Odd Jobs (154 page)

I
N RESPONSE
to a request from
The Independent on Sunday,
of London, for a contribution to their weekly feature “A Book That Changed Me.
”

Every book I have read has changed me to a degree, if only to supply some new bits of information to my leaky brain, or to have aged me by the extent of one more vicarious emotional ordeal. A number of volumes that I can recall lighted my way to authorship, from the comic books of childhood, through the mystery novels and science fiction of adolescence, to those titles by James Thurber and Thornton Wilder and Ernest Hemingway that somehow held out the possibility of emulation, of joining their authors on the library shelves. At college, Shakespeare, of whom I had read but a few plays by the age of eighteen, offered an image of authorship with a vengeance—an insatiable impersonator, spouting language, ranging with a wild freedom from scene to scene, murder to murder, metaphor to metaphor. That a literary work could have a double life, in its imagery as well as its plot and characters, had not occurred to me until Professor Harry Levin’s meticulously textual course in Shakespeare. And then, after college, as I have confided more than once to interviewers, my discovery of Henry Green’s novels and of Scott-Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust served as revelations of style, of prose as not the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations. My intoxicated imitations of these two writers marked the beginning of a style of my own.

But when I search for a book that changed
me
, the me who lives as well as writes, I come up with Søren Kierkegaard’s
Fear and Trembling
, bound with the shorter work
The Sickness Unto Death
in an Anchor paperback. I still have the book; it cost eighty-five cents, fit easily in the hand, and had a pumpkin-colored cover designed, as were all the early Anchor books, by Edward Gorey. It came out in 1954; I read it in 1955 or early 1956, as a nervous newcomer to New York City, husbandhood, and paternity. Amid my new responsibilities I felt fearful and desolate, foreseeing, young as I was, that I would die, and that the substance of the earth was, therefore, death. My quest for consoling contradiction of this syllogism had already led me to books. I remember standing in Blackwell’s great bookstore, in Oxford, staring at the plain broad backs of a complete set of Thomas Aquinas and thinking that somewhere in there was the word I needed. I read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
articles on “Jesus”
and “Miracles”; I read Chesterton, Unamuno, Mauriac, Maritain, C. S. Lewis, and Eliot, to name a few—for in the Fifties a number of professed Christians still commanded intellectual respectability and even glamour—but it wasn’t until I entered the Kierkegaardian torrent that my trepidation washed away, or at least began to erode.

Kierkegaard’s torrential, mesmerically repeated evocation, at the outset of the book, of Abraham’s setting forth to sacrifice Isaac, an incomprehensible act that marked the beginning of Judaic faith and God’s stated covenant, established a feverish pitch that corresponded to my state of inner alarm. As Kierkegaard proceeded to discuss—to torment, as it were—the outrageous miracle of Abraham’s faith, the fussy terminology of high German philosophy had a strangely reassuring effect on me. “The paradox of faith is this, that there is an inwardness which is incommensurable for the outward, an inwardness, be it observed, which is not identical with the first but is a new inwardness”: such a sentence was music to my ears, balm to my soul, preconditioned as my ears and soul were by an earnest if rather sketchy Lutheran upbringing. Eagerly I took from Kierkegaard the idea that subjectivity too has its rightful claims, amid all the desolating objective evidence of our insignificance and futility and final nonexistence; faith is not a deduction but an act of will, a heroism. So I took courage and thumbed my nose, in a sense, at the world, in imitation of Kierkegaard’s proud, jeering, disorderly tone. Reading
Fear and Trembling
relieved my dreadful solitude; his voice—luckily an abundant voice, which I pursued in volume after volume as they tumbled forth from the university presses in those postwar years—gave me back my right to live. After
Fear and Trembling
, I had a secret twist inside, a precarious tender core of cosmic defiance; for a time, I thought of all my fiction as illustrations to Kierkegaard.

A R
EMINISCENCE
of Alfred A. Knopf and myself, composed for a booklet honoring his firm’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1990
.

My reverence for Alfred A. Knopf was so great that I was always surprised by his willingness to treat me like a grown-up. I had never before met a man who was also a company. In his august, purple-shirted presence, in that baronial panelled office of his, I felt a bit like one of the slender arrows clutched, on our national seal, in the talons of the American eagle; my impulse was to fly. Yet in all our transactions he was amiable
and equable and even kindly, the curve of his hussar’s mustache reinforced by the beginnings of a smile.

Our relationship reached its peak of intimacy in 1960, at the time of the publication of
Rabbit, Run
. I had rushed to type up this my second novel before moving for some winter weeks, with my family, to the island of Anguilla, then a remote Caribbean outpost of the severely dwindled British Empire. Just before New Year’s I mailed the manuscript down to New York and headed into the sun; after some weeks, a limp ten-cent air letter wandered into the Factory, Anguilla’s breezy combination of a general store, town hall, and post office, and was brought, with some fanfare, to me. Its contents were pleasing but also slightly puzzling:

When I paid my visit a month later, at the old Knopf offices at 501 Madison, Alfred told me, with a slightly ceremonious air, that his lawyers had advised him that, in view of some of the novel’s sexually explicit scenes, its publication might land us both in jail.

The notion of sharing a jail cell with Alfred must have had its charms, for in the next instant of this conference he pulled his camera out of his desk and took a photograph of me remarkable in its serenity. My face, youthfully smooth and oval, looks lovingly into the lens, and a cigarette languidly smolders in my gracefully posed hand; the photo was used on the back flap of the jacket of
Rabbit, Run
, where it can still be admired. The author at peace with the world.

I think what Alfred captured at that moment was the relaxed visage of a man who has decided to sell out. Rather than grab the uncensored manuscript and stalk out onto Madison Avenue in search of a more daring publisher (this was 1960, mind), I agreed to go along with the legal
experts, and trim the obscenity to the point where the book might slide past the notice of hypothetical backwoods sheriffs vigilant against smut.
Lolita
and the unexpurgated
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
had rather recently been published, and in 1961 the publication of Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
would make our delicate verbal surgery absurd, but for the moment we were on the cutting edge, snipping away.

None of the excisions really hurt, though I did restore them in later editions. The youngish, roundish, baldish lawyer who guided my scalpel, as we sat at the big table in the firm’s windowless book-lined conference room, was especially leery of my lyrically developed description of a woman urinating, and of what he called “contact”—
le contact de deux épidermes
, as the French say, in definition of
l’amour
. The word “fucking” in itself bothered him less than I would have thought. Alfred, present for some of this lengthy operation, at one point exclaimed, in that voice of his that was, like that of a great boxer, somehow smaller than one expected, “How the hell can you have fucking without contact?”

But the lawyer knew, and I came to enjoy the editorial process at his side; having performed the requisite excision with his guidance, I would then stitch the sutures as tidily as I could, even prettily, endeavoring, as is the artist’s habit, to make a virtue of necessity. Who knows?—now that the sexual revolution and its foul-mouthed verbal outriders are as old hat as orgone boxes and waterbeds, I might find that the expurgated version was the better. At any rate, a little less contact here, and a subdued urinary lyricism there, and the lawyer was, so to speak, satisfied. We put away our blue pencils and let the text run out to play.

He had been a gentle, word-sensitive adviser. Lawyers and writers after all are both dealers in language. I felt I had gotten off easy. Some of my most somatic rhapsodies had been left untouched, and even in the touchier parts sufficient textual evidence remained to indicate that my hero and his doxy weren’t playing backgammon. This young lawyer, whose name escapes me and shall not be pursued, sadly died not many years after this consultation, of a heart attack on a golf course. He was my first dead collaborator.

It seemed worthwhile, in 1960, to give names to things and acts that formed a central part of human workings. I was fresh enough from college to have Catullus, Swift, and Rabelais in mind as models of untrammelled realism, and of course James Joyce’s noble, unyielding modern example. And, since I didn’t expect the novel to make me rich (it didn’t), and had previously left a publisher who wanted, for different reasons, to
tamper with another novel,
The Poorhouse Fair
, it would have been no great matter for me to have dug in my heels and taken my chances elsewhere, where less cautious lawyers might be called in, or, better yet, none at all.

But I trusted Alfred. I liked the way the books he published looked, and I liked his old-fashioned, no-nonsense way of working. My estimate—perhaps that is what I am doing in the contemplative photograph, estimating my chances—was that in this bind the best shake in town was likely to be given here, across the desk from me. I have never regretted sailing on with
Rabbit, Run
and its slightly trimmed sails. Many books followed. When
Couples’
turn came to raise eyebrows, it was 1968, and the text went to the printers just as I had submitted it. Alfred and, when he was gone, the firm that still bears his name have done for me all a writer can ask a publisher to do: they have made attractive packages out of my manuscripts and given the public a chance to buy them. Though he looked somewhat like a pirate—a pirate emeritus—there was nothing visibly piratical about the ship he ran, and he would be disappointed to see the cutthroat, money-mad mood that prevails in the book industry now.

To the young man I was, Alfred conveyed, with his costumes, his mustaches, and the twinkle in his unexpectedly blue eyes, the welcome notion that the book business was fun. Even dodging Southern sheriffs could be a kind of fun. “If it was just you and me, John, we’d fight it and have a helluva good time,” he said at one point in the little
Rabbit
crunch, or so I remember. I was flattered by this spontaneous avowal of comradeship, across the gaps of years and eminence, and took it to heart. Though we didn’t fight the sheriffs, we had a pretty good time together anyway.

I
N RESPONSE
to a query from
Esquire
as to bad reviews one remembers receiving
.

Three reviews, all of early books, that have stuck in my craw were John Aldridge on
Of the Farm
in
Book Week
, the late Alfred Chester on
Pigeon Feathers
in
Commentary
, and
Commentary
’s editor, Norman Podhoretz, on
The Centaur
in some unlikely magazine like
Horizon
. The reviewers all seemed to my tender sense of it to be intent not so much on dismissing the book as on annihilating its author, who in some unwitting
ideological fashion had given them deep offense. To find oneself assaulted like this in print is certainly a salubrious experience for a young writer, for in a world that does much to soften and conceal its basic dangers he is frankly invited to consider whether he intends to go on existing or not. My decision, after an initial flash of uncertainty, was to go on existing, even if everything these shrewd and inimical voices said was true. More recent reviews that have given me the same sensation—of a reviewer whom there could be absolutely no pleasing, and whose opinion therefore was a purely animal noise, marking an invasion of territory—are a short notice by a Dorothy Rabinowitz of
Museums and Women
in, I think,
The Saturday Review
and a strenuous put-down of
The Coup
in a Midwestern journal of the New Right (or was it the New Left?) which I would not have seen had not its editors kindly mailed it to me. Gilbert Pinfold, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel about his ordeal, confesses to being unable to detect a particle of difference in intelligence between his favorable and his adverse reviewers; my own tendency has been to believe the worst and to find its proponents far cleverer than the poor fools who are more or less on my side. But in the end, the next day dawns with its sunburst of blank paper, and the enterprise of composition itself, with its grand intention of bringing a piece of reality over into print, overrules the keenest self-doubts and the most venomous sneers.

I
N RESPONSE
to a query from
The New York Times Book Review
as to “important” books one has never been able to finish reading
.

Like many an autodidact I have taken simple-minded pride in finishing a book once I began to read it. With considerable pleasure I devoted a youthful summer to reading through
Don Quixote;
in my early twenties I made my blissful way, over several years, through all of
Remembrance of Things Past. War and Peace, Portrait of a Lady, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, The Iliad
, and
The Odyssey
all in their season fell to the buzzsaw of my reading. I had every expectation of relishing
Tristram Shandy
, by Laurence Sterne. My taste ran to prankish books, British books, and books of pivotal importance in the history of Western thought.
Tristram Shandy
, modernism’s first masterpiece, triply qualified. Had I not, furthermore, read through
Ada
and Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
, thus somewhat straddling the case? I remember well more than one summery occasion when my increasingly tired-looking Modern Library edition of Sterne’s
facetious, mind-addling classic was hauled down from its shelf into the sun and shade; once I took it with me to a week alone on Martha’s Vineyard, thinking to force the issue. Alas, even the boredom of utter solitude was no match for the boredom that poured in waves off the chirping pages of this particular great book. I made it as far as page 428, a half-faded bookmark tells me; but, like Scott on his return from the South Pole, I did not quite have the stuff to complete the job. I should have eaten the sledge dogs, like Amundsen.