My Generation (42 page)

A
lthough not nearly so long nor so ambitious as my other works,
The Long March
achieved within its own scope, I think, a unity and a sense of artistic inevitability which still, ten years after the writing, I rather wistfully admire. Lest I appear immodest, I would hasten to add that I do not consider the book even remotely perfect, yet certainly every novelist must have within the body of his writing a work of which he recalls everything having gone just
right
during the composition: through some stroke of luck, form and substance fuse into a single harmonious whole and it all goes down on paper with miraculous ease. For me this was true of
The Long March
, and since otherwise the process of writing has remained exceedingly painful, I cherish the memory of this brief work, often wondering why for a large part of the time I cannot recapture the sense of compulsion and necessity that dominated its creation.

Possibly much of the urgency of the book is due to factors that are extremely personal. As the reader may eventually begin to suspect, the story is autobiographical. To be sure, all writing is to some degree autobiographical, but
The Long March
is intensely and specifically so. I do not mean that the central figures are not more or less imaginary—they are; but the mortar explosion and the forced march, which are central to the entire narrative, were actual incidents in which I was involved, just as I was bound up, for a time, in the same desolating atmosphere of a military base in the midst of a
fiercely hot American summer. If the story has a sense of truth and verisimilitude, it is because at the time of the writing all of these things—the terrible explosion, the heat of summer, and the anguish of the march itself—still persisted in my mind with the reality of some unshakable nightmare.

Perhaps it was an even larger nightmare which I was trying to create in this book, and which lends to the work whatever symbolic power it has the fortune to possess. Because for myself (as I do believe for most thoughtful people, not only Americans but the community of peaceable men everywhere) the very idea of another war—this one in remote and strange Korea, and only five years after the most cataclysmic conflict ever to engulf mankind—possessed a kind of murky, surrealistic, half-lunatic unreality that we are mercifully spared while awake, but which we do occasionally confront in a horrible dream. Especially for those like myself who had shed their uniforms only five years before—in the blissful notion that the unspeakable orgy of war was now only a memory and safely behind—the experience of putting on that uniform again and facing anew the ritualistic death dance had an effect that can only be described as traumatic. World War II was dreadful enough, but at least the issues involved were amenable to reasonable definition. To be suddenly plunged again into war, into a war, furthermore, where the issues were fuzzy and ambiguous, if not fraudulent, a war that could not possibly be “won,” a senseless conflict so unpopular that even the most sanguinary politician or war lover shrank from inciting people to a patriotic zeal, a war without slogans or ballads or heroes—to have to endure this kind of war seemed, to most of us involved in it at the time, more than we could bear. War was no longer simply a temporary madness into which human beings happily lapsed from time to time. War had at last become
the
human condition.

It was this feeling I believe I was trying to recapture when sometime later, in the summer of 1952, I found myself in Paris still unable to shake off the sense of having just recently awakened from a nightmare. My own ordeal and the ordeal of most of my Marine Corps friends (including one or two who died in Korea) was over—yet the persistent image of eight boys killed by a random mortar shell and of a long and brutal march lingered in my mind. Senseless mass slaughter and a seemingly endless march, the participants of which were faceless zeroes, were all that in retrospect appeared to me significant about this war without heroes, this war which lacked so utterly a sense of human identity, and which in so sinister a fashion presaged
the faceless, soulless, pushbutton wars of the future. All right, I would write about this faceless, soulless march. Yet, all my intentions to the contrary, I began to understand, as I wrote, that even in the midst of an ultimate process of dehumanization the human spirit cannot be utterly denied or downed: against all odds, faces emerge from the faceless aggregate of ciphers, and in the middle of the march I was creating I found Captain Mannix slogging and sweating away, tortured, beaten but indomitable. A hero in spite of himself or me, he endures, and in the midst of inhumanity retains all that which makes it worthwhile to be human. I myself cannot be sure, but possibly it is the hopeful implications derived from this mystery—this kind of indefatigable man—which are all an artist can pretend to suggest, however imperfectly, in his struggle to comprehend the agony of our violent, suicidal century.

[Introduction to the Norwegian edition of
The Long March;
Cappelens, 1963.]

M
ost of us writers who were involved as judges at the birth of an unfortunate literary enterprise called the Turner Tomorrow Award wish we had never heard of it, for the thing was misshapen, ill-conceived in its Atlanta womb, and caused us who presided at its parturition to be cast as the venal midwives. Sponsored by the Turner Publishing Co., offshoot of Ted Turner's communications empire, the award of $500,000 (reputedly the largest of its kind ever given) was to go to a single work of fiction that would produce “creative and positive solutions to global problems.” Four awards of $50,000 each would go to the runners-up.

In a diatribe written by Jonathan Yardley,
The Washington Post'
s in-house Torquemada, the judges—who included Carlos Fuentes, Peter Matthiessen, Wallace Stegner, Nadine Gordimer, and myself—were accused of being whorish sellouts who not only would comprise our literary standards, if we had any, by getting connected with such a venture but “would do just about anything” to obtain the $10,000 fee we were each given for our labors.
¹
Yardley's piece is filled with silly judgmental bluster, but if, as a responsible journalist, he had bothered to discover some of the facts about our involvement in this venture he could have easily done so.

Most of us had some misgivings when the Turner organization enlisted us through Thomas Guinzburg—a respected New York literary figure who was a friend of all of us—but I think that we each felt it was possible that our
participation might at least cause some of this huge amount of money to be distributed to a few writers of promise. But this was before the outlines of the woeful project became clear. Some months later, early this year, when we learned of the extraordinary dreck the first readers were encountering in the winnowing-out process (one manuscript among the 2,500 submitted worldwide contained the word “pray” repeated an estimated 150,000 times) our earlier doubts crystallized into dismay. We sent a letter to Guinzburg stating our misgivings and making it clear that we wished to resign, categorically, so that other judges might be substituted. Interestingly, the letter contains virtually the same indictment of the award that Yardley made (including the impossibility of good fiction being served up on demand) and that he implied we would never dare to express, being “blinded by the bucks.”

If we had insisted on resigning, as we should have, each of us would have had to forfeit the $10,000 fee, a reward which Yardley really believes had held us in greedy expectation for nearly a year. One hates to paw over this matter in public, but it's hard to avoid Yardley's vulgar fixation on money. He is at his most sanctimonious in his insistence that the prospect of this “fortune,” as he puts it, unhinged us with avarice. Few American writers make as much as a second-rate TV anchorperson or a second-rate second baseman, but some of us do quite well. Carlos Fuentes, who lectures widely, receives a minimum of $15,000 an appearance. There is scarcely one of the judges who could not with ease get $10,000 for a lecture or an appearance and spare him or herself the miseries of the Turner Tomorrow Award, which required—in my case—setting aside numerous afternoons better devoted to my work, plowing through twelve hulking manuscripts, taking three thousand words of notes, conferring with fellow judges, and traveling to the final judges' meeting with its poisonous unpleasantness. (Nadine Gordimer, a woman of stony integrity, told me in distress that she actually lost income during the grind, which included a fourteen-thousand-mile round-trip from South Africa.) On emotional grounds alone, I would not repeat the experience for twice the fee.

But we were persuaded to stay by Guinzburg and in the process were blandly deceived by the Turner organization. One of our inducements was the claim that there were many promising entries from the Third World and Eastern Europe, where money, publication, and media attention would be a significant boon to writers who had worked long in obscurity. (These never
materialized.) We were also told that if we stayed we would be free to make any prize-winning decisions we chose to, even if our judgments were negative. Indeed, we could make no awards at all. Given this autonomy, we stayed. Our reading did turn up, surprisingly enough, four novels by writers we felt were deserving of encouragement, though no single one of the books, in the opinion of the majority of the judges, was exciting enough to make us want to anoint it with $500,000—a sum we thought from the beginning (and said in our letter) was cosmically inflated. We therefore decided on the more modest course of awarding each of the four winners the runner-up prize of $50,000, with
Ishmael
—an intelligent and provocative work by Daniel Quinn—being singled out for special attention.
²
This seemed a way of bringing sensible scale, at least, to a project badly afflicted by grandiosity.

At a fairly rancorous judges' meeting in New York City early in May—also attended by one Michael Reagan, a self-styled “media” person representing the Turner management—our majority decision was accepted as binding. Of the final panel of nine judges only three, including the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, favored the bloated half-million-dollar award and took the side of Reagan, who, though a nonvoting onlooker, was plainly seething over our refusal to give the seal of approval to Ted Turner's megalomaniacal shower of gold. (Reagan would later make whiny remarks about the dissenting judges' failure to hand our fees back, his apparent logic being that only judges favorable to the Cause deserved recompense; he also was plainly determined to overlook our authority to make any decision we pleased.) When we left the meeting it was with the understanding that our decision would be honored.

We were wrong. At the Turner Tomorrow Award ceremony early in June it was announced that
Ishmael
had received the $500,000 prize. We had been lied to and betrayed. Our public protest over the betrayal comprised a tempest that would fit comfortably into my granddaughter's half-inch-wide china teapot.
³
And even she could tell that we were badly taken. But being taken is not the same as being venal—and one trusts this puts the record straight.

[
Washington Post
, July 16, 1991.]

N
ews of the new movie version of
Lolita
, starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and about to begin filming in North Carolina, has caused me to recall my own odd involvement with the book, in the months before Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece was first published in the United States. Part of the myth surrounding the novel is the notion that Bennett Cerf, the co-owner of Random House, was one of the group of hapless publishers (others being Douglas Black of Doubleday; Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus & Young; and Max Schuster) who so lacked foresight, or were so timid in the face of
Lolita
's ostensibly salacious subject matter, that they missed out on one of the great publishing coups of all times. But Cerf, at least, has to be excused from this group, since his failure to publish the book was not one of either will or vision but was due to his being hamstrung by a corporate decree of his own devising.

I first read
Lolita
in 1957, in the original Olympia Press edition, published in Paris by Maurice Girodias; the twin green volumes had been smuggled through New York customs by a friend of mine, the theatrical producer Lewis Allen. That
Lolita
was published by the firm that also brought out such incandescent titles as
White Thighs
,
With Open Mouth
, and
The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe
helped create a notoriety that Nabokov rightly deplored but which did in fact contribute to the widespread impression that
the novel was unfit to be read by decent Americans. Publishers all over New York shunned the work. The book, of course, is a sidesplitting and heartbreaking triumph, and entirely filth-free; Allen and I were so smitten by Humbert Humbert's sublime obsession that we toyed with the idea of trying to persuade Nabokov to let us publish
Lolita
in a private edition, and to hell with the obscenity laws. But financial problems sent me instead to Bennett Cerf, who had recently become my publisher.

Not long before this, Bennett had named a new editor-in-chief, Hiram Haydn. A sophisticated and rather scholarly man, Haydn had brought me along from Bobbs-Merrill, where he had edited my first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
, and where he had fought valiantly and more or less successfully against the company bluenoses, based in the Indianapolis home office, who had objected to my fairly tame sexual tableaux and occasionally crude language. Cerf greatly respected Haydn. For the first time during his presidency of Random House, Bennett had bestowed on an editor absolute autonomy, and so I was reasonably certain that, given Haydn's broadmindedness,
Lolita
would be a shoo-in for prompt and enthusiastic publication, even though I had had early qualms about Bennett. When I handed him the two volumes, he fingered them with gingerly distaste, shook his head, and murmured something like “Well, I don't know…dirty books.”

A week or so later, warm with pleasure and anticipation, I marched into Haydn's office in the old Villard mansion, on Madison Avenue. Before I could utter a word, Hiram rose from his desk, his face actually blue with rage. “That loathsome novel will be published over my dead body!” he roared. Dumbfounded, I asked him what in God's name had caused him to react this way to such a splendid literary achievement. He ranted and shouted, and when I asked him to explain, to
please
explain, the reason for his fury he replied that I, Bill Styron, knew full well that he, Hiram Haydn, had a daughter the age of the victim of Humbert Humbert's disgusting lust, and that when my own daughter was that age perhaps I'd understand the hatred a man might feel for
Lolita
. For some reason, I was not angry with Hiram. It was an outburst that revealed the power of art's sometimes terrifying menace.

I fled to the office next door, where Bennett, his pipe propped against his cheek, was gazing desolately into the distance. “That novel is a masterpiece,” he said, in a choked voice, “but I can't budge the man. He said if I overruled
him he'd quit.” He paused, then added, “What a
wonderful
book!” His eyes had the look of one who had divined the wretched future:
Lolita
published by some second-rate outfit like Putnam; ecstatic reviews; week after week at the top of the best-seller lists; and any new works of Vladimir Nabokov forever lost to Random House.

[
New Yorker
, September 4, 1995.]