Reading for My Life Read online

  But from my own childhood I can tell you: First, we possess language, and then we possess ourselves. Alone in literature, we find sanctuary and what John Cheever meant by “simplicity and usefulness,” valor, virtue, kindness, beauty, and “the stamina of love, a presence… like the beginnings of some stair.” We also discover discrepancy. I picked up my plain American style from Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, my dreaminess from Greek myths and the King James Bible, my social-justice politics from John Dos Passos and Ralph Ellison, my nose for phonies from J. D. Salinger, and my delusions of grandeur from James Joyce. At first I wanted to be Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, not to mention Prometheus. Later on, I would want to write The Sun Also Rises and Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man—like God paring His fingernails. Real life has turned out to be less thrilling. After a fast start, I haven’t published a novel in twenty years. The public has a way of letting you know that it will pay more for you to discover and to celebrate excellence in other people, and rather less for your own refined feelings. These days, I spend half my day writing about television, and the other half writing about books, and I read instead of sleep. This is innocent enough; I do less damage than a lawyer. In the discovery process, I may even do some good. It sometimes seems that the nonfiction best-seller list in the New York Times consists entirely of books by and about war criminals, self-help gurus, and greedheads, and all these books have the same title: How I Lost Weight, Found God, Smart-Bombed Arabs and Changed My Sexual Preference in the Bermuda Triangle. But there’s always an Eva Hoffman and a Susan Faludi, and so many novels, all of them reinventing the world in words.

  And is it really such a big surprise that when we are young and incomplete and curious, we should look for and find ourselves in books, as well as everything we want to be and aren’t, might have been and shouldn’t? I’m only sorry that as we get older, we stop looking. García Márquez spends half of every year in Havana, in a house mantained for him by Fidel Castro. In exchange, an insomniac Fidel relies on the Nobel Prize winner to supply him with books to read at night as he rumbles the city streets in his chauffeur-driven limousine. One night Gabo gave Fidel a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The next breakfast, Fidel slammed down this book: “The bastard!” he cried. “I couldn’t sleep!” Nor, of course, should any of them sleep: our pols, those caudillos. They should be looking into books, as if they were mirrors. And they should be seeing Dracula, Hamlet, Kali, Ahab, Frankenstein, Robin Hood, Pinocchio, Oedipus, and Peter Pan.

  Anyway, when the alarm bell rang to end the fifties snooze, for many it sounded like Elvis. For me, it was Allen Ginsberg and his “Howl,” that elegy for beautiful losers, that closet history of the Other America of Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, and Ginsberg’s crazy Communist Jewish mother: “Get married Allen don’t take drugs,” she told him. I left the beach as soon as I could for Cambridge, Mass., where, for the student paper, I wrote about Kerouac and rock ’n’ roll. I also reviewed Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Amazing that a Russian knew so much about America, especially our motels. But I didn’t belong at Harvard, where I read Dostoyevsky when I was supposed to be reading Henry James, any more than I’d belong, decades later, in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, or the Oriental in Bangkok. You can take the boy out of his class, but you can’t take the class out of the boy. I dropped out: for Greenwich Village. In a surplus Army fatigue jacket with pockets full of Baudelaire, I was a cabbage child among the Beats. Like Ginsberg, I wanted to know: “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” I’m not saying that a lot of other stuff wasn’t going on besides books. In addition to beer, television, and rock ’n’ roll, there were bombs to ban, and Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. But popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

  At the end of that decade all the boho boychicks wanted to be Norman Mailer. Back then even Mailer wanted to be Mailer. I’m not sure about now. But after many unpublished manuscripts, I left one Third World country, Greenwich Village, for another, Berkeley Cal. At Pacifica Radio, KPFA in Berkeley, I found that to get free copies of books from New York publishers all you had to do was promise to review them. So, while I worked on my third first novel, I also scheduled myself to talk about brand-new books like V, Herzog, Hall of Mirrors, Letting Go, Cat’s Cradle, Rabbit Run, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch-22, and The Fire Next Time. And I talked about new novels from abroad like The Tin Drum, The Golden Notebook, and The Mandarins. On the one hand, Flannery O’Connor and Mary McCarthy; on the other, Julio Cortázar and Chinua Achebe. Loving such books wasn’t exactly molecular biology or particle physics; you had merely to trust the tingle in your scalp, a kind of sonar, and their deeper chords possessed you. Looking back at what became of me, I’m sorry I didn’t turn out to be Dostoyevsky or Günter Grass or Doris Lessing. I know perfectly well that the relationship between critic and author is more often parasitic than it’s symbiotic. “Insects sting,” Nietzsche told us, “not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.”

  But when you love these books, they love you back. Having identified with somebody else’s heroic imagination; having gone through that shadowy door into realms of feeling never glimpsed before with such luster; having seen centaurs and witches and flying fish and bare ruined choirs and the glowing cores and burning grids and neon clouds and crystal nerves and singing spheres of cyberspace, of thought itself—you are more interesting, and so is the world. Neither of you will ever again be monochromatic. Except for Dos Passos, James Baldwin, and Doris Lessing, I’d never have spent the midsixties in the civil rights and antiwar movements. If I hadn’t read Lessing, I’d be just another Mailer—certainly incapable of sending our daughters up like kites, to discover their own lightning.

  It was my pleasure and privilege at the New York Times to review the very first books by Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Gordon, Cynthia Ozick, and Joan Didion—double-identities doubly Other—as if, by the abrasions of sex on race on class on culture, they rubbed up something combustible; as if by these plate tectonics I got the continental drift I need. Since, in Oakland a couple of years ago and up the Hudson just this Christmas, the houses of Kingston and Morrison somehow burned to the ground, my sidekick has suggested that Gordon, Ozick, Didion, and any other woman writer I admire should take out more insurance. But I was partial as well to György Konrad, Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, and Stanislaw Lem, in whom I found a more compelling politics to construe than dreamt of in the geopolitics of Dr. Kissinger, and just look what happened to Eastern Europe in 1989. I also loved the Latin Americans. Just imagine sitting down to the glorious surprise of One Hundred Years of Solitude, before anybody else has told you how to feel. If your passion is cities, as mine has always been, there to explore were the Buenos Aires of Borges, the Lima of Vargas Llosa, the Havana of Cabrera Infante, the Mexico City of Fuentes. Plus, of course, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Kobo Abe, Solzhenitsyn, V. S. Naipaul, and Wole Soyinka. Imagine being paid to think out loud about Midnight’s Children, or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, or The Woman Warrior, or Song of Solomon.

  Here, by the way, is what Kingston told a reporter after her house burned down, with all of her manuscripts: “Did you know that when paper burns,” she said, “it is very beautiful? It’s just amazing to look at a burned book. It looks like feathers, the thin pages, and it’s still book-shaped, and you touch it and it disintegrates. It makes you realize that it’s all air. It’s inspiration and air and it’s just returned to that.” Talk a
bout your Magic Realism!

  It never occurred to me that celebrating Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston was in any way subversive of the American literary canon, that short shelf of Wonderbread Boys. Nor did it occur to me that García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Abdelrahman Munif, and Wole Soyinka represented some sinister threat to Eurocentric thralldom. We must live together, and will die alone, and need in the interim all the genius we can get. I like the Canon. I just wish there were more of it. After the Great Debate on Great Books at Stanford, they added one woman and one wog. This seems stingy. We don’t do these writers any favor by deigning to read them; they’ve done us the favor by being there to dazzle us into sentience. The novel, after all, was invented a thousand years ago in Japan, by Lady Murasaki. The most important English-language poem of the twentieth century, Eliot’s “Wasteland,” ends with a Sanskrit quote that’s likewise at least a millennium old, and so, too, did the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer quote Sanskrit in the atomic desert, when he broke light like a pencil. We leave town each summer for Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen jokes, a Heart of Darkness and the Blood of the Lamb. We will leave the house to deploy in a metropolis of Haitian cabbies, Korean vegetable vendors, Indian newsstands, Greek coffee shops, Arab head shops, and Senegalese street peddlers, hungry for sushi, Mex, falafel, pizza, shishkebob, mousaka, Polish ham, Jerusalem artichokes, Chinese takeout, salsas, and chutney. Why aren’t we equally hungry for meaning? It’s amazing how avid we are for every goodie in the global-village souk except books, how it’s somehow all-American to develop a crush on our enemies once we’ve killed enough of them, to fall in love—after the landgrab and slave auction, the Gatling gun and lynch mob, the atom bomb and napalm—with the very culture we’ve dispossessed, with the beads, and the blues, and the betelnuts; even to make movies about them. We just won’t read them: as if their books were some kind of Pearl Harbor sneak attack on Jeffersonian democracy and the Puritan City on the Hill.

  But language is guilty of association with rational comment and abstract ideas and magical transcendence. It’s subversive of pieties, euphemisms, stereotypes, and agitprop. A book, said Kafka, “must be an ax for the frozen sea in us.” Eduardo Galeano, the Latin American historian and Groucho Marxist, reports on a day in the Montevideo slums. He was painting a picture of a pig on the hand of a little boy. “Suddenly,” says Galeano, “word got around. I was surrounded by little boys demanding at the top of their lungs that I draw animals on their little hands cracked by dirt and cold, their skin of burnt leather: one wanted a condor, and one a snake, others preferred little parrots and owls, and some asked for a ghost or a dragon. Then in the middle of this racket, a little waif who barely cleared a yard off the ground showed me a watch drawn in black ink on his wrist. ‘An uncle of mine who lives in Lima sent it to me,’ he said. ‘And does it keep good time?’ I asked him. ‘It’s a bit slow,’ he admitted.”

  So are we: a bit slow. There’s already an international multiculture. And it isn’t a multiculture of bluejeans, gangster movies, and rock music; of bank loans, arms credits, and microchips; of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the CIA and the spider-speak in green decimals of international currency speculation. It’s a multiculture of distinctions and connections and the exchange, in the library, in translation, of our highest hopes, darkest chords, and coded meanings. It’s Kobo Abe reading García Márquez in Japanese, and Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie reading him in English; and García Márquez, reading Faulkner and Flaubert in Spanish, not to mention Kafka in a Borges translation. It’s Philip Roth, in Czechoslovakia, discovering Jiri Weill. And Maxine Hong Kingston rewriting the classical Chinese Journey to the West, to include Abbie Hoffman as the Monkey King. And Naguib Mahfouz organizing forty Arab intellectuals to defend the right of Rushdie to his novels and his life, which teaches us something about courage we’d not otherwise have learned from the cowardly silence on this subject of a John Le Carré and a V. S. Naipaul.

  This is what I do for a living. I review this multiculture. And then we leave town—for Paris, Prague, or Johannesburg; for Moscow, Shanghai, or Istanbul; Jerusalem and Bangkok—to see for ourselves what these remarkable men and women have been writing about. As if by magic lantern, we see through these books that we have loved, and those that loved us in return, and it’s my opinion that if more of us had read Václav Havel before 1989, the collapse of what my sidekick calls the nonprofit police states of Eastern Europe might not have seemed so astounding. A David Grossman, in Hebrew, and a Jacobo Timerman, in Spanish, prophesy every bit as much as they report, and so has Nadine Gordimer, in novel after novel, from South Africa. Likewise, there were Filipino novelists and playwrights presaging that fairy tale, the Princess Bride in yellow taking charge when the Wicked Frog left town with his Dragon Lady, in an American whirlybird. A close reader of the Chinese Misties could have predicted Tiananmen Square. Nor would I be shocked if Milorad Pavicˇ, in his Dictionary of the Khazars, proves more reliable than anybody at the U.N. on the worm in the brain of Serbia.

  The phone rang a couple of months ago. “Hi,” she said: “This is Toni, your Nobelette. Are you ready for Stockholm?” It hadn’t really occurred to me to go. It’s not as if I put her over the top. The best I could say for myself and Toni Morrison’s brilliant literary project—her reimagining of the lost history of her people, their love and work and nightmare passage and redemptive music, a ghostly chorale, a constellation of humming spheres, with its own gravity and so many morning stars—is that, from the very beginning, I’d been there cheering. But who am I if not a reader she imagined? And if she wanted me, I’d go. I could always wear a sign around my neck saying in big block letters: I TOLD YOU SO.

  Well, look where she is now, after the fanfare and the processional, descending the marble stairs on the arm of the king of Sweden. Our Majesty: I am proud of her. I’m even, a little bit, proud of me. I’m proud, in fact, to be a citizen of whatever country Toni Morrison comes from. In Beloved, Denver warns her ghostly sister about their difficult mother: “Watch out for her; she can give you dreams.” So do they all, these writers I’m waving my arms about, these angels made of words. Watch out for them. They give you dreams.

  The Cambridge Scene

  HE WORE a fool’s cap crowned with tiny bells, and he strummed, of all things, a lyre—probably brass, but it looked gold. And he said:

  I am the myth-maker, the symbolist, the seer of truths. I have wandered down the pedestrian centuries, beneath the bright flags, toting a bag of legends and singing the old songs. I have been Homer’s eyes. I suggested Mephistopheles. They say—with some salt to be sure—that I pinched Beatrice, and Dante merely followed her flight to comfort. I am the Muse, the Artist, or if you will, the Human Venture. You may think my costume outlandish and my demeanor strange; but that is your fault, not mine. I have endured.

  In each age I have found a home: I was swaddled in immortality and time was my play-pen. Men burned candles at my altar—in religion, poetry, the sciences. All the professions engendered their terms, and the terms became symbols, and the symbols grew into myths, and the myths became legends. And the legends were allegories, teaching the racial wisdom.

  I was at home in Thebes; I whispered in Cassandra’s ear; I felt secure in the shadow of the cross; I rode phantom horses through the Nordic lands and danced on the northern twilight—among the apparitions of the imagination.

  In this time only am I alone.

  I counseled the children as they spoke, one heart to another. I understand the idiot’s smile. I sing of the simple savage.

  Know me, and you know why man aspired from the cave to Westchester County, from the sling to the mushroom cloud. Know me, and you know that primitive man conceived in images, that his images were ideas; that he ascribed words to these ideas. And now, in this technological century, the word has grown further from the idea, until they have separated, and the word is all. The shattered images lie in a pile, along with utopia and dreams.
r />   The dream needs neither time nor mathematics.

  Ask me why you have no poets and no epics. Ask me to talk to you of greatness and Art. I will tell you that you are lost. That the Indian with the name of a bird and the hieroglyphic picture-writing and the stone monuments of island cultures have a wisdom which you lack. They have not divided the estate of God into man and nature, into past and present. They have not abandoned the essence of image and the picture-idea.

  Civilization, and the apotheosis of abstraction. When words become their own meaning, when Angry Young Men and hipsters plunge into the night and the academicians experiment with style—ask me why there is no literature.

  Did not Eliot return to dead cultures, ancient languages, and the Legend of the Fisher King? Did not Yeats sustain himself on the Irish folklore? Did not Lawrence traipse across continents to Mexico, seeking the meaning of the Aztecs, the wisdom of primitive man?

  What obsessed scowling Melville to create a new symbolism of the sea? Whence Faulkner’s new mythology? Why all the shouting and none of the beauty of literature?

  I will tell you, for I know. There are no men who think symbolically. There are no artists who understand the myth. These are no times to sing of the Abstract and the investigating subcommittee.

  You come nearest to the ancient rhythms in jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Your modern art has lost its meaning. The myth, tongue of the unconscious and language of the race, was sanctioned solely by children, savages, and fools—before Freud. And now only by psychiatrists.