Fame & Folly (44 page)

“IT TAKES A GREAT DEAL OF HISTORY TO PRODUCE A LITTLE LITERATURE”
 

H
. G. W
ELLS
once accused Henry James of knowing practically nothing. In the Jamesian novel, Wells charged, “you will find no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing.” Wells concluded: “It is leviathan retrieving pebbles.”

James was desperately wounded. He was at the close of his great span of illumination—it was less than a year before his death—and he was being set aside as useless, “a church lit but without a congregation.” Replying to Wells, he defended himself on the question of the utility of art. Literature, he asserted, is “for use”: “I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything behind.” There followed the famously characteristic Jamesian credo, by now long familiar to us. “It is art,” he wrote, “that
makes
life, makes interest, makes importance … I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” And though he was speaking explicitly of the novel’s purpose as “the extension of life, which is the novel’s great gift,” there is evidence enough that
he would not have excluded the literary essay, of which he was equal master, from art’s force and beauty. Thus, what Henry James knew.

To which Wells retorted: “I had rather be a journalist, that is the essence of it.”

In the quarrel between Wells and James, James’s view has been overtaken by times and habits far less elevated in their literary motives (and motifs) than his own, and by radical changes in the aims of education and in the impulses that drive the common culture. What James knew was the nobility of art—if, for him, the novel and the literary essay were not splendors just short of divine, then they were, anyhow, divining rods, with the capacity to quiver over the springs of discovered life. What Wells knew was something else—the future; us; what we are now. He welcomed the germinating hour of technology’s fecundity, and flourished in it. James, we recall, switched from pen and ink to the typewriter, not because he was attracted to machines—he was not—but because he suffered from writer’s cramp. He never learned to type himself; instead, he dictated to a typist—a technological regression, in a way, to the preliterate oral; or else an ascendance to the dominant priestly single voice. Wells, by contrast, was magnetized by the machine-world. Imagine him our contemporary: his study is mobbed by computer, printer, modem, e-mail, voice-mail, photocopier, fax, cable—the congeries and confluence of gadgets and conveniences that feed what the most up-to-date colleges advertise as “communications skills.”

The truth of our little age is this: nowadays no one gives a damn about what Henry James knew. I dare to say our “little” age not to denigrate (or not only to denigrate), but because we squat now over the remnant embers of the last diminishing decade of the dying twentieth century, possibly the rottenest of all centuries, and good riddance to it (despite modernism at the start and moonwalking near the middle). The victories over mass murder and mass delusion, West and East, are hardly permanent. “Never again” is a pointless slogan: old atrocities are models (they give permission) for new ones. The worst reproduces itself; the best is singular. Tyrants, it seems, can be spewed out by the dozens, and
their atrocities by the thousands, as by a copy machine; but Kafka, tyranny’s symbolist, is like a fingerprint, or like handwriting, not duplicatable. This is what Henry James knew: that civilization is not bred out of machines, whether the machines are tanks or missiles, or whether they are laser copiers. Civilization, like art its handmaid (read: hand-made), is custom-built.

Let this not be mistaken for any sort of languorous pre-Raphaelite detachment from science or technology, or, heaven for-fend, as a complaint against progress and its reliefs. Gratitude for anaesthesia and angioplasty and air travel, and for faxes and computers and frozen food and the flush toilet and all the rest! Gratitude, in truth, for Mr. Gradgrind and the Facts, and for those who devise the Facts—especially when those facts ease the purely utilitarian side of life. What distinguishes the data of medicine and science is precisely that they
can
be duplicated: an experiment that cannot be repeated will be discarded as an unreliable fluke, or, worse, as a likely forgery. In the realm of science, what is collective has authority. It is the same with journalism: if two reporters witness an incident, and the two accounts differ, one must be wrong, or must at least promote distrust. A unique view, uncorroborated, is without value. Wells, in discrediting James, was in pursuit of public and collective discriminations, as opposed to the purely idiosyncratic; he was after consensus-witnessing, both in science and society, and a more recognizable record, perhaps, even of lust and whim. Defined political and religious opinions, clear partisanships, persons definitely up to some specific impersonal thing.

Defined, definite, specific—how, what, when, where: the journalist’s catalogue and catechism. Naming generates categories and headings, and categories and headings offer shortcuts—like looking something up in the encyclopedia, where knowledge, abbreviated, has already been codified and collected. James’s way, longer and slower, is for knowledge to be detected, inferred, individually, laboriously, scrupulously, mazily—knowledge that might not be found in any encyclopedia.

“I had rather be a journalist, that is the essence of it”—hark, the cry of the common culture. Inference and detection (accretion heading toward revelation) be damned. What this has meant, for
literature, is the eclipse of the essay in favor of the “article”—that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap, impatient thing. A while ago, coming once again on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque”—an essay not short, wholly odd, no other like it, custom-made, soliciting the brightness of full attention in order to release its mocking charms—I tried to think of a single periodical today that might be willing to grant print to this sort of construction. Not even “judicious cutting,” as editors like to say, would save Stevenson now. Of course there may be an instantly appropriate objection to so mildewed an observation. Stevenson is decidedly uncontemporary—the tone is all wrong, and surely we are entitled to our own sounds? Yes, the nineteenth century deserves to be read—but remember, while reading, that it is dead.

All right. But what of the “clear partisanship” of a book review encountered only this morning, in a leading journal dedicated to reviews? “Five books, however rich and absorbing, are a hefty number for the reader to digest,” the reviewer declares, commenting on Leon Edel’s multivolume biography of Henry James; “a little amateur sleuthing some years ago suggested to me that the number of people who bought Mr. Edel’s quintet bore little relation to the number who succeeded in battling their way through them.” (Amateur sleuthing may be professional gall. “Succeeded in battling,” good God! Is there a paragraph in Edel’s devoted work, acclaimed as magisterial by two generations, that does not seduce and illuminate?) Edel, however, is not under review; he is only a point of contrast. The book in actual question, a fresh biography of James—in one volume—is, among other merits, praised for being admirably “short.” It is attention span that is victor, even for people who claim to be serious readers.

And writers may give themselves out as a not dissimilar sample. Now and then you will hear a writer (even one who does not define herself as a journalist) speak of her task as “communication,” as if the meticulous making of a sentence, or the feverish uncovering of an idea, or the sting of a visionary jolt delivered by what used to be called the Muse, were no more artful than a ten-minute telephone conversation. Literature may “communicate” (a redundancy,
even a tautology), but its enduring force, well past the routine of facile sending and receiving, is in the consummation, as James tells us, of life, interest, importance. Leviathan rises to kick away the pebble of journalism.

Yet the pebble, it seems, is mightier than leviathan. The ten-minute article is
here
, and it has, by and large, displaced the essay. The essay is gradual and patient. The article is quick, restless, and brief. The essay reflects on its predecessors, and spirals organically out of a context, like a green twig from a living branch. The article rushes on, amnesiac, despising the meditative, reveling in gossip and polemics, a courtier of the moment. Essays, like articles, can distort and lie, but because essays are under the eye of history, it is a little harder to swindle the reader. Articles swindle almost by nature, because superficiality is a swindle. Pessimists suppose that none of this is any longer reversible. That the literary essay survives in this or that academic periodical, or in a handful of tiny quarterlies, is scarcely to the point. It has left the common culture.

Some doubt whether there
is
a common culture now at all, whether it is right to imagine that “the West” retains any resonance of worthy meaning; or even that it should. To claim commonality is, paradoxically, to be written off as elitist. Politically, through exploration, exploitation, and contempt, the West has spread elitism and exclusion; but it has also spread an idea of democratic inclusiveness so powerful—all of humanity is made in the image of the One Creator—that it serves to knock the politics of contempt off its feet all over the world. The round earth, like an hourglass, is turned upside down these days, spilling variegated populations-in-motion into static homogeneous populations, south into north, east into west; the village mentality, with its comfortable reliance on the familiar, is eroded by the polychrome and polyglot. America, vessel of migrations, began it. Grumbling, Europe catches up. While the kaleidoscope rattles and spins, and tribe assaults tribe, no one can predict how all this will shake itself out; but the village mentality is certainly dead. The jet plane cooked its goose.

…

B
ETWEEN THE LAST
paragraph and this one, I took a quick trip to Paris. This is not the sort of thing a hermitlike scribbler usually does; generally it is a little daunting for me to walk the three short blocks to Main Street. But the rareness of such a plummeting from one society into another, perhaps because one’s attention becomes preternaturally heightened, somehow illumines the notion of commonality. I crossed an ocean in an airplane and found, on the opposite shore, almost exactly what I left behind: the same congeries of concerns. The same writers were being talked about, the same world news (starvation, feuding, bombing) was being deplored; only the language was different. So there really
is
a “West”—something we mostly forget as we live our mostly Main Street lives. Suppose, then, the language were not different but the same?

And if “commonality” requires more persuasive evidence than a transoceanic flight, there is, after all, the question (the answer, rather) of English—setting aside Shaw’s quip about America and Britain being separated by a common language. The mother-tongue, as the sweet phrase has it, is a poet’s first and most lasting home, his ineradicable patriotism.
^*
In my teens I read Katherine Mansfield: what did a New York-born Jewish girl whose family had fled the boot of the Russian Czar have in common with a woman born in New Zealand forty years earlier? And what did this woman of the farthest reaches of the South Pacific have in common with an island off the continent of Europe? How rapidly the riddle is undone: Keats and Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth, to begin with. The great tree-trunk of English literature … no, that grand image ought to give way to something
homelier. Call it the drawstring of English letters, which packs us all into the same sack, at the bottom of which—as we tumble around all mixed up down there, North Americans, Australians, Nigerians, South Africans, Jamaicans, numbers of Indians, and on and on—lies a hillock of gold.

The gold is the idea (old-fashioned, even archaic, perhaps extinct) of belles-lettres. Some will name it false gold, since English, as language and as literature, came to the Caribbean, and to New York, and to all those other places, as the spoor of empire. (Spooky thought: if not for the Czar of All the Russias, and if not for mad King George III, and if not for their anachronistic confluence, I would not now be, as I am, on my knees before the English poets. Also: no native cadences of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Cather!) The Shropshire Lad for a while bestrode the world, and was welcome nowhere. But Milton and Mill and Swift and George Eliot and E. M. Forster came along as stowaways—“Areopagitica,” and
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, and “A Modest Proposal,” and
Daniel Deronda
, and
A Passage to India
. These hardly stand for the arrogance of parochialism—and it is just this engagement with belles-lettres that allows parochialism to open its arms, so that the inevitable accompaniment of belles-lettres is a sense of indebtedness. “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” James noted; everything that informs belles-lettres is in that remark, and also everything that militates against the dismissal of either the term or the concept.