My Generation (50 page)

I
have been lucky to have known Red Warren well for quite a few years and to have been privy to certain personal matters known only between good friends. I am therefore aware of an interesting fact about Red's early life that is not generally understood by less favored mortals. This is that as a boy in his teens Red's simple but very red-blooded American ambition was to become an officer in the United States Navy. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the truth, not an idle fiction. Indeed, it was
more
than an ambition; it was a goal very close of attainment, for Red had obtained his appointment and was all but packed up and ready to leave the bluegrass of Kentucky for Annapolis when he suffered an injury to his eye which made it impossible for him ever to become a midshipman. There is irony in this, for it always has seemed to me that Red at least
looks
like a sailor. If you will glance at him now, you will see it: that seamed and craggy face which has gazed, like Melville's, into the briny abyss, that weather-wise expression and salty presence which have made him physically the very model of a sea dog; and as a consequence I have often become thoroughly bemused when speculating on Red's career if he
had
gone off to the Naval Academy. I would like to consider this prospect for a moment.

First, let no one underestimate the military mind; at the highest levels of command great brilliance is required, and for this reason Red would have been what is known as a “rising star” from the very beginning. Thus I visualize
the scenario—if I may use that awful word—like this. Number one in his class at Annapolis, Red becomes the first naval Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where his record is also spectacular. He takes his degree in Oriental history, writing a thesis which is a revisionist examination of Genghis Khan, largely laudatory in tone. Later in my fantasy I see Red at the end of World War II, much decorated, at the age of forty the youngest captain in the seagoing navy, attending the Naval War College at Newport, writing learned dissertations on the nuclear capabilities of the Soviet fleet. His recommendation is: Let's press the button,
very softly
, before the Russians do. During the Korean War, a rear admiral now, he wins his fourth Navy Cross, is made commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, is on the cover of
Time
magazine, has a tempestuous though necessarily discreet affair with Ava Gardner. Through the dull and arid years between Korea and Vietnam, Red Warren plays golf with Eisenhower, rereads Thucydides and Clausewitz, hobnobs with Henry Luce, Barry Goldwater, and Mendel Rivers, and is appointed Chief of Naval Operations under Lyndon Johnson.

I don't know why my fantasy brightens and becomes happy at this point. Maybe it's because I see Red Warren miraculously turn a major corner in his life, undergoing—as it were—a sea change. He becomes a
dove
! After all, a great Marine general, ex-Commandant David Shoup, did this: why not Red in my fantasy? Now as he reverses himself, the same grand historical imagination which in his alter ego produced
All the King's Men, World Enough and Time
, and
Brother to Dragons
is suddenly seized with the folly and tragedy of our involvement in Southeast Asia, so that on one dark night in 1966 there is a confrontation, many hours long, between the admiral from Kentucky—now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and the Texas president, two Southerners eyeball to eyeball; and in this passionate colloquy it is the
Kentuckian
who finally gains the upper hand with his forceful, humanitarian argument—founded upon the ineluctable lessons of history of which he is master—that this war can only lead to futility, disaster, and national degradation. I even see the droplets of sweat on Lyndon Johnson's forehead as, after a grave long pause, he gives in, saying, “God damn yore soft-hearted hide, Admiral Warren, you've convinced me!” And immediately I see him getting on the telephone to McNamara: “Bob, git those advisers out of Vietnam! We're going to nip this here dirty little war in the bud!”

But this kind of wish-fulfillment becomes almost unendurable, and so in my mind's eye I bring Red's naval career to a merciful close, seeing him as
grim and cruel reason dictates he most likely
would
be today—not basking in well-deserved homage at the Lotos Club but retired to the Pacific seaside at Coronado, cultivating prize asparagus or roses, writing letters to the
San Diego Tribune
about stray dogs, queers, and the Commie menace, and sending monthly donations to Rabbi Korff.

So by that fateful accident years ago America lost a master mariner but gained a major novelist and poet, a superb essayist, a literary critic of great breadth and subtle discrimination, a teacher of eloquence, a sly and hilarious storyteller, and altogether one of the best human beings to break bread with, or join with in
spirituous
companionship, or just simply
be around
in this desperate or any other time….

I would like to conclude with a couple of brief reminiscences having to do with Red Warren which in each case are oddly connected with—of all things for two good ole Southern boys—winter snow. The first of these events occurred a long time ago in New York City during the famous blizzard of late December 1947 (which many of you here doubtless still remember), when I—a young and aspiring and penniless writer up from the Virginia Tidewater living in a basement on upper Lexington Avenue—first read
All the King's Men
. I think it is absolute and unimpeachable testimony to a book's impact on us that we are able to associate it so keenly with the time and the surroundings and the circumstances in which we read it. Only a very great work can produce this memory; it is like love, or recollections of momentous loving. There is what psychologists call a
gestalt
, an unforgettability of interwoven emotions with which the work will ever in recollection be connected with the environment. Somehow the excitement of reading
All the King's Men
is always linked in my mind with the howling blizzard outside and the snow piling up in a solid white impacted mass outside my basement window. The book itself was a revelation and gave me a shock to brain and spine like a freshet of icy water. I had of course read many novels before, including many of the greatest, but this powerful and complex story embedded in prose of such fire and masterful imagery—this, I thought with growing wonder, this was what a novel was all about, this was
it
, the bright book of life, what writing was supposed to be. When finally the blizzard stopped and the snow lay heaped on the city streets, silent as death, I finished
All the King's Men
as in a trance, knowing once and for all that I, too, however falteringly and incompletely, must try to work such magic. I began my first novel before that snow had melted; it is a book called
Lie Down in
Darkness
, and in tone and style, as any fool can see, it is profoundly indebted to the work which so ravished my heart and mind during that long snowfall.

Many years and many snowfalls later I was walking with Red Warren one late afternoon on, of all absurd things,
snowshoes
through the white silence of a forest in Vermont—a rather clumsily comical trek which, had you told the young man on Lexington Avenue he would be making it in the future, would have caused him both awe and incredulity. Red and I were by this time fast and firm friends, bonded in a friendship long past the need of forced conversation, and as we puffed along in Indian file across the mountainous snowdrifts, each of us plunged in his own private meditation, it creepily occurred to me that we were far away from home, far away from the road, still miles away from anything or anybody—and that, worst of all, it was almost night. I had a moment of terrible panic as I thought that Red and I, having unwittingly strayed in our outlandish footgear off the beaten track, would find ourselves engulfed by darkness in this freezing wilderness, utterly lost, two nonsmokers with not a match between us, or a knife to cut shelter—only our foolhardy, vulnerable selves, floundering in the Yankee snows. After the initial panic slid away and I had succumbed to a stoic reckoning, a resignation in face of the inevitable, it occurred to me that if I had to die there was nobody on earth, aside from perhaps Raquel Welch, that I'd rather freeze to death with than Robert Penn Warren: this noble gentleman from Guthrie, Kentucky, whose humane good sense and lyric passion had so enriched us all through these many novels and poems and essays and plays, and whose celebration of the mystery and beauty and, yes, even the inexplicable anguish of life had been one of those priceless bulwarks against death in a time of too much dying. Just then I heard Red casually say, “Well, here's the road.” And I was a little ashamed of my panic, but not of those thoughts, which also had included my heartfelt thanks to God that Red Warren never became an admiral.

[Speech delivered at the Lotos Club, New York City, April 1975.]

I
'm Bill Styron, an old friend of Lillian's, like many of us here. She once told me that this would be the day that I yearned for more than anything in my life—speaking words over her remains—and she cackled in glee. “Ha, ha,” she said, and I cackled back. She said, “If you don't say utterly admiring and beautiful things about me, I'm going to cut you out of my will.” I said there was no possible way that I could refrain from saying a few critical things, and she said, “Well, you're cut out already.”

That was the way it went with us. I think we had more fights per man-and-woman contact than probably anyone alive. We were fighting all the time, and we loved each other a great deal for sure, because the vibrations were there. But our fights were never really, oddly enough, over abstract things like politics or philosophy or social dilemmas; they were always over such things such as whether a Smithfield ham should be served hot or cold, or whether I had put too much salt in the black-eyed peas.

This anger that spilled out from the lady, almost a reservoir of anger, was really not directed at me or her other friends or even the black-eyed peas, but was directed at all the hateful things that she saw as menaces to the world. When she hated me and the ham, she was hating a pig like Roy Cohn. I think this is what motivated her; when one understood that the measure of her anger was really not personal but cosmic, then one was able to deal with her.

I was privileged, I think the word is, to take Lillian out—to be the last
person to take her out to dinner. I did so a few days ago here in Chilmark at La Grange. It was quite an ordeal. We sat down (I had to get her into a chair), just the two of us, and she groped for the various things she had to grope for because, as you know, she was blind and quite radically crippled. Then we had conversation. We carved up a few mutually detested writers and one or two mediocre politicians and an elderly deceased novelist whom she specifically detested, and we got into this sort of thing; and we then started talking about her age.

I didn't tell her the snoop from
The New York Times
had called me up asking if I knew her age. I said the only biographical data I had at hand was that she was probably seventy-nine. And she said, “I don't know whether the twentieth of June was my seventy-fourth or my seventy-third.” She had been doing this all of her life, not as a vanity—though that was fine too—but as a demonstration of the way that she was hanging on to life.

I realized as I was sitting there that she was painfully uncomfortable. She said that she was cursed by God with having from birth a skinny ass. So I had to go and put things under her constantly, which was fine. She said this bolstered her skepticism about the existence of God. So I told her something that she had always responded to: that the curse was made up for with an ample and seductive bosom. She smiled at that. Through all of this, she was gasping for breath and was suffering. It hit me that this woman was physically in agony. There was something enormously wrenching about being seated alone with this fragment of a human being, suffering so much, gasping for breath. Yet I had a glimpse of her almost as if she was a young girl again, in New Orleans with a beau and having a wonderful time.

As these memories came flooding back, I remember that gorgeous cackle of laughter which always erupted at moments when we were together, with other people or alone. It was usually a cackle of laughter which followed some harpooning of a fraud or a ninth-rater. It was filled with hatred, but hatred and anger which finally evolved into what I think she, like all of us, was searching for—some sort of transcendental idea, which is love. As we went out, I was in awe of this woman. I have no final reflection except that perhaps she was in the end a lover, a mother, a sister, and a friend—and in a strange way a lover of us all.

[Tribute spoken at a memorial service for Lillian Hellman, July 3, 1984, in the town of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard.]

B
ack in the 1940s, if you were an aspiring young writer—or even if you merely cared for literature—you passionately read short stories. You read novels and poetry, too, but the short story was the proving ground for your own talent, and you experienced this most demanding of literary forms in a very personal way. You read the stories of the masters with that mixture of critical alertness and abandoned devotion that is the mark of the hopeful apprentice. Of the many masters of that form whose work was part of my self-imposed curriculum, there was no one who stirred me to more open and defenseless admiration than Irwin Shaw. The passage of time, however, has eroded Shaw's reputation. His stories, appearing regularly in
The New Yorker
, were models of the form, possessing all the elements I yearned to emulate: irony, a beautifully attuned ear for the demotic speech of mid-century America, humor, controlled rage at the world's injustices, and a casually elegant lyricism which pervaded each tale and stamped it as the work of Irwin Shaw and no one else. Hemingway had this magnetic appeal for a somewhat earlier generation of readers, and J. D. Salinger would exert the same magic a bit later. One of the higher tributes one can pay to a writer is when, as in certain remembered glimpses of a passionate love affair, the reader can recall the place and time of the act of reading. I was in the Duke University library reading room when I read, in a collection of Shaw stories, that seductive gem of a tale, “The Girls in Their Summer
Dresses,” and felt the little chill that attends the experience of almost perfectly realized inspiration.

A few months later I was in Marine boot camp when a
New Yorker
somehow came my way and I read “Walking Wounded.” It was a story of military life and sexual frustration, both of which weighed on me heavily at the time, and I responded vibrantly to the author's mordant depiction of the erotic tensions in Cairo (where Shaw had been stationed), and the toplofty behavior of the American women there, all of which reinforced my belief that no one spoke more eloquently about the outrages suffered by men at war than Irwin Shaw. During the postwar years, when I returned to Duke to complete my studies, I had read nearly everything in prose that Shaw had written—which is to say several collections of his stories and the novel
The Young Lions
. There were other stories that I thought just as marvelous as those I'd read earlier—“Sailor Off the Bremen,” “Act of Faith,” and that incomparably poignant study—so deep in the American grain—of failed ambition, “The Eighty-Yard Run.” I considered myself something of an expert on Shaw, so much so, in fact, that when I briefly harbored the notion of becoming a graduate student in English I thought it might be a fine idea to write a thesis on his work. I was inordinately sensitive to Shaw's writing and felt very protective toward him, becoming mildly disappointed when his work was not quite up to snuff but never failing to recognize that what he wrote—even slightly second-class Shaw—was written by an outstanding artist. Shaw's war novel,
The Young Lions
, was one of those mild disappointments which might have been less so had it not emerged in the shadow of
The Naked and the Dead
, a work which had overwhelmed me. So sweeping and passionate had Mailer's novel seemed to me that
The Young Lions
suffered somewhat by comparison. I was bothered by an element of contrivance, especially in the character of Noah Ackerman, whose victimization in the Army at the hands of anti-Semites—echoing a theme which had worked well in Shaw's stories—bore the ponderous stamp of Message. Still, I thought the book a tremendous achievement, and it helped consolidate the hero worship I had for Irwin Shaw.

A year or so after this, having come to New York to give a try at chipping out a niche in the pantheon where Shaw was solidly lodged, I was sitting one night with some literary pals in a restaurant we all went to in those days. This was the Blue Mill Tavern on Commerce Street, not far from the seven-dollar-a-week cell I inhabited on West Eleventh Street. The Blue Mill was
smoky, crowded, and cheap, with plain but admirable cuisine. The place specialized in steaks, and $1.25 bought a portion of sirloin of the same high quality that is sold today at the Palm or Christ Cella for twenty times the price. That night my heart nearly stopped when I saw through the murk a big burly man with powerful shoulders edging his way toward a table where not one but two girls waited, fresh-faced and with adoring eyes. I was certain this was Irwin Shaw. I had been seeing Irwin from time to time on the streets of the city ever since I had arrived. Almost any heavyset, athletic young man with dark hair and radiantly good-looking Jewish features was someone I suspected of being Shaw. That night my suspicion grew into conviction simply because—I later realized—I
wanted
the person to be Shaw, and I said as much to my companions. In doing so, of course, I was made to appear foolish, for the big guy was not my idol at all, I could soon tell, and I retracted my claim with flustered embarrassment. I could not have known then that Shaw was already a high-roller and bon vivant of great magnitude and would have found the Blue Mill a most unlikely place to dine, not because he lacked the common touch but because it was far off the beaten track between places like “21” and Le Pavillon, which had become his accustomed haunts.

Several more years passed. I had written my first novel, which for a first novel had been quite successful, and had settled upon Paris as a temporary home before proceeding on my European
Wanderjahre
. It was in that war-tired but resurgent and beautiful city, where American money and American energy were helping give birth to literary projects like
The Paris Review
—with which I had become marginally associated—that I finally met Irwin Shaw. He was climbing out of, appropriately, an American car—a gleaming green Ford convertible. Paris was still swarming largely with bicycles and motorbikes and pre-war Citroëns, and Irwin's Ford looked enormous and impressive. So too was Irwin—a rugged hulk of a man in the prime of his late youth, thirty-eight or thereabouts, with one of the most immediately appealing and warm-hearted presences I had ever known or imagined. Consider what the young first novelist's natural reaction would be if, upon meeting the writer of one's fantasies, he is told after no more than a few minutes—as Irwin told me: “You really wrote one hell of a book; man, you really took off!” (His exact words, graven upon the memory.) The young first novelist coughed, or grunted, or murmured something incoherent; I was quite choked up, stupefied by the praise, the spontaneous generosity. It
was the hallmark, I would come to understand, of Shaw's personality—a genuine indwelling sweetness that made it virtually impossible to dislike the man who so steadfastly possessed such a quality, even when after becoming his friend, as I did, the first sad and troublesome doubts about his writing grew into feelings I never thought I could entertain: more than slight disappointment, and then often active dislike.
Dislike!
In those days that word attached to any of the Shaw canon would have been inconceivable.

If we are honest with ourselves we will all admit to having been happily seduced, at least once in our lives, and probably twice, by the lurid glamour of Hollywood, and it was through Irwin that my seduction began. Paris was thronged by people from the movie business and Irwin knew them all—big-time directors like John Huston and moguls like Sam Goldwyn, stars such as Gene Kelly and Ingrid Bergman and Evelyn Keyes, and all sorts of other peripheral figures of legendary glitter: Robert Capa the daredevil photographer, the wonderfully droll screenwriter Harry Kurnitz, gorgeous French models like Bettina. It was through Irwin that I met a lifelong friend, Art Buchwald. To a boy from the Virginia Tidewater it was pig heaven, a tableau from
Life
magazine come alive, and I ate it up.

I first understood wine to be something other than dago red, a nearspiritual experience, when at a party Irwin invited me to—given by Darryl Zanuck in an incredibly chic restaurant called Chez Joseph, all brocade and damask and fawning waiters—I drank a pre-war Château Margaux, sharing in the miracle with a beautiful French starlet whose hot
venez-ici
eyes had gazed down at me from dozens of Paris billboards. What impressed me the most about Irwin's connection with this heady scene was his ease with it, his blasé attitude, a sense that even though he was involved in this world, which had begun to remunerate him so well for the scripts he was writing, he could really take it or leave it. It seemed not to be a milieu whose celebrated corruptions were for him a temptation, and I admired him even more than ever for his grand air of detachment, of being slightly above it all. One night, I witnessed this sang-froid at a screening on the Champs-Élysées of an awful movie called
Hans Christian Andersen
, unredeemable despite its wonderful star, Danny Kaye. Old Sam Goldwyn, the producer of the film and our host (and who had proclaimed it his greatest effort), sat in the darkness whispering his delight while in the seat behind him, and next to me, Irwin fell sound asleep. Not only that, he began to snore, which made me queasy lest it disturb the old man's rapture. Yet in the end it affirmed more than ever Shaw's
disdain for Hollywood. Like Faulkner he appeared to me a man who could feed at that banquet but duck out from it at will, feeling no need to join the party.

The next year, when I was in Rome, Irwin was there also, tooling around with his lively wife, Marian, in that huge barge of a green Ford. Once more I felt the full impact of his spacious generosity. I was about to get married and while I had arranged for the ceremony to be held in Michelangelo's splendid Campidoglio, I had made no plans for the postnuptial festivities. Irwin immediately took care of all this, arranging a huge party at his apartment in Parioli, constantly fussing over my bride and me with loving attention and making hilariously bawdy toasts as the blowout drew to a close. That spring and early summer Rose and I saw a lot of the Shaws, taking long drives to places like Ostia and Anzio, where we often dined—dangerously, as we would later learn—on raw oysters and mussels, and drank cold Frascati wine. We talked about travel in Europe, sports, politics, books. Irwin had read prodigiously, and continued his reading; I was always impressed by the breadth of his literary tastes—his love for the Romantic poets and the Victorian novelists, the European modernists—Mann and Proust, Camus and Koestler and Joyce. He was almost unqualifiedly magnanimous about those of his contemporaries whom he respected, the only real exception being Hemingway, for whom he bore a long-standing grudge dating back to wartime London. This antagonism had to do with the woman they had shared, Mary Welsh, whom Hemingway later married, but they would have loathed each other anyway, like rival buck deer. The machismo for which Hemingway was so famous was by no means absent from Shaw; one writer I knew who played tennis with Irwin described him as a “hyper-competitive pain in the ass.” But I admired Shaw's exemplary kindheartedness concerning his literary colleagues, especially the promising younger ones, to whom he could be actually tender. He had certainly been that to me; in many ways the writer whom I had admired from such an impossible distance had not only become my literary older brother but for a while at least—such was my emotional commitment—a surrogate brother for the one I never had.

When he died in 1984 at the age of seventy-one near his home of exile for many years—Klosters, Switzerland—Shaw was not included on most lists of illustrious American writers. Despite a large and continuous output of novels
and stories, which kept him plugging valiantly away right through the painful illnesses of his last days, his work had long before been dismissed as, at best, journeyman entertainment of slightly sub-middlebrow blandness, slick and proficient, but devoid of any of the merits that would elevate his words to the realm of literature. He was regularly roasted by the critics; probably no serious writer of his time received so many go-arounds of hearty walloping as Irwin Shaw. He had been snubbed by the awarders of prizes, and for him the doors of the prestigious literary academies and societies had been firmly shut. It was said that he had exchanged the rich heritage of his humble Jewish origins in Brooklyn and a once proudly eloquent social consciousness for a world of glitzy glamour.

Probably the worst insults he received were from critics who made unflattering, and unfair, comparisons to writers who were unblushing hacks. Shaw wrote with integrity, but the sad truth about his later career is that much of the criticism leveled against him was well founded: those who were devoted to Shaw's early writing, and those devoted to the boisterously generous and captivating man, had occasion to rue the decline of his work after its grand beginnings. Lumping him in with the potboiler kings was, however, a canard. None of them were ever capable of a novel with the power and magnitude of
The Young Lions
. Nor did any of them possess a shred of the passion and musical grace that informed Shaw's early stories, which belong in the durable canon of American short fiction, along with the tales of Welty, Cheever, and Salinger.

In his fine study of Shaw's life,
Irwin Shaw: A Biography
, Michael Shnayerson has set down a vivid account of the writer's often turbulent career, taking a hard-nosed view of the easy seductions that led him into too many commercial back alleys, yet never failing to honor Shaw's immense personal charm and his substantial literary achievement. Few biographies have so well portrayed a writer torn between heeding the siren song of art and the more tempting moans of the various bitch goddesses. The tension produced by this dichotomy in Irwin Shaw helps give Shnayerson's book great dramatic impact.

In one of his letters, Joseph Conrad wrote of the frustration and hardship of writing and the chanciness of a writer's fate, observing that even the most ambitious and hopeful artist must live with the knowledge that the permanence of his work is a matter of doubt. Shaw's later work somehow reflects a lack of hardship; it suffers from an absence of real pain. It is too
bad that this work appears meretricious, and that the resurgent fame which fell upon him toward the last was the result of a television miniseries based on one of his less compelling books. One must respect, however, the courage that held him to his writer's calling until he could write no more; this would inspire one's admiration even if he had not given us those stories that sprang, elegant and tender, from the splendid dawn of his career and which seemed destined, as surely as do those of any writer of his time, for the permanence they deserve. These too are traces of one's self that are worth leaving behind.