Reading for My Life Read online

  The modern poet comes to symbolism with a consciousness: This is a symbol, meaning such and such. But a symbol means itself, and must be understood for itself, and must be conceived.

  Freud discovered mythology and meaning in the dream, explained Hamlet and charted the mind by means of Oedipus. Jung wrote of archetypes, of the recurring myth in art, of the common symbols of man. There is a racial consciousness, a spiritus mundi—human history is community property among the family of artists. But the word has supplanted the idea.

  I condemn you, who have made me an orphan. You attack the logic of religion and laugh, at cocktail parties, over totem poles and pillars. You dismiss mystics as paranoids and prophets as crackpots. You pride yourselves as Men of Logic when your understanding is mechanical. In your anxiety to reason, you have forgotten how to feel.

  Yours is a motel civilization, from gentlemen farmers to university professors. Your literature has standardized the Bible and propitiated the cult of the Word. Your art makes no sense and your music is too loud. You cannot speak to one another and you have forgotten who you are. You have only dictionaries and manuals and wireless sets—tuned in to nothing and listening attentively to babble.

  And you give me no home. No home but park benches and gutters and all-night motion picture houses full of sailors. No home but pinball machines and erotica shelves and occasional wine cellars, and a night in jail.

  I do not begrudge my loneliness, not my persecution. But you have taken my lyre and broken it, and spit on the dead centuries, and rendered art into pornography. For what it availeth, I can do naught but curse you.

  There aren’t many soap boxes for men with bells on their heads. (The bells had a tinny sound, anyway.) And, what with his plaid patches and his broken lyre, the myth-maker was only marking time until a vagrancy charge or an asylum.

  Besides, only a few of us saw him, and we were drunk at the time.

  The Demise of Greenwich Village

  THERE USED TO be an old man with a mole on the end of his nose and a paper cup strung around his neck, standing on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, playing the violin. Several weeks ago he disappeared. He was subsequently found to have died of indigestion in a hotel room in the South Village.

  The fiddler left very little to remember him by—a few sticks of furniture, some pornographic photographs, and a fleeting immortality in several unpublished novels. In a way, he was symbolic of Greenwich Village. As of summer 1958, they were both dead, and nobody could properly recall when they started dying.

  A peripatetic observer, traipsing the slow mile of gift shops, bookstores, and bars between Rienzi’s (where you take your friend from Chicago) and the White Horse Inn, is bound to get depressed. Bohemia has become a tourist attraction. That careful decadence of dress which used to be the uniform of the literateur has become Fifth Avenue fashion. Whether the reason for or the result of this change, Village creativity is at low ebb in everything but drama. The painting is bad and expensive; the poetry is stale and academic; the tablecloths are all checkered; and little magazines litter the streets.

  People go to Greenwich Village today to escape from art instead of to it. There are, of course, the visitors. Long-drawn, tweed-beaten, and corn-twanged Idaho sophomores, who couldn’t tell flamenco guitar from a Jew’s-harp, are shortening the coffeehouse circuit and getting strummed to death. Pre-med Kentucky studhorses come down for a weekend to see what goes on on the other side of the Baptist church. But the permanent residents fall readily into ready-made categories.

  First of all, there are my friends (they used to be my friends). They are a splintered group. The guy who flunked out of Harvard at the end of his sophomore year because he sat up all night writing dirty poetry; Bennington girls who left college to do something earthy; NYU poets who need haircuts; college newspaper editors who couldn’t land a job with the Times; magnas in English literature who don’t want to teach and can’t quite see returning to Des Moines to work for the water company.

  Besides my friends, there are other people in Greenwich Village. Walk into any bar, and the first thing you notice are the homosexuals. The Village has become the place to go if you want to rub knees with local expatriates in the Age of Aberration. The classified ad for apartment-sharing “with a congenial young man” (Village address) is a classic form of journalistic pimping. Barroom and street-corner solicitation is commonplace, partly because there are a number of such people who hang out in the Village, and partly because there are a number of people who go to see them—to see what happens to their libido when confronted by something more substantial than that man’s hand on your knee in the New Haven bus station.

  The Village is one of the few publicized habitats of the lesbian. Red-faced lumberjack women with straight hair, men’s ties, and a business suit, buying drinks for their sweet young things, peer with a weary omniscience at the coeds and pickups plying their trade. Pickups, too, have a way of gravitating toward the Great White Arch, although the game is more dignified today as free love and physical self-expression. As one of the former psychology majors explained it: “A community of total tolerance tends to the pornographic. You have to have standards or you engender the obscene.”

  Real estate values in the Village have skyrocketed. Studio apartments which used to go for ten dollars a week can’t be bought for ninety a month. Many a genuine avant gardiste has had to content himself with a New Jersey boarding house or a West Side basement.

  Patrons today are paying their bills. Mama Gagliano, a grocery store proprietress in the shadow of the marquee, had this to say: “I used to have to carry some of the boys. They couldn’t pay for groceries. They’d always ask me to wait awhile, and I would wait. Today, everybody pays. I carry nobody. And they buy more food.”

  Village shops have tripled their prices for handcraft and chinaware and clothes. On biweekly Thursday nights Manhattan secretaries rush with their paychecks to purchase ninety-dollar coats and twenty-dollar sweaters—for Friday’s evening at the theater.

  All of which has created a new kind of Village citizen. We are all familiar with the old stereotypes, and they still abound. The wistful Dadaists, the Serious Young Men, who regard Art as a craft, literature as a mental discipline, creativity as a form of calisthenics, and the role of the Artist as a poignant blend of anguished genius and popular messiah. These are the poets living on their parents’ allotment checks, waging battle in dozens of little magazines. They are formalist or antiformalist. Their irony has the convolutions of a pretzel. Life is a matter of chamber music, peeled grapes, and a theory of aesthetics. (Almost everybody has either written his own or replied to somebody else’s theory of aesthetics.) They prowl the streets, they let their hair grow long, they wear black turtleneck sweaters and dirty white tennis shoes. They scowl frequently, gesticulate elaborately, drink heavily, and live crudely. Their rebellion is in clothes and conduct, not creativity. And it is not long before those clothes—leather-patched, moth-eaten, tawdry, and inexpensive as they may be—become a uniform, a badge by which the manikin inside seeks to say: “I am writing a novel; I think about existentialism; I have read Henry James; I don’t have enough money to make it to the Left Bank.”

  Nobody ever told Morris that needing a haircut, a shave, a bath, and a new suit doesn’t make you Rimbaud, or even Thomas Wolfe. The only thing Gladys (who writes sonnets) learned from Radcliffe is not to comb her hair. And she’s still wearing the same raincoat. Gladys and Morris never produced anything worthwhile, and they never will. They are the dregs of each college generation for whom bohemianism solves the problem of what to do with themselves.

  They live, together, in a cold-water flat with cracked plaster and empty flowerpots (unless they’ve planted peyote). They’ve scoured the five boroughs for enough orange crates to hold their books. The floor is strewn with French novels whose pages have been slit but seldom read, trinkets from Chinatown, old college notebooks, and yellow paper. There’s a portable typewriter, the Times liter
ary supplement, and a half-finished essay on Virginia Woolf. A couple of cockroach colonies maintain the atmosphere of decadence and the myth of suffering. But Gladys and Morris go to bed with full stomachs.

  The new citizen is of a different ilk. It’s often difficult to distinguish him from the college crowd and the Book-of-the-Month and afternoon bridge brigade that comes to the Village to see what starving Bohemians are all about, and spends most of its time in fashionable restaurants, masqueraded to the earlobes in costumes considered appropriate, looking at each other in simulated excitement and secret disappointment. The new citizen is something different.

  Compton is a public relations agency hack or a Madison Avenue adman. He writes thirty-second jingles for a new margarine and depletes the watercooler to lubricate his tranquilizing pills. He graduated with a liberal arts degree, never eats the olive in his martini, and aspires someday to write the suburban or the Organization novel. But he generally returns home from his nine-to-five sojourn too tired for anything but a gin and tonic. Compton lives in the Village (he can afford the rent); his books are hardcover; and his laundry is clean.

  What Morris, Gladys, and Compton have in common is their arid little community. In most of the coffeehouses the jazz is so well-modulated that you can’t hear it, so far out that it’s gone. It serves as a sort of Muzak background for conversational patter and dream interpretation. The imported Italian coffee is forty cents a throw, and usually cold by the time it arrives. You amuse yourself by watching two fellows with beards resolve their existentialist dilemma and despair each evening until midnight, when they probably go to bed together.

  The whole Village is one big Hayes-Bick, and it’s always two in the morning.

  Apathy is the latest religion. Even poetry-and-jazz was a flop in Washington Square.

  From the coffeehouses there’s no place to go but the bars, where the drinks are about as expensive and as watered as anywhere else. Or spots like Rocky’s, with checkered tablecloths, sawdust, cobwebs, bad paintings, and Chianti bottles.

  There used to be a time when John Reed and Lincoln Steffens lived at the same Village address, when Mama Gagliano “carried the boys” until that publisher’s commission came through. No more. Even Wolfe went to live in Brooklyn. The Village today is populated by the smug, the self-conscious, and the literary sycophants. The bars depend on the tourist trade. The aberrants depend on the college students. The shops depend on the secretaries. The best thing to come out of the Village in a quarter century is Jules Feiffer, and he’s certainly the only reason for reading either of the two weekly papers distributed locally. The most absorbing issue of conversation since Jack Kerouac has been the traffic in Washington Square Park.

  America’s great bohemian subculture still languishes in the corpulent shadow of its European counterpart. We are imitators. We have imitated their knee-socks and their coffeehouses, their existentialism and their morals. We have failed to affirm or deny anything in our own experience. We have failed to realize that the scowl and the furrowed brow and the hofbrau philosophizing of the Continent had its roots in a real dilemma, in war and social upheaval. The American Bohemian, Beat, Tired, Brown, or Silent, is a pampered child shaking his rattle, the spoiled spawn of college literary magazines, dissatisfied because America is something more than a whorehouse and something less than a Christmas tree. And all he’s creating is noise.

  Pasternak’s Hero: Man Against the Monoliths

  THE CRITICAL HOBBYHORSES have been ridden to hell, and the trumpets are put away. Edmund Wilson and the Nobel Prize Committee and the Soviet Writers Union and the American newspaper editorial pages have had their say on Pasternak—and perhaps now a second reading and some thoughts are in order.

  Doctor Zhivago has sold more hardcover editions in the United States than any other book since Peyton Place. It was the most popular literary Christmas present of the 1958 holiday season. The proportion of pages read to books bought must be more lopsided than that of the Gideon Bible. And one of the biggest reasons for the disparity is reader fatigue; the busy man must choose between the book itself and the welter of commentary on it.

  Zhivago is a novel by a poet, and as such is at once too great and too restricted for its literary form. It is apolitical, and, ironically, a political shillelagh inveighed by both sides in the Cold War. It alternates between axes of profound beauty and profound confusion. It is not quite Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, but its intellectual vitality and respect for human dignity make it tower above anything else around these days.

  The story of Yuri Zhivago is the story of the Russian intellectual—the disintegration of the man of ideas. Zhivago, as a student in the University, welcomes the Revolution; as a professional man displaced, repudiates it; as a degenerate in a one-room Moscow flat, is finally destroyed by it. In the process of that destruction, Pasternak tells the story of Russia in the twentieth century—of the parasites who feed on emergent ideologies, of men serving and struggling against systems and faiths they cannot grasp, of the miasma of bureaucracy, land reform, nobility, and military that was Russia after October 1917.

  But the book is much more than an indictment of the Communist system. It is, just as much, an indictment of world-savers and social engineers, the true believer and the legislator of morality; an indictment as much of any political system which seeks to reform the world from the top or bottom, and ignores the basic ingredient and the basic problem, man.

  In the process of disintegration, Zhivago devolves from a respected physician and devoted poet to a tired, beaten man who dies of a heart attack on a Moscow trolley-car. And that disintegration cannot be ascribed solely to the disruptive political system which surrounds him, to the “inscrutability of universal chaos.”

  Zhivago himself is a weak man, a Russian Hamlet to whom reality itself is the greatest antagonist. (The figure of Hamlet dominates Zhivago’s conception of himself, culminating in the most notable of his poems collected at the end of the book.) The collection of pygmies in the Soviet Writers Union, besides their fatuous forays against Zhivago’s politics, complained that the character lacked a social conscience, that the book itself was devoid of a social meaning. And, in a way, it is legitimate criticism. When a protagonist of great stature fails to come to terms with reality, it is seldom a social novel; but it is often great tragedy, and such is Pasternak’s book.

  In a sense, Zhivago and the Russian intellectuals he symbolizes are Dostoyevsky’s Ivan all over again. Just as the murder of the Father Karamazov was a consequence of Ivan’s ideas, so was the Revolution a consequence of the (at once brilliant and naive) Russian intellectual ferment, a century in the coagulating. And just as Ivan was unable to face the practical implications of those ideas, to accept his own involvement in reality, and went insane, so Zhivago and his ilk came out of the October Revolution bewildered and shaken into silence.

  Zhivago’s tragedy is somewhat confused by Pasternak’s limitations as a novelist. This is his first novel. He is a poet, and during the Stalin era of literary frigidity, he devoted himself to Russian translations of Shakespeare. As a poet, he has been schooled to write from a single point of view, a single consciousness ranging on a variety of subjects or focusing on one. Most poetry is characterized by this synthesis of artist and the created personality. For poetry, it is basic; for the novel, it can be disastrous. The fusion of Zhivago and Pasternak admits of no third party and no alternatives. Life is as Zhivago sees it, and the arguments of supplementary characters are given very little stature. Dostoyevsky argued eloquently for all three Karamazovs. Shakespeare’s universal vision was splintered into a Lear, and Edmund, and a Fool in just one play. But Zhivago’s antagonists are given a few pages of characterization, a few pages of soliloquy, and a few pages of judgment—then back again into the morass of Zhivago’s disaffection.

  Evgraf, Zhivago’s brother, appears once every 150 pages and plays his spasmodic role as a brother’s keeper. Pasha, who left his family to become a military commander for the Communist
s, must explain his love, excuse his motivation, justify his life, and shoot himself in ten pages. These two men offered Zhivago a serious intellectual challenge—service out of love, and service out of duty. But Zhivago fails to come to terms with either concept, and Pasternak abets him. We are told that Lara (for Zhivago, the life-force) symbolizes the oppression of the nineteenth century and the hope of the twentieth; but someone has to say it, for in the characterization of her words and deeds there is no indication of such a symbolic meaning.

  The texture of the book itself is often dreamlike. There are no explanations for remarkable coincidences. Useless characters and irrelevant scenes are introduced, languish, and are forgotten. Time sequence and geography and character all blur into a fantastic, exciting, but extremely confusing montage. The Soviet literary critics rightly complained that there was a failure to distinguish between the March and October revolutions. No matter what the color of your party card, there was a difference. Pasternak is not a novelist, and this is not his genre.

  So much for the complaints. They have been technical. They have dealt with discipline and character development, the craft and grammar of modern literature. Doctor Zhivago is a great book, much greater than the customary valentines and pared prose that usually saturate the book review sections.

  Zhivago is great because of its intellectual vitality. Each page brims with ideas. The pages are full of magnificent prose. Pasternak’s poetic eye catches the turbulence of mobs and the despair of a nomad class dislocated and displaced by political charades; the disintegration of urban centers, the breakdown of communications and transportation; the ultimate wall between the people and the politicians who legislated for them; the conflicting faces of reality itself. His brilliant intuitive sense re-creates the confusion and the fullness of the times. His feeling for the Russian countryside and his landscape description have few peers in any literature.