Nonconformity (3 page)

—Joseph Conrad,

from an essay entitled “Books”

1905
³⁰

S
UMMER ON SEVENTY-FIRST STREET, when I was a Southside sprout, was blue as peace. The cross above St. Columbanus caught the light of a holier daybreak than ours while the wan gas-flares still wavered. Then the bells of early mass rang out, for our own morning had lightened the alleys at last.

And long after the twilight’s last lamplighter had passed, ladder across his handlebars and gas-torch against his shoulder, somebody else’s twilight burned on behind that cross. The light that lingered, the light that held, belonged to somebody else’s night. Somebody else’s somebody else, who ran daybreak and evening too.

But not the hours that ran between. The wan little flares that the lamplighter left, the flares that tried all night to shine—then faltered and flicked out one by one—belonged to us like the alleys.

Wherever they led, the alleys were ours, and all their littered spoils. Between that early alien light and that twilight like a spell, we patrolled those battleways bearing gas-grenades
made of garbage wrapped tightly in the tricolors of the
Saturday Evening Blade.
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We had had enough of peace.

Beside the armored schoolyard, behind the guarded bars, we tracked the treacherous Hun. Keeping one eye peeled for the barbarous Turk as well. Our bayonets were hewed from sunflower stalks: we had had enough of peace. Now we were out for blood. And on the heights of the Rock Island tracks we lost Chateau-Thierry to six anemic Swedes. (The solitary triumph of modern Swedish arms.) When we refilled the grenades from the deepest cans and crept out to the counterattack, one of us fastened a rusty wire onto an empty tomato can, pulled it through the schoolyard fence and hooked it onto a grapefruit tin: the field telephone had been invented at last.

What’s more, it worked. By lying prostrate you could communicate with the courier on the other side of the fence and still stay out of the line of fire. You could, of course, have stood up and told him over the wood what you had in mind. You might, for example, have suggested, “Peace, it’s wonderful”—but we were sick to death of peace. And lying prostrate was infinitely more strategic.

The accurate ear and the retentive memory of such a writer as James T. Farrell constitute a kind of literary field-telephone, a two-party line possessing the added advantage of getting a message down straight without getting smacked in the teeth with a hatful of slops. A method based on the judicious non-com’s understanding that if you can keep
from getting hit long enough, you’ll still be passing water when the war is done. As well as upon the sensible novelist’s premise that if you can nail your literary fences high enough and get enough code down behind them fast enough, the end result
must
be art.

It must be art because it pays so well.

Where the morning-report school succeeds is in its stenographic fidelity. Where it fails is in affording the breath of life to its morning reports.

Thus while Scott Fitzgerald’s people possess considerably more standup vitality than those you met last night at your analyst’s house-party, Farrell’s, like inkblots arranged by Rorschach, own even less. Flat as the print, prostrate as one of his own shattered infinitives, Studs Lonigan no longer requires serious criticism. The most he can bear by now is an autopsy.

What Fitzgerald risked, that the field-telephone school dares not, was an emotional sharing of the lives he recorded. “I have asked a lot of my emotions,” he once took mournful count, “—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up there with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.”
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But he wasn’t like you or me, or James T. Farrell, or anybody. He stood on the precipitous edge of exhaustion, a
man who had spent himself, by coins of pity and love and pride, into spiritual bankruptcy—“I only wanted absolute quiet to think out … why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”
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Infected as younger writers are today by the current passion for caution in everything, the reportorial method affords an emotional detachment that makes a virtue of stenography. The advantage of replacing the complexity and the pain of the living experience with the painless and simple process of giving dictation has become sufficiently plain to the sensible writer. For by this method one could report on the overburdened without identifying himself with them. One could preserve a sense of superiority to the dead and the overburdened. A surefire means, it seemed, wherewith to gain one’s art without losing one’s life.

Yet time’s terrible eraser sweeps the board swiftly of the names of those who succeeded, like Tarkington,
³⁴
by never taking the risk of failure. But out of the shambles that he made of his personal life, Fitzgerald’s art triumphed. Unsaving of spirit and heart and brain, he served the lives of which he wrote rather than allowing himself to be served by them.

And so died like a scapegoat, died like a victim, his work unfinished, his hopes in ruin. “…  The natural state of the sentient adult,” he wrote, “is a qualified unhappiness.”
³⁵

The price had been higher than Kipling’s.

O
ne harassed and despairing night I packed a briefcase and went off a thousand miles to think it over. I took a dollar room in a drab little town where I knew no one and sunk all the money I had with me in a stock of potted meat, crackers and apples. But don’t let me suggest that the change from a rather overstuffed world to a comparative asceticism was any Research Magnificent—I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy
—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Does this seem a fine distinction? It isn’t: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. I mention these because they are the men best known to us all.…

My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was very distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen
men of honor and industry since the war.… I had stood by while one famous contemporary of mine played with the idea of the Big Out for half a year; I had watched when another, equally eminent, spent months in an asylum unable to endure any contact with his fellow-men. And of those who had given up and passed on I could list a score
.

This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one.… A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person—to be kind, just or generous.…

I have now at last become a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be became such a burden that I have “cut him loose”…. Let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods. A
writer need have no such ideals unless he makes them for himself, and this one has quit
.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,

“Handle with Care,” autobiographical fragment in
The Crack-Up
April, 1936
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N
OT THAT FITZGERALD OR ANYone else ever forged a novel out of nothing but pity and personal recklessness. You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. Compassion is all to the good, but vindictiveness is the verity Faulkner forgot: the organic force in every creative effort, from the poetry of Villon to the Brinks Express Robbery, that gives shape and color to all our dreams.

“Vice, as vice, is bad and unwanted,” the French light-heavyweight philosopher, Carpentier, once philosophized, “but there must be deep down in the makeup of every fighter a kind of viciousness. Wells (Bombardier Wells) had me
in extremis
but he failed to see red.” Marking the only known instance of a fighter speaking Latin to the working press, as well as the only known instance of an English heavyweight having anyone on earth
in extremis
.

Leo Durocher, a utility infielder with a resonant baritone, put it somewhat less literally: “I don’t get this stuff
about sportsmanship. You play to win, don’t you? Say I’m playing short and Mother is on first and the batter singles to right. Mother comes fast around second with the winning run—Mother will have to go down. I’ll help her up, dust her off and say ‘Mom, I’m sorry, but it was an accident’—but she won’t of scored. Nobody asks how you happened to lose. All they want to know is did you win. If I’m spitting at a crack in the wall for nickels I still want to win. Anybody can come in second. Nice guys finish last.”
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A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even.

And, of course, neither will. Whether or not either has actually been robbed by society is beside the point. A man so convinced, however illogically, will endure the agonies of the damned to get his own back. For if he felt he had nothing coming he’d be out of business, as strong-armer or poet, that same day.

If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either. “The artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed,” Degas agreed in essence with Durocher.

In the more meaningful writing, as in the defter sort of jack-rolling, this is either candid or concealed. Candid as in Céline, Genet or Dorothy Parker, concealed as in Koestler, Richard Wright or Mickey Spillane. And in the very best writing the one becomes a complete sublimation of the other.

“Even then,” Dostoevsky’s underground man recalls, “I carried this hole in the floor of my heart. I was terribly afraid to be seen and recognized.”
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The great paradox of Dostoevsky lies in the vitality he drew from degradation. American writing, it is this observer’s notion, will remain without vigor until it draws upon the enormous reservoir of sick, vindictive life that moves like an underground river beneath all our boulevards. When the sewers back up we call it a “crime wave;” when after a while the waters subside a little we are content until the waters begin to lap the curb again. Then the pumps come out, and we’re in for another wave of reforms, from press, pulpit and politician, which serve to increase newspaper circulation, fill up the pews for a few Sundays and pump up the local payrolls.

The stranger from Mars who spent a day in the public library came away knowing that a few Americans possessed wealth that was virtually incalculable, that a hundred-odd million others had more than just enough. But gained barely an inkling into the lives of those who live out their hand-to-mouth hours without friendship or love.
They belong to no particular street in no particular city. They pass from furnished room to furnished room, and belong not even to their own time; not even to themselves. They are the ones who are displaced in time, and again displaced in the heart.…

“I read the smooth journals but they gave no news of this.”

Not until he walked the unswept streets in the hundred-storied evening and saw the legend in the first-floor-front—ROOM FOR TRANSIENT—did he begin to understand. Or was advised by a clerk, across an ancestral register, “Give a phony, mister.” He wanted to say who he was, but the clerk didn’t want to know.

Not until he saw them sleeping in the all-night restaurants and the all-night movies and the night-blue bars of the whiskey wilderness did he understand at last that he was on the ancient unswept street where most of humanity has always lived.

And had he asked them, they would not have been able to say who they were. Belonging nowhere, no one can tell who he really is. Who one really is depends on what world he belongs to. The secret multitudes who belong to no world, no way of life, no particular time and place, are the truly displaced persons: displaced from their true selves. They are not the disinherited: they are those who have disinherited their own selves.

Out of the furnished rooms and into a cheap hotel
and back to the furnished room before the room is out: the “unemployed bartender,” “unemployed short-order cook,” “unemployed salesman,” “unemployed model,” “unemployed hostess;” “self-styled actor,” “self-styled artist,” “self-styled musician,” “self-styled author,” as the self-styled reporters conveniently file them. Their names are the names of certain dreams from which the light has gone out.

The clerk at the third-rate hotel is always half-pleased to see the “unemployed hostess” or “self-styled actress” come in to register, wearing nylon hose and carrying all she owns in the handbag slung over her shoulder. “A room with a private bath,” she instructs him. “I don’t want to be disturbed.” You don’t have to tell
her
to give a phony.