Fame & Folly (34 page)

She, like so many of her generation, once sought work and recognition. Perhaps she labored for the sake of fame, who knows? Five or six of her contemporaries, no more, accomplished that ubiquitous desire. But here in the gyre of my eighteenth year, my goatish and unbridled twentieth, my muscular and intemperate and gluttonous prime, it is fruitfulness I am after: despite the unwantedness of it—and especially despite
her
—I mean to begin a life of novel-writing. What do I care? I have decades to squander.

As for her: coward, whining wizened hoary fake—I deny her, I denounce her, I let her go!

OLD HAND AS NOVICE
 

I
REMEMBER
precisely the moment I knew I wanted to write a play: it was in an out-of-the-way theater, the Promenade, on Broadway in the Seventies, somewhere in the middle of the second act of
The Common Pursuit
, a melancholic comedy by the British playwright Simon Gray. The play was a send-up of the passionate Cambridge cenacle attached to
Scrutiny
, that fabled literary periodical presided over by F. R. Leavis, an eminent critic of forty years ago; it followed the rise and fall and erotic history of its madly literary protagonists from cocky youth to sour middle age. Madly literary myself, I sat electrified in the seductive dark of the Promenade, flooded by an overpowering wish: Some day!

And I remember precisely the moment I discovered the first sinister fumes brewed up by those liars and obfuscators who dare to term themselves “revisionists,” but are more accurately named Holocaust deniers. It was the late summer of 1961. My husband and I had just rented an apartment in a building so new that the fresh plaster, not yet fully dried, was found to be congenial to a repulsive army of moisture-seeking insects rather prettily called silverfish.
How to rid ourselves of this plague? Off we went to the town library, to look for a book on household infestation. The helpful volume we hit on happened to be translated, and very nicely so, from the German. It recommended a certain gas with a record of remarkable success in the extermination of vermin. An asterisk led to a slyly impassive footnote at the bottom of the page, utterly deadpan and meanly corrupt: “Zyklon B, used during the Second World War.”

How the delectable theatrical dark came to be entangled with the dark of Zyklon B, the death-camp gas, I can hardly fathom; but when, after years of feeling unready, I did finally undertake to write a play, it turned out to be tempestuously and bitterly political—nothing in the least like that dream of literary laughter the Promenade had inspired long before. Its salient theme was Holocaust denial: a trap contrived out of cunning, deceit, and wicked surprise. Yet a not inconsequential literary issue stuck from the start to the outer flanks of my play, and continued to dog it: the ill-humored question of the playwright’s credentials.

Of course there is nothing new in a writer’s crossing from one form into another; no one is startled, or aggrieved, by a novelist turned essayist, or by a poet who ventures into fiction. The radical divide is not in the writer, but in the mode, and mood, of reception. Reading is the expression of a profound social isolation. As in getting born or dying, you are obliged to do it alone; there is no other way. Theater—like religion, its earliest incarnation—is a communal rite. Study a row of faces transfixed in unison by a scene on a stage, and you will fall into a meditation on anatomical variety irradiated by a kind of dramaturgical monotheism: the infusion of a single godly force into so many pairs of luminously staring eyes.

Theater
is
different from fiction, yes; an untried genre for the novice playwright, a dive into strangeness: that mysterious hiatus in the dark, that secret promissory drawing of breath just before the stage lights brighten. Nevertheless a novice is not the same as an amateur. An amateur worships—is glamorized by—the trappings of an industry, including the excitements of being “inside.” Theater industry (or call it, as anthropologists nowadays like to
do, theater culture), with all its expertise, protocol, hierarchy, jargon, tradition, its existential hard knocks and heartbreak, its endemic optimism and calloused cynicism, its experience with audiences, its penchant for spectacle, still cannot teach a writer the writer’s art—which is not on the stage, but in the ear and in the brain. Though a novice playwright will certainly be attentive to “technique,” to “knowhow,” real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self; a writer’s lessons are ineluctably internal. As a beginning novelist long ago, I learned to write dialogue not in a fiction workshop ruled by a sophisticated “mentor,” but by reading Graham Greene’s
The Heart of the Matter
over and over again. There were uncanny reverberations in those short, plain sentences, and a peculiarly suspenseful arrest of a character’s intent. The perfected work was the mentor.

Let me not arrogantly misrepresent. There is plenty for an uninitiated playwright to learn from the living air of a reading, a rehearsal, a developing performance in the theater itself; and from an actor’s cadence or lift of the eyelid; and from an impassioned talk with a seasoned playwright (and no one is more openly generous than lifelong playwrights, who are a band of mutually sympathizing cousins); and above all from a trusted and trusting director who recognizes the writer
as writer
. Besides, a novelist’s perspective is hardly akin to a playwright’s. Novels are free to diverge, to digress, to reflect, to accrete. Proust is a gargantuan soliloquizer. Tolstoy encompasses whole histories. George Eliot pauses for psychological essays. A novel is like the physicist’s premise of an expanding universe—horizon after horizon, firmament sailing past firmament. But a play is just the reverse: the fullness of the universe drawn down into a single succinct atom—the all-consuming compactness and density of the theorist’s black hole. Everything converges in the dot that is the stage. A novelist seeking to become a playwright will uncover new beauty—structure and concision; the lovely line of the spine and the artfully integrated turn of each vertebra.

Yet always a gauntlet is thrown down before the newcomer playwright (especially one who has arrived from the famously sequestered craft of fiction), and that is the many-fingered image of
“collaboration.” I want to say quickly—against all the power and authority of theatrical magnates and magi, against the practice and conviction of all those who know more and better than an uninformed interloper like myself—that the term “collaboration,” as I have heard it used again and again, is a fake, a fib, and a sham. The truth stands clarified: no matter what the genre, a writer is necessarily an autonomous, possessed, and solitary figure generating furies. Imagination is a self-contained burning, a fire that cannot be fed from without. The idea of a “collaborative art” is an idea out of Oz—i.e., it supplies you with a phony wizard haranguing into a megaphone. No one can claim ascendancy over a writer’s language or imagination, and anyone who tries—and succeeds—is an invader, an editor, or just a run-of-the-mill boss. Writers cloutless and consequently docile will likely acquiesce—but what will come out of it is what editors and bosses always get: something edited, something obliging. An artificial voice. A dry wadi where the heart of a river might have roiled. In the name of a putative collaborative art, a novice playwright (even if an old hand as a writer) will be manipulated by the clever, patronized by the callow, humiliated by the talentless. Generations of clichés will pour down. To become master over a writer is not, as it happens, to become a master of writing.

But if the notion of a collaborative art is simply authoritarian make-believe, the experience of
skills
in collaboration is the rapt and gorgeous satisfaction of theater—the confluence of individual artists, each conceptually and temperamentally singular. The brainy director’s orchestral sensibility; the actors’ transformative magickings (a gesture over nothingness will build you the solidest phantom table conceivable); dramatic sculptures hewn of purest light; inklings sewn into a scene by the stitch of a tiny sound; a dress that is less a costume than a wise corroboration; a set that lands you unerringly in the very place you need to be; and the sine qua non of the producers’ endlessly patient acts of faith—all these carry their visionary plenitude. Novice playwrights—and veterans, too, I believe—will fall on their knees in gratitude.

To return to the matter of credentials. A bird can fly over any continent you choose; it’s the having wings that counts. A writer
can be at home in novel, story, essay, or play; it’s the breathing inside a blaze of words that counts. However new to theater culture, a writer remains exactly that—the only genuine authority over the words and the worlds they embody.

And if the play should vanish away without being realized in a theater before an audience (nine times out of ten, plays are snowflakes in July), the disappointed scribbler will peacefully turn back to the blessed privacy of a secluded desk—where the writer not only acts all the roles, wears all the costumes, and dreams all the scenery, but is both determined producer and tireless director, unwaveringly committed to fruition; and where there is no mistaking who is sovereign.

SEYMOUR: HOMAGE TO A BIBLIOPHILE
 

A
NYONE WHO
sets out to tell her own peculiar Seymour story takes no risks of parochialism: nothing can be more certain than that
my
Seymour will be
your
Seymour; and vice versa. There are two reasons for this confidence. The first is that I came to Seymour late, and found him in all the ripened wholeness of his absolute Self—Seymour to the full, Seymour to the dazzling brim. By the time I got to know him—less than two years, it turned out, before he left us to join Keats in Heaven—it was plain he had been this Seymour, and no other, for a long while: a man of such spirited sweetness, airiness, and diffident wit, a man of such ungrudging jauntiness and sprightly gentleness, an affectionate idealist so luminously elevated by humane imagination, that I understood at once I had fallen into an amazement.