Occasional Prose (29 page)

This is part of the book’s knowingness—not an altogether pleasant quality. The knowingness makes a curious accompaniment to the celebrity theme, for Joan Didion clearly does not care for the celebrity circuit and one of the attractions Jack Lovett has for her—and possibly for Inez too—is that he is not in
Who’s Who
, does not have his name on his whiskey bottle in a Hong Kong restaurant (in fact has a false name taped to his quart of Black Label); Jack Lovett is a solitary who drowns in a hotel swimming-pool and is shipped out in a body bag. His profession requires him not to be known and to leave no fingerprints on what he touches.

Still, to be known and to be knowing are not so far apart. Everyone in
Democracy
is some kind of insider. It is not merely the Harry Victors and their entourages; the author herself has some complicity in the insider-outsider game—seven years at
Vogue
leave their mark. In the milieu of this
Democracy
, not just people but places and times can be poker chips: the St. Regis Roof, the Dalton School, Grant Park in Chicago at the ’68 convention, where Harry Victor is not shy about getting himself tear-gassed for the camera of a
Life
photographer. But to appreciate that detail, you have to know about Grant Park, and not everybody does. To be knowing about the right names implies, moreover, being knowing about the wrong names—Dow Chemical, Air Asia, Air America. That is very important too.

The names of airports can be spent like coin: Anderson, Clark, Travis, Johnston, besides the old penny-ante ones like Tan Son Nhut. I am not sure where some of these airports are (I guess most of them are in the Pacific) or whether they are military or civilian. But I know that I ought to know. That is the special kind of insecurity—fear of not belonging to a club—that Hemingway had a genius for producing in his readers and in a colleague like Scott Fitzgerald, who even confessed to Ernest that he thought his own penis was too small. The spoor of Hemingway is all over
Democracy
, like the print of the Abominable Snowman. Not your table manners, not even your morals, but saying the wrong thing (as poor Scott Fitzgerald apparently did rather often) excludes one forever.

The greatest sinner in
Democracy
is Harry Victor, who infallibly pronounces sentences like “I’ve always tried to talk up to the American people. Not down. You talk down to the American people at your peril. ... Either Jefferson was right or he wasn’t. I happen to believe that he was.” That “happen to believe” will cook him for all eternity—I agree with Joan Didion there. Yet to my mind, that is insufficient evidence for
artistic
damnation. A man who identifies a ghastly young woman he has brought along to a London dinner party as “a grandniece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States” condemns himself socially whenever he gives tongue; in real life, with any luck, one could avoid meeting him. But in a novel, once such people are met, I think one has the right to ask to know them better before sending them unpardoned to hell. Is the ear the ultimate moral judge?

For all its technical mastery and on-target social observation (Miss Didion is wonderful not only at hearing her characters but at naming them—take “Inez”), there is a depthlessness in
Democracy
as there was in
A Book of Common Prayer
. We would need to know a Harry Victor from the inside looking out to feel his real hollowness; it is tiring just to listen to his sound track playing over and over. This is true for most of the characters, though with the bit parts the effect is stunning: “‘This is a stressful time,’ the doctor said,” following his previous one-liner, “It might be good to talk about therapy.” The bigger role of Jessie, the Victors’ teen-aged, heroin-shooting child, does not come off so well; perhaps the unexplained in her (like the manner of her arrival in Saigon without a passport) bulks somewhat too large. To my mind, the best character is Billy Dillon, Harry Victor’s aide, who has the good fortune—which is also the reader’s—of being a consciously funny man.

But, finally, what is one to make of Jack Lovett, inscrutable by profession from beginning to end? Whatever one decides, one must applaud the author’s nerve in making a CIA agent in his sixties the love interest and
parfit gentil knight
of her book. Actually, this is a romantic, even a sentimental novel, with the CIA man and the congressman’s wife as a pair of eternally faithful lovers, constantly separated and constantly reunited till his death and burial under a jacaranda tree—after which Inez Christian Victor has only one choice, in essence the choice of Guinevere: to take the veil. Kuala Lumpur is her Almesbury. “Mother Teresa,” Billy Dillon dryly observes. That Inez Victor (and her creator) clearly prefer a CIA agent to a famous liberal senator may indicate a preference for action over talk or just a distaste for United States hypocrisy—the larger aims of Harry Victor and of “the store” being at bottom the same. Maybe those are the “cards on the table” that were promised when we first met “Joan Didion” in that early chapter.

Possibly. As I said to start with, the book is deeply enigmatic. For the reader willing to sweat over them, there are a number of half-buried puzzles. One riddling passage, I confess, has been tormenting me for weeks. It appears for the first time on page 18: “So I have no leper who comes to the door every morning at seven. No Tropical Belt Coal Company, no unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.” “Joan Didion” (she is the one talking) seems to mean that as a novelist she lacks some of the reliable old machinery that might have helped her tell her story. On page 78 the thought recurs. Inez is watching her unconscious sister Janet through a glass partition in the third-floor intensive care unit of Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. Janet is on life support. Inez is still wearing a plumeria lei given her at the Oahu airport. “This scene is my leper at the door,” the author tells us, “my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.”

Does the reader recognize anything? For the leper, my friends and I have tried Conrad, Kipling, Graham Greene, Waugh’s
Handful of Dust
—in vain. The Tropical Belt Coal Company looks more promising in that it is more specific. That leper could be anywhere. In
The Ten Commandments
, maybe, of Cecil B. De Mille, just as well as in Graham Greene. But no Tropical Belt Coal Company of fiction comes to mind, and indeed it sounds like a joke: Does anyone burn coal in the tropics? Yet coal is mined in Borneo; that is in the world atlas.
*
As for the figure on the hillcrest, it could be an Indian in any old Western. Perhaps all the elements in the puzzle are out of movies. Perhaps Joan Didion is just wishing that she were an old-time screenwriter rather than a novelist. If that is it, I am irritated. To be portentous, one ought to be deeper than that. I feel a bit like Alice when she heard the Duchess speak calmly of “a large mustard mine near here.” Of course, the Duchess could speak calmly because that was Wonderland. And possibly that is the right way to take this latest Joan Didion—calmly, not setting out to solve sphinxine riddles, not looking for influences and analogues, not hoping for the author’s sake to exorcise the malign shadow of Hemingway, certainly not asking how Wendell Omura got on Janet’s lanai or how, precisely, old Hem, than whom no more elitist writer ever took up pen, could illustrate in his sentence structure any idea of democracy. Just let it go.

April 22, 1984

*
Numerous readers wrote in to tell me that the Tropical Belt Coal Company is on the first page of Conrad’s
Victory
. Yes. And one reader proposed that the leper came out of Flaubert’s “St. Julian the Hospitaler.” That does not ring a bell for me.

PREFACES AND POSTFACES

The American Revolution of Jean-François Revel
*

L
ISTEN TO THE FIRST
sentence. “The revolution of the twentieth century will take place in the United States.”
Pow!!!
The French reader was already seeing stars when the second sentence hit him. “It can take place nowhere else.” Americans may feel bewildered, skeptical, glad, or sorry to hear the news, curious to know more. But you have to be French to get the full impact, the “visceral reaction.” Ever since you could count up to ten or spell
c-h-a-t
, you have been secure in the thought that the United States is the citadel of imperialism, racism, vulgarity, conformism. And now a
Frenchman
returns from a voyage of discovery to say it is a hotbed of revolution.

Blandly, with a straight face, the enormity emerges, buttressed by figures and arguments, precedents, citations. Is it a joke? No and yes. It may have started out as a hardy quip or demolishing retort, and somewhere behind these pages Jean-François Revel is still suppressing an inadvertent smile. We, his readers, not required to school our features, laugh out loud in delight. At what exactly? At the French, of course, and their starchy preconceptions, which are being shaken, jostled, disarrayed, like a matron in some old slapstick comedy. But also at the author himself, that expressionless comedian, swinging from a precipice, teetering on a tightrope. We laugh at his imperturbability in the presence of his imminent danger, at his reckless aplomb in courting ridicule—the reverse of sympathetic chuckles. He is serious, he protests: “Why are you laughing?”

All Jean-François Revel’s books are cliff-hangers. He is a pamphleteer, and his first necessity therefore is to boldly secure attention. Characteristically, in his opening pages he risks being removed from the scene in a strait-jacket. His pamphlets are heresies and they generally result from prolonged exposure to piety. He is restive, like a schoolboy in church, surrounded by hushed worshipers and prompted to commit a sacrilege—stand up and
prove
to them that the Bible cannot be true. His anti-clerical nostrils are quick to detect the slightest smell of incense, and misfortune—or good luck—has placed him in a variety of churches, chapels, oratories, cenacles. He has passed most of his life among the devout.

Gaullist France itself is one huge basilica, consecrated to Glory. The Sorbonne is a monastery from which pilgrims set out for the wayside shrines of the national
lycée
system or go on foreign missions, spreading French culture. Revel started off in clerical disguise. He was an
agrégé
in philosophy and taught first abroad—at the University of Mexico and the University of Florence and at the local French Institutes—later in
lycées
at Lille and Paris: history of philosophy, history of art, French literature, geography.

His first published blasphemy or tale-told-out-of-school was
Pourquoi les philosophes
, an attack on the then reigning gods of French philosophy. Next came
Pour I’Italie
, a tract
against
Italy—for Revel a natural by-product of four years as a lecturer in Florentine classrooms. A simple corrective, he would have said, of Italophilia, a healthy explosion of the whole bag of myths about Italian art, Italian culture, Italian virility, Italian gaiety, good looks, liveliness, all of which he found non-existent, and backed up the verdict with real-life anecdotes and observations, many true, many funny, some brutal, such as the one, which gave much offense to feminine readers of
Epoca
, that Italian women have hair on their legs.

Not a word, I am sure, was invented, and yet the book was biased to a point that someone who loved Italy could have considered almost insane. Or the result of some personal grievance—an idea that was aired in the Italian press at the time and that I rather subscribed to myself simply from reading the book, which has many complaints about the unavailability of Italian girls. Knowing Revel, as I now do, I no longer think that explanation can have been right. There is something wonderfully disinterested about Revel’s biases, a joy in bias itself as an artistic form, embracing hyperbole and conducing, finally, to laughter. He has a Falstaffian side and only cares that his “slant” should run counter to respectable culture and received opinion. If he has a personal grievance, it is a long-standing, deeply nurtured one against the immovable forces of entrenched beliefs that insult his sense of the self-evident.

There followed one of his most charming and persuasive works,
Sur Proust
. It is not so much controversial as, again, heretical. Revel loves Proust, which means that he is against orthodox Proustians, including Proust himself at certain moments. He makes the convincing argument that what is good in
A la recherche du temps perdu
is the worldly social side, the human comedy, whereas the “deeper” parts, the philosophy of time and memory, the
madeleine
and so on, are simply commonplaces of French philosophy already out of date at the time Proust wrote and often at variance with the book’s real story. I.e., what is considered “superficial” in Proust is profound, and vice versa.

At this point in Revel’s career, it might have been said that the man was simply an attention-seeker, moving lightly from field to field, in search of provocative positions to occupy and abandon, a journalistic
enfant terrible
or disgruntled academic whose formula was to assert the opposite of what “everybody” was saying. This would have been to ignore the solidity and breadth of his learning but, more than that, to mistake the impetus behind his contrariness, the irrepressible spirit of contradiction that guides him, like a dowser, in the hope of striking truth.

Self-dramatization, eagerness for the spotlight must count very low among Revel’s motivations. He has some traits in common with Shaw (he was once meditating a book against Shakespeare) but totally lacks Shaw’s theatrical vanity and Irish flair for personal publicity. Unlike Shaw, Revel does not play the sage, ready for consultation by newsmen on all manner of subjects; no Isadora Duncans, so far as I know, have been asking to have babies by him. He is not a highly advertised “brain,” in fact makes no pretensions to having anything more than common garden intelligence; if he is different from the majority, he would say, it is only because he is not ashamed to be caught using that very ordinary faculty—the natural light of reason.