Fame & Folly (15 page)

The question leads once more to sectarianism and its dooms. It may be that Chester is a sectarian writer in a mode far subtler than genre writing (he once published a pornographic novel under a pseudonym, but let that pass) or monomania. Homosexual life, insofar as he made it his subject, was never, for Chester, a one-note monody: what moved him was the loneliness and the longing, not the mechanics. His sectarianism, if I am on the right track, took the form of what is sometimes called, unkindly and imprecisely, ventriloquism. It is a romantic, even a sentimental, vice that only unusually talented writers can excel at—the vice, to say it quickly, of excessive love of literature; of the
sound
of certain literatures. Ventriloquist writers reject what they have in common with their time and place, including its ordinary talk, and are so permeated with the redolence of Elsewhere that their work, even if it is naturally robust, is plagued by wistfulness. I am not speaking of nostalgia alone, the desire to revisit old scenes and old moods. Nor am I speaking of the concerns of “mandarin” writers, those who are pointedly out of tune with the vernacular, who heighten and burnish language in order to pry out of it judgments and ironies beyond the imagination of the colloquial. Ventriloquist writers may or may not be nostalgic, they may or may not be drawn to the mandarin voice. What ventriloquist writers want is to live inside
other literatures
.

Chester, I believe, was one of these. It made him seem a poseur to some, a madman to others; and he was probably a little of both. He drove himself from continent to continent, trying out the Moroccan sunlight as he had read of it, Malcolm Cowley’s Paris as the garden of liberating “exile,” the isles of Greece for the poetry of
the words, Jerusalem for the eternal dream. Literature was a costume, or at any rate a garment: he hardly ever went naked. He saw landscapes and cities through a veil of bookish imaginings. Inexorably, they failed him. The Greek island had unworkable plumbing. Jerusalem had traffic noise. Paris turned out to be exile in earnest. The Moroccan sunlight came through as promised, but so did human nature. Wherever he ran, the nimbus grew tattered, there were quotidian holes in the literary gauze.

This is not to say that Chester was not an original, or that he had a second-hand imagination. Who is more original than a man who fears he is not there? “And I would watch myself, mistrustful of my presence … I want to be
real
,” he wrote in an early story. (Its title, “As I Was Going Up the Stair,” echoes the nursery chant: “I met a man who wasn’t there.”) For the tormented who blind themselves before mirrors, a wash of hallucination will fill the screen of sight. Woody Allen’s Zelig falls into old newsreels, his Kugelmass into a chapter of
Madame Bovary
. Chester allowed himself to become, or to struggle to become, if not a character in fiction, then someone who tilted at life in order to transmogrify it into fiction. He is remembered now less as the vividly endowed writer he was born to be than as an eccentric ruin in the comical or sorrowing anecdotes of a tiny circle of aging scribblers.

Most of the writers who on occasion reminisce about Chester have by now lived long enough to confirm their own minor status. If he was in a gladiatorial contest, and not only from the perspective of Mr. Emerson’s adolescent amphitheater, but with all of his literary generation, then it is clear that Chester has lost. In 1962, commenting on a first collection of short stories by John Updike, he was caustic and flashy: “… a God who has allowed a writer to lavish such craft upon these worthless tales is capable of anything.” A reviewer’s callow mistake, yes. Updike has gone from augmentation to augmentation, and nobody can so much as recognize Chester’s name. It is common enough that immediately after writers die, their reputations plummet into ferocious eclipse: all at once, and unaccountably, a formerly zealous constituency will stop reading and teaching and talking about the books that only a short while before were objects of excitement and gossip. It
is as if, for writers, vengeful mortality erases not only the woman or the man but the page, the paragraph, the sentence—pages, paragraphs, and sentences that were pressed out precisely in order to spite mortality. Writers, major or minor, may covet fame, but what they really
work
for is that transient little daily illusion—phrase by phrase, comma after comma—of the stay against erasure.

I sometimes try to imagine Chester alive, my own age (well, a few months younger), still ambitiously turning out novels, stories, essays. No white hair for Chester; he would be perfectly bald, and, given his seniority, perfectly undistinguished by his baldness. I see him as tamed though not restrained, a practiced intellectual by now; industrious; all craziness spent. Instead of those barbaric dogs, he owns a pair of civilized cats. If I cannot untangle the sex life of his later years, I also know that it is none of my business. (In “The Foot” he speaks glancingly of having had sexual relations with a woman for the first time, at thirty-seven.) His ambition, industry, and cantankerous wit have brought him a quizzical new celebrity; he is often on television. In degree of attention-getting he is somewhere between Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, though less political than either. He avoids old friends, or, if not, he anyhow avoids me; my visits with him take place in front of the television set. There he is, talking speedy Brooklynese, on a literary panel together with Joyce Carol Oates and E. L. Doctorow.

I look into the bright tube at those small, suffering, dangerous eyes under the shining scalp and think:
You’ve won, Chester, you’ve won
.

OUR KINSMAN, MR. TROLLOPE
 

T
HREE-QUARTERS
of a century have slipped away since Bloomsbury last sneered at the British Victorians; fiction’s new career, in the form of
Ulysses
, began over seventy years ago. We post-moderns are by now so far from the modernist repudiation of Victorian influence that we can look with an unembarrassed eye—an eye of one’s own, we might say—at the three-decker Victorian novel’s subplots and coincidences, its bloated serializations, its unnaturally heightened and speechifying dialogue. We can see past their potboiler mechanisms into what these baggy old novelists humanly, and sometimes half-divinely,
knew
.

Anthony Trollope has long been excluded from this percipient, and undeceived, reassessment. He is nearly the only Victorian novelist who has been critically doomed to remain a Victorian. He alone appears to be unforgiven. Dickens and Henry James and George Eliot and Thackeray—even the colonialist-imperialist Kipling!—are permitted, and sometimes prodded, to transcend the accident of their chronology and the confines of their mores. Only Trollope is regarded as still mired in his devices—devices
that are, in their pre-video yet cinematic way, archetypes of our present-day story-machines, glowing like colored apothecary globes in rooms where pianos used to stand. Trollope, in brief, is dismissed as a kind of antiquated television set; he is said to be “undemanding.” Dickens, by contrast, survives in all his greatness as caricaturist; George Eliot as moralist; Thackeray as ironist; Hardy as determinist. (Shorthand, it goes without saying, for the orchestrally manifold.)

But there is no organizing epithet or central insight for Trollope. He is all those sharp-edged things: caricaturist, moralist, ironist (very strong here), determinist (to a degree). And still he is flicked off as shallow. So he is left behind among the unemerged Victorians, deprived of the stature of transcendence. Much of the fault is extrinsic: a case can be made that the blame falls on those preening bands of Trollope cultists, farflung votaries in Papua, Tel Aviv, and Hay-on-Wye (not to mention certain pockets of the Upper West Side)—coterie enthusiasts and credit-seekers who suppose that to esteem a writer is to take on some of that writer’s cachet. Trollope’s reputation has rested (or foundered) too long and too stickily on the self-congratulation and misdirection of Trollopean zealots. These, like the even more notorious Janeites, or like the pious devotees of an apotheosized George Eliot, are misled in assuming that their hero is all tea-cozies and country comforts, in the style of
Masterpiece Theater
’s bright palette. Worse, single-author addicts have the naive habit of equating literature with the easy pleasures of self-approval.

But there is, I think, a more significant reason for the omission of Trollope from most contemporary reappraisals. It isn’t only that serious readers will run from what the zealots praise. The truth is that Trollope is more
ours
than any of those honored others (Dickens, for instance)—which may be why the current generation has the instinct to undervalue him. Writers who describe for us precisely the way we live now tend to be scorned—a single glance at how the so-called multiculturalists and other politico-literary trendists have slighted Saul Bellow is a sufficient sampling. Trollope is ten times slyer than his adorers (adorers of village parsonages) can dream—slyer and colder, with a brainy analytic
laughter so remote it can register nearly as indifference. Trollope, like Bellow, is a meticulous and often ferocious anatomizer of character and society. His hand can be both light and weighty; he gets to the bottom of vileness, and also of decency; he is magisterially shrewd—shrewd in the manner of Cervantes; he likes to write about churchmen but is easy on belief; nothing in the pragmatic workings of worldliness escapes him.

Henry James complained early and nastily about Trollope’s “devotion to little things,” and charged him with “the virtues of the photograph.” “Mr. Trollope is a good observer,” James said, “but he is literally nothing else.” A surprisingly grudging comment from the novelist whose most celebrated dictum is “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” and who was himself possessed by the voyeurism of the ardent observer. Well, yes, there
is
in Trollope something of a camera mounted on a helicopter—the Olympian looking down at a wide map strewn with wriggling mortals and their hungers; I mean by this that Trollope is at heart a cynic. But a cynic is a great deal more than an observer; a cynic is a metaphysical necessity. Trollope is not much concerned with retributive justice: his comeuppances come and go. He accepts and will not judge; or, if he judges, he will not invest his soul in the judgment. He may be a moralist—he certainly responds to the discriminations of the moral life—but he is too dispassionate to jubilate or grieve. Whatever is is exactly what one might expect.

“Cynic” commonly suggests a detached pessimism, a pessimism sans bitterness—but a cynic is acutely alert to an element of strangeness in the way matters fall out. From the Olympian’s view, everything is strange—love, hate, religion, skepticism, exultation, apathy, domesticity, class, greed, infatuation, mercilessness, godliness. That may be why, having witnessed in our own century the strangest and the worst, we seem finally to be disconnected from the impersonal though earnest virtues of the photograph. What is a photograph if not a stimulus to the most deliberate attentiveness: time held motionless in a vise of profound concentration, so that every inch of the seized moment can be examined? Bellow, in his own version of James’s exhortation, adds it all up as
follows: “Writers are naturally attentive; they are trained in attentiveness, and they adduce attentiveness in their readers (without a high degree of attentiveness, aesthetic bliss is an impossibility).” The term “aesthetic bliss” Bellow borrows from Nabokov, linking it to the “recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life” by “artists who write novels or stories.” The notion of the photograph as one likely key to (or recognizer of) human essence is useful enough; though we know the camera can be made to lie, we also know it as reality’s aperture. We say we are in earnest about the importance of being earnest, but we frequently choose (it is the way we live now) social superstition over social truth; or the partisan simulacrum over historical reality; or furry pointillism over the unrelenting snapshot; or sentimental distortion over exact measure. All of this is just what Trollope will
not
do; it takes a peculiar literary nerve to admit to the way we live now. And nerve (or call it courage) is the foundation of the aesthetic (or call it, more plainly, art).