully—against the ravages of World War I and eighteenth-century intellectual currents...
...Shortly a man named Zelig Fingerbein enters the cafeteria and, after pausing to look around, sits down with the narrator, who knows him only vaguely...
...We must first achieve a more responsive color spectrum, a saner one...
...Davy Crockett died there...
...Now men will have to take their medicine...
...Take a story entitled "The Third One," for example...
...Singer resolved to tell the new species he would encounter that although deformed they were not all good...
...Many of Singer's characters are marked by a similar kind of "orality...
...Lyndon Johnson, one of the country's most popular presidents, came from Texas...
...But what's wrong with the Ten Commandments...
...Civilized man has to learn the greatest of all arts: to overcome jealousy...
...He continues: "Women had to suffer for generations—polygamy, harems, men who came back from war with concubines...
...The wall that separates the world from the underworld has become too thin...
...There are over three billion people on this planet, yet it has produced only one greatest writer...
...he has come to the view that in the twentieth century such things must be expected...
...Like all Everymen, he is the protagonist of a story...
...He has likewise failed to paint the plight of the debutante...
...Surely in a juster world there would be more...
...We walked out on Broadway and the heat hit me like a furnace," the narrator recounts...
...Some readers may feel that these facts add up to a powerful literary indictment...
...That night they made many pledges to each other but Genia's affair with Max didn't end...
...No woman can give you what I can.' Typically feminine talk...
...I took a table near the wall,.drank coffee...
...No matter how much I loved my wife, I was never indifferent to other' women....1 might not have been Byron, but my appetite was as 'strong as his...
...He's a painter—that's what he claims, anyway...
...The woman gave her name and her address in a Texas village...
...There were always opportunities...
...There's nothing new in that, either...
...To some, it is a miserable superstition, a weakness verging on altruism...
...Everyman'.' is itself a strange name...
...Why are you so shocked...
...The middle phase of stories is less well-defined...
...He tells the story's narrator, only a vagueacquaintance, many of his most personal experiences, such as the time an abstract painter named Max tried to kiss him and he replied: "Max, don't make a fool of yourself...
...they had lunch and supper and would gossip for hours at a time...
...Men made jokes, women giggled...
...Like many Everymen, Zelig has a wife—Genia (a pretty woman but strange name)—and his share of troubles, not necessarily in that order...
...Without having taken the same courses it is often difficult to answer these questions, or even understand them...
...I wonder...
...Do what yuu like,A:mly come back to me,' she said...
...Had I not first encountered one of Singer's stories in the New Yorker during a well-attended costume party, I would have felt so too...
...But Zelig saysthat of the emotions, jealousy is one of the strongest...
...Excessive religious worship could take away from those vital hours the writer needs to think up his stories, and later erase them...
...If Joyce had gone to church more often himself, maybe he would have been a better writer...
...The stories he has written by pen can be divided into three general types, each roughly corresponding to a phase of his life...
...As Zelig tells the narrator, he gave up literature some years before to become a landlord...
...Before I could undertake so large an order," the narrator recounts, "I went to the counter and got another cup of coffee," (This is a typical reaction of the Americans, for whom coffee is preeminently the "think drink...
...As investigators we will have to make up our own rules as we go along, like Freud in the early years...
...As Zelig finishes his story, the narrator notices that the cafeteria is beginning to fill up with diners...
...The obvious alternative to the novel, then, is the short story—but the rules for this genre were set over half a century ago by Henry James and James Joyce, two failed novelists...
...When I finally confessed, [Genial didn't make a, big tragedy out of it...
...Max almost pursued Zelig...
...Singer holds that there is a difference between right and wrong, to use legal jargon...
...Singer has painted seven novels...
...when I said even the most trivial thing, he cried out with enthusiasm...
...There is also his way with words...
...It is difficult for outsiders to realize what reverence Americans have for Texas and its residents...
...Needless to say, Social Darwinism has been completely discredited in recent years...
...Find someone for me.' She wanted just once to taste what being 'progressive' is like...
...If animals really possess the astral body, all our philosophies must be revised...
...If so, my whole philosophy must be revised...
...I looked at Zelig...
...During the day, between three and five, it was...
...Few great books film well...
...Besides, their dining-hall confessors have other concerns to worry them: "Is verbal diarrhea contagious...
...All these are purely Singer touches...
...He says they had better leave before the management throws them out...
...Good examples of this phase are stories like "The Destruction of Kreshev," "Big and Little," or "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy...
...Or did it...
...He makes a few smudges on canvas and it's supposed to be a sunset in Zakopane or a bullfight in Mexico...
...The theme in the most of these is explicitly religious, although sometimes a demon steps in as narrator to vary point-of-view...
...A story entitled "The Third One" is conveniently at hand, so we might as well test it for traces of Singer-Darwinism...
...No one could possibly have enough interesting things to say to fill up a whole novel...
...The Third One" will to many readers seem inconclusive...
...There was sincerity in the letter...
...That is the kind of thing boors would say...
...Genia Fingerbein, one of the story's principal characters, is ostensibly an aging beauty in her fifties—probably a foreigner, perhaps atheistic...
...I had them once, but I freed myself....' " In this passage the narrator apparently says nothing, but Zelig jumps to the conclusion that he is "shocked" at the story because of his "old morals and prejudices...
...She started talking in a jargon she picked up from books by doctors and love experts about how backward she was...
...Here Zelig is projecting or transfering onto the narrator feelings he himself has but cannot tolerate...
...But what about the novel, that broad canvas of life...
...For this, and many other reasons, literature today is not held in high regard...
...To use the close, textual analysis 'preferred by those of us in the academy, I have selected a representative Singer story for our examination...
...Perhaps this makes him greater than Darwin...
...This said, the whole picture is not a rosy one...
...The methodology of Singer-Darwinism has not yet been firmly established...
...When this form of psychiatric transference takes place in New York City it is known as "Manhattan Transfer...
...She started talking in a jargon she picked up from books by doctors and love experts about how backward she was...
...Others, while admitting that religion was once the opiate of the masses, now say that it is too inefficient, as it cannot be injected directly into the bloodstream...
...She said, 'I can't do it without you...
...The world's greatest writer would have to be a creative person—this is the sort of judgment we can make...
...This is the question Singer poses...
...Although Zelig Fingerbein has a strange name, he is a sort of Everyman...
...It is also important to keep in mind that religious worship is still legal_in this country...
...If I could 'I would have dragged her to the Sanhedrin and had her stoned—the way they did in ancient times...
...Darwin was British...
...surely it could not have been made up...
...But how is he ideologically...
...But does the astral body really exist...
...Joyce thought that each story should be a sort of "epiphany," which sounds very High Church, even fruity...
...Lyndon Johnson died there...
...Nothing new in that, either...
...Linnaeus comes to mind as well, because Singer's genius is essentially one of identifying, categorizing, and namecalling—all of which he shares with that master scientist...
...It's unnecessary merchandise...
...Some people don't think much of it...
...The passages quoted from this story are just ones of human interest, so some readers will be disappointed...
...That Isaac Bashevis Singer has three names is bound to cause consternation among many Alternative readers...
...Sheand Max went to plays, movies, and-exhibitions...
...most names are strange...
...In a sense he writes compressed novels, cutting out the traditional several hundred pages padding...
...Singer-Darwinism has nothing to do with Social Darwinism, the theory that parties keep getting better and better...
...it would be boorish to sayjust who the world's greatest writer is...
...Entitled "The Third One," it begins as follows: "It was sweltering outside, but the cafeteria was cool...
...There is sincerity in this paragraph...
...The Third One" is probably not one of the best Singer stories, but it appears toward the middle of the book and thus hopefully represents the stories which come before and after it...
...Usually in the New Yorker, people (here loosely defined) only read those stories which portray the drama of English country life, have a lot of jokes, or are the work of several authors whose surnames begin with the letter B. However, these pieces are signed only at the end, so that while at this terrific party I was telling you about, I found myself reading a short story (I didn't know how short) set in *.Manhattan cafeteria: it was not until the very end that I realized that the author's surname did not begin with the letter B at all...
...Isn't that crazy...
...After some years, Zelig says, "Genia began to insist that there was no basic difference between the psychology of women and men, and she even talked about finding herself a man...
...She developed a real complex...
...A mob had collected to gape at her...
...Are red and green valid colors today...
...By lc gal...
...Singer in a cafeteria is like Darwin in the Galapagos, but the mutant native species is regrettably our own...
...The trouble with these things is that they are only literary and thus not very important...
...Some people might cite Tolstoy as an example to the contrary, but they had better reread War and Peace—pages 63, 239, 678, 951, and 1311...
...I used to write poems and I published, too, but who needs poetry today...
...Even good literature doesn't interest me any more...
...For these the cafeteria is a persistent motif...
...Yet in these brief passages are many of the characteristic elements of Singer's work...
...It was still daylight but the neon signs were already A tepid stench came up from the subway gratings...
...Besides "The Third One," good examples are "Alone," "Property," "The Beard," or—to sum them up—"A Day in Coney Island...
...Yet she has many of the traits of a freshman (sophomore...
...An Antigone complex...
...1 felt my whole life was destroyed...
...There is a pause in the text, then the narrator reports: "Zelig Fingerbein finished off his cold coffee in one gulp...
...Then Genia confessed to him that she and Max were having an affair...
...Do I read too many Greek plays...
Vol. 8 • April 1975 • No. 7
