My Generation (41 page)

“What field?” I replied feebly.

“Abnormal psychology. Are you a specialist?”

His tone and manner had so smothered me with humiliation that I was speechless; after a silent beat or two he said: “This book is not for young boys seeking a thrill.”

The effect was catastrophic, nearly fatal; I slunk out of the New York Public Library, resolved never to enter a library again.

These countless years later I've been able to regard those incidents in the way one regards so many experiences that seem tragic at the time they happen; they were both educating and valuable. Recently, when I've pondered the issue of censorship and pornography I've remembered these moments of awful rejection and have seen that they comprise an object lesson. Of course, my own youth was a factor in having been denied, and neither of those books were pornography. Still, there's a point to be made. It was not prurience, not lust that impelled me to seek out these works but a far simpler instinct: curiosity. In a puritanical society—and America is, par excellence, a puritanical society—it is the veil of forbiddenness, as much as what lies behind the veil, that provokes the desire for penetration, if I may use the word. Had Miss Evans permitted me to read the word
condom
, or had I been able to while away a winter afternoon immersed in Krafft-Ebing, whose juiciest passages, I later learned, were obscured in a smoke screen of Latin, I might have fulfilled at least some of my curiosity and then returned to normal adolescent concerns. As it was, I remained heavy-spirited and restless with need. The present-day foes of sexually explicit writing and other depictions of sex, whether art or pornography, and those who would censor such works don't understand this underlying psychological reality and thus undermine their own cause. There is, it is true, a group, probably not very large, of super-enthusiasts for whom pornography is an obsession and a necessity. Joyce Carol Oates has likened these people to religious votaries: one might morally disagree with them even as one scorns so much seemingly displaced heat, but their requirements should be democratically
tolerated and finally even respected. At the same time, the nearly universal availability of erotica has allowed most other people to take it or leave it; many find it somehow fulfilling, and there is nothing wrong with that. I suspect that the great mass of people, their curiosity blessedly satisfied, have discovered in the aftermath an excruciating monotony and have signed off for good. The censors who would reestablish the tyranny of my youth should quit at this point, accepting the fact that it's the sordid absolutism of denial—not what is made accessible—that turns people into cranks and makes them violent and mad.

After I experienced rejection, acceptance, and total immersion in reading, the United States Marine Corps introduced me to the glories of the library. During World War II, at the age of seventeen, I joined the Marines but was deemed too young to be sent right away into the Pacific combat. I was delivered for a time, instead, to the V-12 program at Duke University, which then, as now, possessed one of the great college libraries of America. I'm sure it was at least partially the Zeitgeist that led me into a virtual rampage through those library shelves. When one has intimations of a too early demise it powerfully focuses the mind. The war in the Pacific was at a boiling fury, and there were few of us young marines who didn't have a prevision of himself as being among the fallen martyrs. I was taking a splendid course in seventeenth-century English prose and I'd hoarded an incantatory line from Sir Thomas Browne: The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. This, of course, is British understatement. I wanted desperately to live, and the books in the Duke University library were the rocks and boulders to which I clung against my onrushing sense of doom and mortality. I read everything I could lay my hands on. Even today I can recall the slightly blind and bloodshot perception I had of the vaulted Gothic reading room, overheated, the smell of glue and sweat and stale documents, winter coughs, whispers, the clock ticking toward midnight as I raised my eyes over the edge of
Crime and Punishment
. The library became my hangout, my private club, my sanctuary, the place of my salvation; during the many months I was at Duke, I felt that when I was reading in the library I was sheltered from the world and from the evil winds of the future; no harm could come to me there. It was doubtless escape of sorts but it also brought me immeasurable enrichment. God bless libraries.

It's hard for me to realize that this was exactly fifty years ago, perhaps to this very night. Truly still, the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. I
forgot to mention that among the books at the Duke library I desperately wanted to read in those days, but was unable to obtain, were
Lady Chatterley's Lover
by D. H. Lawrence and
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller. I did, however, see them incarcerated, immobilized like two child molesters, behind heavy wire grillwork in the Rare Book Room. I've learned that they were finally set free some years ago with an unconditional pardon.

[
Traces
(Indiana Historical Society), Spring 1995.]

Dear—:

The preface which you have wanted me to write, and which I wanted to write, and finally wrote, came back to me from Paris today so marvelously changed and reworded that it seemed hardly mine. Actually, you know, it shouldn't be mine. Prefaces are usually communal enterprises and they have a stern and dull quality of group effort about them—of Manifesto, Proclamation of Aims, of “Where We Stand”—of editors huddled together in the smoke-laden, red-eyed hours of early morning, pruning and balancing syntax, juggling terms and, because each editor is an individual with different ideas, often compromising away all those careless personal words that make an individualist statement exciting, or at least interesting. Prefaces, I'll admit, are a bore and consequently, more often than not, go unread. The one I sent you, so balanced and well-mannered and so dull—I could hardly read it myself when I finished it—when it came back to me with your emendations and corrections I couldn't read it at all. This, I realize, is the fault of neither or none of us; it's inevitable that what Truth I mumble to you at Lipp's over a beer, or that Ideal we are perfectly agreed upon at the casual hour of 2
A.M.
becomes powerfully open to criticism as soon as it's cast in a printed form which, like a piece of sculpture, allows us to walk all around that Truth or Ideal and examine it front, side, and behind, and for minutes on end. Everyone starts hacking off an arm, a leg, an ear—
and you end up with a lump. At any rate, I'd like to go over briefly a few of the things you questioned; we'll still no doubt disagree, but that's probably for the better. There are magazines, you know, where a questioning of words amounts to dishonesty, and disagreement means defection.

First, I said, “Literally speaking, we live in what has been described as the Age of Criticism. Full of articles on Kafka and James, on Melville, or whatever writer is in momentary ascendancy; laden with terms like ‘architectonic,' ‘Zeitgeist,' and ‘dichotomous,' the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter.” (Perfect beginning for a preface, you may note; regard the arch rhythms, the way it fairly looks down the nose at the reader.)

All right, then I said, “There is little wonder” (always a nice oblique phrase to use in a preface) “that, faced with Œdipus and Myth in Charlotte Brontë, with meter in Pope and darkness in Dante, we put aside our current quarterly with its two short poems, its one intellectualized short story, in deference to
Life
, which brings us at least
The Old Man and the Sea
.” This, of course, as you remember, was only by way of getting to the first brave part of the Manifesto: that
The Paris Review
would strive to give predominant space to the fiction and poetry of both established and new writers, rather than to people who use words like “Zeitgeist.” Now in rebuttal, one of you has written that it is not always editorial policy that brings such a disproportion of critical manuscripts across the editors' desks, pointing out that “in our schools and colleges all the emphasis is on analysis and organization of ideas, not creation.” The result is that we have critics, not creators; and you go on to suggest that, since this is the natural state of things, we should not be too haughty in the stating of our intention of having more fiction and poetry in
The Paris Review
.

To this I can only say:
d'accord
. Let's by all means leave out the lordly tone and merely say: Dear reader,
The Paris Review hopes
to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. OK? But as for “Zeitgeist,” which you accuse me of denouncing unnecessarily, I still don't like it, perhaps because, complying with the traditional explanation of intolerance, I am ignorant of what it means. I hope one of you will help me out.

Among the other points I tried to make was one which involved
The Paris Review
having no axe to grind. In this we're pretty much in agreement, I believe, although one of you mentioned the fact that in the first number of
The Exile
there were “powerful blasts” by Pound, among others, which added considerably to the interest of the magazine. True, perhaps. But is it because we're sissies that we plan to beat no drum for anything; is it only because we're wan imitations of our predecessors—those who came out bravely for anything they felt deeply enough was worth coming out bravely for? I don't think so. I think that if we have no axes to grind, no drums to beat, it's because it seems to us—for the moment, at least—that the axes have all been ground, the drumheads burst with beating. This attitude does not necessarily make us the Silent Generation (the fact of
The Paris Review
belies that), or the Sacred Generation, either, content to lie around in one palsied unprotesting mass. It's not so much a matter of protest now, but of waiting; perhaps, if we have to be categorized at all, we might be called the Waiting Generation—people who feel and write and observe, and wait and wait and wait. And go on writing. I think
The Paris Review
should welcome these people into its pages—the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.

Finally, and along these lines, I was taken pretty much to task by one of you for making the perhaps too general statement that there are signs in the air that this generation can and will produce literature equal to that of any in the past. Well, I suppose that is another Ringing Assertion, but it's a writer's statement, almost necessarily, and not a critic's. A critic nowadays will set up straw men, saying that Mailer had Ahab in mind when he created Sergeant Croft, that Jim Jones thought of Hamlet when he came up with his bedevilled Private Prewitt, stating further, however, that neither of these young men have created figures worthy of Melville or Shakespeare; they do this, or they leap to the opposite pole and cry out that no one writing today even
tries
to create figures of the tragic stature of Lear. For a writer, God forbid either course. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. The writer's duty is to keep on writing, creating memorable Pvt. Prewitts and Sgt. Crofts, and to hell with Ahab. Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation—who cares? The
writer will be dead before anyone can judge him—but he
must
go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all that he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope—qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning. If he does not think, one way or another, that he can create literature worthy of himself and of his place, at this particular moment in history, in his society, then he'd better pawn his Underwood, or become a critic.

Ever faithfully yours,

B
ILL
S
TYRON

[
Paris Review
, inaugural issue, Spring 1953.]

M
emory is, of course, a traitor, and it is wise not to trust any memoir which lends the impression of total recall. The following account of the founding of
The Paris Review
comprises my
own
recollection of the event, highly colored by prejudice, and must not be considered any more the gospel than those frequent narratives of the twenties, which tell you the color of the shoes that Gertrude Stein wore at a certain hour on such and such a day….

The Paris Review
was born in Montparnasse in the spring of 1952. It was, as one looks back on it through nostalgia's deceptive haze, an especially warm and lovely and extravagant spring. Even in Paris, springs like that don't come too often. Everything seemed to be in premature leaf and bud, and by the middle of March there was a general great stirring. The pigeons were aloft, wheeling against a sky that stayed blue for days, tomcats prowled stealthily along rooftop balustrades, and by the first of April the girls already were sauntering on the boulevard in scanty cotton dresses, past the Dôme and the Rotonde and their vegetating loungers who, two weeks early that year, heliotrope faces turned skyward, were able to begin to shed winter's anemic cast. All sorts of things were afoot—parties, daytime excursions to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, picnics along the banks of the Marne, where, after a lunch of bread and saucissons and Brie and Evian water (the liver was a touch troubled, following a winter sourly closeted with too much wine), you
could lie for hours in the grass by the quiet riverside and listen to the birds and the lazy stir and fidget of grasshoppers and understand, finally, that France could be pardoned her most snooty and magisterial pride, mistress as she was of such sweet distracting springs.

At night there was a bar called Le Chaplain, on a little dogleg street not far from the Dôme, where a lot of people used to go; you could carve your name with an outstretched forefinger in the smoke of the place, but the refreshment was not too expensive, and in its ambience—quiet enough for conversation yet lively enough to forestall boredom, gloom, self-conscious lapses—it seemed to be a fine place to sit and work up a sweat about new magazines and other such far-fetched literary causes. Even though outside there was a kind of calm madness in the air—French boys, too, were being sent to that most futile and insane of wars, Korea—and in spite of the beatific spring, there was a subdued yet tense quality around, as of a people pushed very close to the breaking point, or as of one hysteric woman who, if you so much as dropped a pin behind her, would break out in screams.
“U.S. Go Home.”
The signs are gone now, for the moment. At that time, though, our national popularity had reached
the
nadir and in Paris there have been better times for literary ventures. But all of us had been in one war; besides, the young
patron
of Le Chaplain, named Paul, by his own proclamation loved America almost as much for
“ses littérateurs”
as for
“ses dollars”
(winks, knowing laughter, toasts in beer to two great nations), and if
The Paris Review
were to celebrate a patron saint, it would possibly have to be this wiry, tough, frenetic Algerian with the beneficent smile, who could vault over the bar and stiff-arm a drunk out into the night in less time than it takes to say Edgar Poe, and return, bland as butter, to take up where he left off about Symbolist imagery. Try starting a little magazine at Toots Shor's.
Les américains en Amérique!
indeed.

Later that spring, as the idea of a new magazine grew less far-fetched (by this time someone mentioned that he actually knew where he could raise $500), we convened in an apartment on a hidden, sleepy street behind the Gare Montparnasse called the Rue Perceval. The apartment belonged to Peter Matthiessen, to whom credit is due for having originated the idea for the magazine. No one seemed to know the obscure street, not even the shrewdest of Left Bank cabdrivers, and in this seclusion three flights up, in a huge room with a sunny terrace overlooking all of Paris, the plans went forward in euphoria, in kennel snarls of bickering, in buoyant certitude, in
schism and in total despair. Though it is no doubt less complicated to organize a little magazine than to start some sort of industrial combine, it is imponderably more difficult an enterprise, I will bet, than opening a delicatessen, and in France one must multiply one's problems—well, by France; to learn successfully how to browbeat a Parisian printer, for instance, is rough schooling for a Parisian, even more so for a recent graduate of Harvard or Yale, and the bureaucratic entanglements involved in setting up a corporation known as
Société à Résponsibilité Limitée au capital de 500.000 frs
. must be self-evident to anyone who has even so much as lost his passport. Yet somehow the thing was accomplished.

To be young and in Paris is often a heady experience. In America a writer not only never knows who or where he is (“Well, what I mean is, was it a best seller?” “Is this novel of yours sort of historical, or maybe what they call psychological?” “Well, I really meant, what do you do for a
living
?”), he gets so he does not
want
to know. In Paris, on this level at least, it is different, as we all know, and like that hardship case of an American writer of authenticated record whose landlady, spying his translated poem in
Les Nouvelles Littéraires
and recognizing his name, offered him out of glowing pride a two percent reduction in his rent—like this young writer, touched by the sentiment even if not by sheer largesse, we feel peculiarly at ease for a change, we know where we are, and we wish to stick around. And so we persisted.

One sunny afternoon toward the end of that spring George Plimpton, another of the founders (the others were Thomas Guinzburg, Harold Humes, William Pène du Bois, and John Train), arrived at Matthiessen's apartment bearing two sinister-looking green bottles of absinthe. He burst in upon a glum gathering desultorily testing names.
Promises. Ascent. Villanelle. Tides. Weather-cock. Spume. Humes
. (I think it was Matthiessen who later hit upon the perfectly exact and simple title that the magazine bears.) Everyone was at low ebb, and it is quite probable that once again the group would have broken up had it not been for Plimpton's absinthe. Here I do not wish to suggest that there was something so fortuitously creative about that afternoon as to lead us to discover right then, once and for all, what we wished the magazine to “be”; by the same token, absinthe, according to the
Britannica
, “acts powerfully upon the nerve centers, and causes delirium and hallucinations, followed in some cases by idiocy.” One can make what one will out of that; for myself, I simply believe that that afternoon was the one upon which we were destined to make a breakthrough,
and that Plimpton's absinthe, while it might not have aided us in our efforts to define our policy, did nothing to hinder us, either. At any rate, toward the end of that day we had discovered roughly what we wished to make of the magazine, and we were in surprising accord.

[From Styron's introduction to
Best Short Stories from The Paris Review
. Dutton, 1959.]