In Rough Country (29 page)

H
ow heartily sick the world has grown, in the first seven years of the twenty-first century, of the “American idea”! Speak with any non-American, travel to any foreign country, the consensus is: the “American idea” has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids, consequently low on natural testosterone, deranged and myopic, dangerous. In 1923 D. H. Lawrence remarked that the essential American soul is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” and except for “stoic” this description is as accurate in 2007 as it was more than eighty years ago when Lawrence's brilliantly unorthodox
Studies in Classic American Literature
was published. How would Lawrence react to the quasi-mystical, shamefully self-aggrandizing “American idea”? Very likely, along these lines:

(If not “lynch” precisely how about “crucify in the media”? The ravenous tabloid press, tabloid TV and ever more ominously “mainstream” media have become the lynch mob of contemporary times, pummeling those guilty of the most innocuous of blunders with the ferocity with which they pummel outright criminals.)

What is most questionable about the “American idea”—indeed, most dangerous—is its very formulation: that there is a distinctly “American idea” in contrast to Canadian, British, French, Chinese, Icelandic, Estonian, or mere human “ideas.” Our unexamined belief in American exceptionalism has allowed us to imagine ourselves above anything so constrictive as international law. American exceptionalism makes our imperialism altruistic, our plundering of the world's resources a healthy exercise of capitalism and “free trade.” From childhood we are indoctrinated with the propaganda that, as Americans, we are superior to other nations; our way of life, a mass-market “democracy” manipulated by lobbyists, is superior to all other forms of government; no matter how frivolous and debased, our American culture is the supreme culture, as our language is the supreme language; our most blatantly imperialistic and cynical political goals are always idealistic, while the goals of other nations are transparently opportunistic. Perhaps the most pernicious of American ideas is the revered “My country right or wrong” with its thinly veiled threat of punishment against
those who hesitate to participate in a criminal patriotism. The myth of American exceptionalism begins with the revolt of the colonies against the British crown. In 1776, what a thrilling, exhilarating “American idea”! But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in a vastly altered world, and considering the higher degree of civilization embodied by Canada, that waged no war against the British—that country's reluctance to rush into war, its disinclination to celebrate the violence of the frontier, and to display itself as exceptional—it might be a timely American idea to examine our very origins.

H
umanism—like “the humanities”—indeed, all of the arts—has sometimes seemed, amid the turbulence of history, a frail vessel bearing us onward along a treacherous stream, and yet, the ideal of humanism prevails: a faith in reason, in the strategies of skepticism and doubt, a refusal to concede to “traditional” customs, religious convictions, and superstitions. Yesterday, in San Francisco, interviewed on Michael Kresnick's popular
Book Forum
, which is a call-in radio show, I inadvertently aroused the anger of a number of individuals who called in to protest my remark in passing that I did not believe in “evil”—that I thought that “evil” is a theological term, and not adequate to explain, nor even to suggest, psychological, social, and political complexities. When we label someone as “evil” we are implicitly identifying ourselves as “good.” The issue was Islamic suicide bombers who are surely motivated by political passions and so to call them merely “evil” is to fail to understand the phenomenon of terrorism. Though I said repeatedly that I wasn't defending terrorism, I was questioning the terms
in which it was being discussed, it seemed to make no difference: my critics remained angry, and unplacated. There would seem to be a powerful need in many—most?—people to believe in literal “evil”—“good”—“God”—“Heaven”—“Hell.” Terms we might interpret as metaphorical have acquired an eerie Platonic “realism.”

Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of human-kind? We must imagine our distant ancestors discovering death—baffled and terrified by death—and needing to ascribe to this natural phenomenon a supernatural explanation. As T. S. Eliot observed, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—especially, humankind can't bear the crushing evidence of a reality that limits human delusions of immortality and omniscience. A primitive fear of the unknown—of death—a disbelief that “this can't be all there is” prevails in all of us, tempting us to believe in a deity that will guarantee not only our immortality but our worth; and will unite us with “loved ones” in the afterlife, as in the country and western classic “May the Circle Be Unbroken” (“in the sky, Lord, in the sky”). As a novelist I tend to be sympathetic with persons who are religious, though I can't share in their convictions; it has always been something of a mystery to me, that intelligent, educated men and women—as well as the uneducated—can “have faith” in an invisible and non-existent God. One hundred years ago a gathering like this would have consisted of a majority of individuals who believed in the “perfectability” of mankind. In the wake of Charles Darwin's revolutionary work, scientists and educators like the distinguished T. H. Huxley believed in both biological and social/moral evolution. The optimism of
the turn of the century—the previous century—is expressed in H. G. Wells's youthful, Utopian work; though there is a check to that work in Wells's brilliantly conceived and executed “scientific romances” (
The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds
). By 1920, a more cautious note is sounded in Wells's monumental
The Outline of History
: “Human history becomes a race between education and catastrophe.” By 1945, in
The Mind at the End of Its Tether
, the former Utopianist was predicting the destruction of human civilization, in a tone comparable to that of Sigmund Freud in his late, melancholy essays
The Future of an Illusion
and
Civilization and Its Discontents
. In fifty years, in the wake of not one but two devastating world wars, the Holocaust and the revelation of the Nazis' genocidal agenda against Jews, the “perfectability of mankind” would seem to have been turned inside-out. And yet, humankind—and humanism—prevails. And in succeeding generations, I would like to predict that humanism—a secular ethical analogue to the old religions of tradition—will be the preeminent belief of humankind.

H
ow solitary I've always felt, in my writing life. Unlike nearly all my writer friends, especially my poet friends, I never really had a “mentor”—never anyone to whom I might show my work in progress in anything approaching an ongoing, still less an intimate or “profound,” relationship.

Even during my marriage of many years—which ended in February 2008 with the sudden death of my husband, Raymond Smith—my writing occupied another compartment of my life, apart from my married life. I am uneasy when people close to me read my writing—my fiction—as if I were intruding on their sense of me, which I would not wish to violate; I think that the life of the artist can be detached from the life of the “art”—no one is comfortable when others perceive, or believe they can perceive, the wellsprings of their “art” amid the unremarkable detritus of life.

Since my husband was an editor and publisher, overwhelmed with reading, assessing, annotating and editing man
uscripts to be published in
The Ontario Review
or by
Ontario Review Press
, I was reluctant to take up his time with yet more writerly projects of my own. I did ask him to read my nonfiction essays and reviews for such publications as the
New York Review of Books
—which, in any case, as an avid reader of that publication, he would have read when they were printed.

Rarely did he read my fiction. Not in progress or after publication.

Maybe this was a mistake. I am willing to concede that much in my life has been mistaken—and yet: what is the alternative, superior life I might have led? Is there such a Platonic fantasy?

I haven't had significant mentors in my writing life, nor have I had “monsters”—but I have had, and have now, fascinating writer friends. It's altogether likely that these writer friends have influenced me in ways too subtle and diffuse to examine except anecdotally.

 

The Rival.
The day of Vladimir Nabokov's death—July 2, 1977—is firmly fixed in my memory, for on the following day Donald Barthelme said casually to me, with a puckish lift of his upper lip and what in non-Barthelmian prose might be described as a
twinkle of the stone-colored eye
behind wire-rimmed glasses: “Happy? Nabokov died yesterday, we all move up a notch.”

(And how did I respond to this? Probably with a startled or an embarrassed smile, and a murmur of mild disapprobation.
Oh Don, you don't mean that—do you?
)

Well, no! Don was just kidding.

Well, yes. What is kidding but deadly serious?

We were in an Italian restaurant within a few blocks of Donald's apartment at 113 West Eleventh Street in New York City. We were having a late lunch after drinks at the apartment with Donald's wife, Marian—Don's second wife, young, blond, attractive and, it seemed, warily in love with this complex, difficult, elliptical man, who behaved much more naturally—graciously—with my husband than with me, with whom he spoke in a manner that was jocular and subtly needling, edged with irony, sarcasm. As if Don didn't know what to make of me—at least in person. This was the first time we'd met after a friendly/funny correspondence following a literary feud of sorts conducted in public, in the pages of the
New York Times Book Review
(me) and
Newsweek
(Donald)—a disagreement of the kind writers had in the 1970s, or perhaps have had through the centuries, regarding the “moral”/“amoral” nature of literature. (The following year, John Gardner would publish his controversial polemic
On Moral Fiction
, praised in some quarters and condemned in others.) For the purposes of writerly combat “Joyce Carol Oates” weighed in on the side of moral seriousness; “Donald Barthelme” on the side of amoral playfulness. In an interview in the
Times
the Dada-inspired Barthelme had stated that “Fragments are the only form I trust,” which in retrospect sounds reasonable enough but, at the time, at the height of whatever literary issue was raging in whatever literary publications, struck me as dubious, or in any case a vulnerable position that might be questioned, if not attacked and repudiated. Subsequently, Donald “attacked” me in print, as one might have foreseen, and somehow it happened
that we began writing to each other, and not long afterward we arranged to meet on one of my infrequent trips to New York, and so Donald Barthelme and I became not friends—for we saw each other too rarely for friendship, and when we did meet, Don was so clearly more at ease with my husband than with me—but “friendly acquaintances.”

Perhaps Don thought of me as a “friendly rival”—it may have been that he thought of all writers, especially his contemporaries, as “rivals”—in the combative, macho way of Stanley Elkin, John Gardner, Norman Mailer, and numerous (male) others. The notion of our being “competitors” in some sort of public contest made me feel very ill at ease, and so invariably I found myself murmuring something vaguely embarrassed and/or conciliatory, usually some variant of
Oh Don, you don't mean that—do you?
with a hope of changing the subject.

With one so strong-minded as Donald Barthelme, you could not easily change the subject. You would remain on Don's subject for as long as Don wished to examine that subject, he with the air of a bemused vivisectionist. As Don's prose fiction is whimsical-shading-into-nightmare, cartoon-surreal-visionary, so Don's personality on such quasi-social occasions was likely to be that of the playful bully, perversely defining himself as an outsider, a marginal figure, a “loser” in the marketplace, in contrast to others whose books sold more, or so he believed. No sooner had my husband and I been welcomed into the Barthelmes' brownstone apartment—no sooner had I congratulated Don on what I'd believed to be the very positive reviews and best-seller status of his new book of stories,
Amateurs
—than he corrected me with a sneering smile, inform
ing me that
Amateurs
wasn't a best seller, and that no book of his had ever been a best seller; his book sales were “nothing like” mine; if I doubted this, we could make a bet—for $100—and check the facts. Quickly I backed down, I declined the bet—no doubt in my usual embarrassed and conciliatory way, hoping to change the subject.

But Don wasn't in the mood to change the subject just yet. To everyone's embarrassment—Ray's, mine, his wife's—Don picked up a phone receiver, dialed a number, and handed the receiver to me with the request that I speak to his editor—he'd called Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Giroux—and ask if in fact Donald Barthelme had ever had a best seller; and so, trying to fall in with the joke, which seemed to me to have gone a little further than necessary, I asked Roger Straus—whom I didn't know, had scarcely heard of at this time in my life—if Don had ever had a best seller, and was told no, he had not.

Plaintively I asked, “He hasn't? Not ever? I thought…”

The individual at the other end of the line, whom I would meet years later, the legendary Roger Straus of one of the most distinguished publishing firms in New York, said coolly, “No. He has not. Put Don on the phone, please, I want to talk to him.”

 

Of course, Donald Barthelme was hardly a “mentor” of mine—I had the distinct idea that he'd read very little of my writing, probably not a single book, only just short stories in collections in which we both appeared, such as
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
or magazines like
Harper's
and
The Atlantic.
(It would be a long time before my fiction began to appear,
not very frequently, in
The New Yorker
, in which Barthelme's wildly experimental short fiction had become a fixture rivaling the well-crafted traditional short fiction of John Updike. How upset Don would be were he living now, to see how George Saunders has usurped his
New Yorker
space with his deftly orchestrated Barthelme-inspired American-Gothic-surreal short fiction.) In my presence, at least, as on that uncomfortably hot July day in 1977 when we had lunch in the Village, it seemed important to Donald to establish himself as both a martyr of sorts—the brilliant iconoclastic/experimental writer whose books sold less than they deserved to sell—and the most strong-willed among us. Social engagements with Donald Barthelme were conducted strictly on Barthelmian terms.

If he were still alive—he died in 1989, of cancer—Don would be seventy-six years old at the time of this writing, December 2008. Very likely the Barthelmian edginess would have subsided by now. Very likely even Nabokov wouldn't have been considered a rival but something like a colleague, a brother, or a friend.

 

The Friend.
Though I was on friendlier, more relaxed and affectionate terms with my fellow western–New Yorker John Gardner, who'd published an early short story of mine titled “The Death of Mrs. Sheer” in his literary magazine
MSS
—and who regarded me, somewhat embarrassingly, as a “major American writer”—like himself—it can't be said that John Gardner was a mentor of mine, either. John was my sole writer friend who read my writing with enormous seriousness, which was both flattering, and unsettling; it sometimes seemed that John took
my books almost as seriously as he took his own. His model would seem to have been the elder, didactic, somewhat tiresome Tolstoy:
Art must be moral.
Another model might have been the zealous reformer Martin Luther. For this reason, John took it as his duty to chide, criticize, scold—in particular he scolded me about my “pessimism”—my “tragic view of life” it was John's hope to enlist me in the quixotic enterprise of writing what he called “moral fiction”—see the preacherly
On Moral Fiction
(1978). My next novel should be, for instance, a novel that John's young daughter could read and be left with the feeling that “life was worthwhile”—so John argued, with grim persistence, pushing aside his near-untouched plate of food (thick sirloin steak leaking blood), and drinking glass after glass of Scotch.

How I replied to this, as to other admonitions of John Gardner's, I have no idea.

Though John professed to admire my novels
A Garden of Earthly Delights
,
Expensive People
,
them
,
Wonderland
—though he gave my postmodernist Gothic
Bellefleur
a long, thoughtfully written, and generous review on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
, and always spoke highly of me in public in venues in which he mischievously and maliciously denounced many of our cohorts—he always seemed disappointed in me. I might have been an acolyte who'd managed to elude the gravitational pull of a powerful planetary force—an American Tolstoy-visionary in the mortal form of John Gardner.

With my longtime predilection for the playful experimentation of James Joyce, no less than for the intransigent tragic
humanism of D. H. Lawrence and the absurdist surrealism of Franz Kafka, I was not likely to be influenced by my fellow western New Yorker from Batavia. I was not likely to be told what to do, still less why I must do it. Nor did I understand the passion with which John attacked his slightly older postmodernist contemporaries, of whom a number were his friends, or had been—John Barth, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin. I never understood the bitterness of some of these rivalries, which hurt John more than they hurt others and made enemies of individuals who should have been friends and supporters at a time when John badly needed support.

But then, I don't really understand the messianic personality—the hectoring Tolstoy, the righteous Martin Luther. I never understood why so exceptional a personality as John Gardner wanted so much to influence others. During our often noisy evenings together, when John lectured in one of his lengthy, lurching, eloquently drunken monologues or argued with someone who dared to challenge him, the calm, still, sane words of Henry David Thoreau came to me:
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Why this compulsion to enjoin others to think as you believe they should? It seemed futile to me, foolish.

Years of proselytizing, preaching and sniping at other writers provoked a considerable backlash against John in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as he might have anticipated. I have no doubt that some of the negative publicity John drew helped to account for his moods of depression, which in turn provoked drinking, and driving while drinking—recklessly, on
the motorcycle that would eventually kill him, in an accident on a graveled country road near his home in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, in 1982.

At the time of his death, John had been divorced from two wives, and was about to marry another, a much younger woman writer, a former student of his at SUNY-Binghamton.

I remember first hearing of John's death. I'd been invited to give a reading at the Princeton Public Library, and my librarian-hostess told me the shocking news: “John Gardner is dead.” Not for a moment did I think that this John Gardner might be the other Gardner, a writer of popular mysteries; I'd known immediately that this Gardner was my western–New York friend. And I'd known, or seemed to know, that John's death (at the age of forty-nine) would turn out to be both accidental and—perhaps, to a degree—self-willed.

What would John Gardner's life be now, if he hadn't drunk so heavily? So compulsively, like a fated character out of Dostoyevsky or Eugene O'Neill? If he hadn't succumbed to an alcoholic's wildly inflated vision of himself—in which he saw his destiny loom large in the writing of the “great American novel” that would “alter the consciousness” of his time? My most vivid memories are of John hugging me, hard. This was John's customary greeting, as it was John's customary farewell. I remember John kissing my cheek, smelling of whiskey—his silvery hair falling disheveled to his broad, slightly rounded shoulders, his gesturing hands edged with grime, like fingerless gloves. I remember the glisten of his eyes, and the sharp smell of his smoldering pipe: “Joyce, you know that we're as
good as—maybe better than—Lawrence, don't you? Lawrence, Joyce—Faulkner—we are their equals, or will be. You know that, don't you? Come on!”