The Last Empire (4 page)

All that changed in the Fifties. Writers can still be minor celebrities, good to flesh out a talk show if they can be counted on not to say anything of interest. But the writer as definer of the prospect has no role at all in the “first world.” Our serious writers teach other serious writers who in turn teach
them
in classrooms. But for the bright inventive woman who kept these diaries the scene was no different from what it was for George Sand—a novel one year, a play the next year, and a life in the stream of her time. When she noted that the reader wants his simple-minded Story Book, she had not realized that the story had already started its leap from dull page to bright moving picture, and when she mourned that this is the age that Can’t Take It, she is quite right except that she thought the “it” was realistic observation—satire—that they couldn’t take when the “it” they can’t, and won’t, take is literature itself.

The New York of the Golden Age (1945–1950—the only period when we were not kept at war) glitters in her diary, as she reflects on all sorts of wonders and novelties and even genius. Among the wonders was John Latouche, a short chunky Irish wit (with the obligatory Jewish mother). Although himself an outlander from Virginia he was, like Dawn herself, the personification of Manhattan, particularly its nightside, when ten thousand musicians in dives played songs for which he had written the lyrics—“Taking a Chance on Love,” “Cabin in the Sky,” “Lazy Afternoon” (written at my house on the Hudson one hot summer day). Latouche talked and talked and kept everyone excited and laughing. It was he who first told me of a writer with the unlikely name Dawn Powell; she had just written a novel called
The Locusts Have No King
. I met Dawn with him. They looked alike except that he had bright blue eyes in his disproportionately large head, while hers were, I think, brown.

Latouche came out Saturday and Sunday and left me exhausted. He is so multi-gifted that he seems to leave people as worn as if they’d been to a circus, and while he shoots sparks in all directions, in the end it is the others who are depleted and he is renourished. . . . It is unconsciously deliberate on his part. He wants people not-to-do, just as he doesn’t-do. He likes their doing well—no envy there—but it’s actual
doing
he minds.

When, to survive, I wrote a dozen plays for live television in one year, Latouche was deeply saddened. “Whoever suspected that you would end up as the Lope de Vega of television?”

March 11, 1954: Latouche’s
Golden Apple
opened at Phoenix—thoroughly fresh and delightful. At end, saw him by stairs in middle of cheers. He was weeping. “They’ve ruined my second act—they’ve ruined it—spoiled everything! Come downstairs and have champagne!” Down was a vast Sardi’s. Gore Vidal—Luciferian-looking young man who called a couple of times. Very gifted, brilliant, and fixed in facility as I am.

Thus, I first appear in her diaries: and though we saw each other far too seldom, the condition of an active life in the golden age, she—like Touche—made the weather for us all or, as she put it, “The way Latouche and I always knocked ourselves out to entertain morons. The more useless and blah they were, the harder we worked for their amusement—as if they were such a waste that only by converting these ciphers into something (in fact nothing more than audience) could they be endured.”

Then the memorable August 7, 1956: “Latouche died!—in Calais, Vermont. Luckily his opera ‘Baby Doe’ had been a great peak last month in Central City, a peak he might not pass. Incredible that this dynamo should unwind and I think I can guess how. Talentless but shrewd users pursued him always . . . trying to get him in a corner room, lock him up and get out the gold when he wanted only to talk all day and all night. . . . I’m sure this was a desperate, hysterical escape from Lillian Hellman and others waiting for his output to finish up
Candide
.” He was thirty-nine.

In later years Dawn reviewed books, shrewdly if somewhat wearily, in
Mademoiselle
. Although like every regular reviewer she was pretty much stuck with the daily output (Capote? “The Southern white trash and
crème de menthe
school as against the old mint julep school”) but her own views on literature, particularly the superiority of Petronian satire to everything else in the prose line, are interesting. “ ‘Realism’ is the only completely vague word. ‘Satire’ is the technical word for writing of people as they are: ‘romantic’ the other extreme of people as they are to themselves—but both of these are the truth. The ability to put in motive is called satire; the ability to put in vision is romanticism.” She duly noted that the rich and the poor could be satirized with impunity (because they were—then—so few and never read books?) but “The middle class is wit-proofed. . . . If there is to be satire it must not
bite at the breadwinner.” And “the human comedy is always tragic but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.”

Powell seems to have got the point to Edith Wharton long before others did. In 1951, “Read Edith Wharton’s
The Reef
and struggling with
Wings of the Dove
by James simultaneously. Curiously alike, but she is so superior in this. Odd, her reputation for ‘moralizing novels’ when it was her
age
which read its own moralizing into her. Not one word could be called moralizing—no villains, no heroes in the noble sense. Villainy is done by a group of characters behaving in the only way they, in all honesty, feel they can decently behave. . . . I must write to Sophy Viner, I woke up thinking. I must tell her—tell her what? She never existed. What a precise miracle of illusion Edith Wharton created—never showing Sophy’s room, giving her only one dress, one cloak, describing her only as fresh-faced—but she is
real
.”

Dawn is very much on to Mary McCarthy: “Read Mary McCarthy’s piece—another beginning of novel. . . . These last two starts are invigorating—like a brisk whiff of the stable on a clear wintry day. She has her two manners—her lace-curtain Irish, almost unbelievably genteel lady scholar torn between desire to be Blue Stocking without losing her Ladyship; and then her shanty Irish where she relaxes, whamming away at her characters like a Queen of the Roller Derby, groin-kicking, shin-knifing, belly-butting, flailing away with skates and all arms at her characters and jumping on them with a hoarse whoop of glee when they are felled.”

Finally, she comes to James through that curiously enchanting nouvelle
The Reverberator
, so prescient in its grasp of the general horror of publicity at the dawn of the age of the tabloid newspapers. “James’s work nearly always stirs the writing imagination. Some object to ‘involuted writing,’ ‘obtuseness’—but none of this is irrelevant. He is like a sculptor in wood, chopping his own trees, hacking and sawing to get to the exact core of his design, examining each branch and bit of sap for its effect on the inner meat. He is after his story for truth’s sake, not yours. He is not a tailor, whipping up a pretty costume for your delight. Authors have been stealing his plots for years not because they are inventions (which always wear out with me) but because they are imperishable human truths. That is why he is caviar for the wise and old and experienced—nothing false.”

A few months before death, Dawn wrote a definite non-Valentine to the rising generation of American writers.

Most important thing for novelist is curiosity and how curious that so many of them lack it. They seem self-absorbed, family-absorbed, success-absorbed, but the new social-climbing writer professes indifference to the couple across the aisle, the noise from the next apartment—as if a gentleman does not concern himself with things not his business.

I contend that a writer’s business is minding other people’s business. . . . The new writers disdain human curiosity; they wish only to explore and describe their own psyches; they are too egotistical and snobbish to interest themselves in neighbors. The urge to write now is no longer the love of storytelling or even the love of applause for a neat turn or dramatic twist. It is the urge to show off, the author as hero is a big sex success and leaves them gasping. The book’s drive is only the desire to strip the writer’s remembered woes and wrongs and show his superiority to the reader—not to communicate with him or entertain.

Since then, of course, text and context have been replaced by Theory, and Author—he dead. Dawn, if alive, would have been one of the first to make it to the Internet as rollicking Queen of the Cyber Punks, carefully digging potholes in the Information Highway.

In 1962 Joe Gousha dies, painfully, of cirrhosis. Dawn writes: “As for his death, this is a curious thing to say but after 42 years of life together—much of it precarious and crushing—we have been through worse disasters together, and I’m sure Joe would feel the same way about me.” The next-to-last entry in the diaries records that “Bunny came in”: Raoul faithful to the end to his Aurore. She died November 14, 1965, at St. Luke’s Hospital. “I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter,” she wrote not long before the end. One might add that those who can (or must) exist without are—what else?—a sad lot.

The New York Review of Books

21 March 1996

* 
L
OST
N
EW
Y
ORK

By 1946 I had spent three years in the army, where the name of the daily
New York Times
book reviewer, Orville Prescott, struck not a bell, while, to the few who were literary-minded, Edmund Wilson meant everything. Wilson was The American Critic whose praise—or even attention—in
The New Yorker
meant earthly glory for a writer. When my first novel was published, I realized that he no longer bothered much with current novels or new writers. Although politely loyal to commercialite friends like Charles Jackson and Edwin O’Connor, he was now working up large subjects—most lately the suppurating wound of Philoctetes, the necessary archer. Also, he was known to have a not-so-secret passion for beautiful young women who wrote beautiful young prose that he might nurture with his generous praise and gentle advice (“ ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c,’ dearest”) and, indeed, if he could hack it, actual presence in their lives should the dice so fall. Even
so, one still hoped. In my case, in vain—snake eyes.

It was the prissy Orville Prescott who praised me while Mr. Wilson astonished everyone that season with a Pythian ode to a beautiful young woman called Isabel Bolton, whose first book,
Do I Wake or Sleep
, he hailed as “school of Henry James . . . the device of the sensitive observer who stands at the center of the action and through the filter of whose consciousness alone the happenings of the story reach us . . . a voice that combines, in a peculiar way, the lyric with the dry; and is exquisitely perfect in accent; every syllable falls as it should. . . .” A star was born.

A comic legend was also born. Wilson, ravished by the beauty of Bolton’s prose, hoped that its creator was equally beautiful and so . . . Well, Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him. Could the two ever be combined—the ultimate soulmate? Montaigne thought that if women endured the same education and general experience as men they would probably be no different and so intellectual equality might be achieved. But he gave no examples. By Wilson’s time, many women had been similarly educated and luminous feminine minds—chock-a-block with
pensées
—were very much out there. But what about . . . well, to be blunt, Beauty? Could Mind as well as Beauty be found in one person?

Wilson’s lifelong quest led him into some strange culs-de-sac. The strangest of all must have been when he discovered that Isabel Bolton—name deliberately reminiscent of Isabel Archer?—was, in reality, a majestic granddame of sixty-three, born Mary Britton Miller in 1883 at New London, Connecticut.

Only five minutes, so legend goes, after my sister. This participation in identical twinship is the most valuable experience of my life. . . . Both of my parents died of pneumonia and within an hour of each other in the fourth year of my life. . . . In my fourteenth year my twin sister was drowned. After this there seems to be a kind of blotting out of life—everything became dim, unreal, artificial.

Perfunctory attendance at a boarding school. A well-off family made travels in Europe possible. “Three years in Italy were of profound importance. In 1911 New York became my permanent home.”

As Miller, she published a half-dozen unmemorable works. Then, in 1946, she recreated herself under another name; and entered her kingdom. Wilson’s was the first fanfare for a woman who was to write a half-dozen more novels of which two are as distinguished as her “first” (the three are now collected in
New York Mosaic
). Bolton died in 1979 at ninety-two, productive almost to the end. As practically nothing is now known of her, editor Doris Grumbach does her best with the odd facts: Bolton came from a “good” family; had two close lady friends; lived in pre-1914 Europe and then Manhattan. Attended the Writers’ Colony at Yaddo. Died in Greenwich Village at 81 Barrow Street, not far from where Wilson’s jolliest muse, Dawn Powell, lived. The rest is, so far, silence, secret—Sapphic?

So little is known of Bolton that one does not know if she and Wilson ever met. But I am fairly certain he saw to it that they did. A meeting only the prose of Henry James could have risen to, unlike the equally great Edith Wharton, who might have fallen upon it with terrible rending eagle’s swoop:

There had been—one wondered not so idly why—no photograph or other rendering of likeness or, even, dislikeness, on the homely paper “jacket” that embraced the ever, to Wilson, with each passing day, more precious volume, the distilled essence of all feminine beauty and sensibility, quite overpowering in its effect upon his perhaps too febrile adhesive system for which the names so boldly yet, by some magical art, demurely printed on this very same “jacket” convey to him the physical beauty of the divine girl who had “cut to roundness and smoothed to convexity a little crystal of literary form that concentrates the light like a burning glass”—his very own words in his
devoir
for
The New Yorker
, written with so much pounding of the heart as, to put it in a plain and vulgar fashion, a cry from that never
not
susceptible heart—in short, a love letter to the unknown girl—surely, a girl of genius rather than a woman like his handsome, brilliant, but—well,
incendiary
(literally) wife, Mary McCarthy, who had recently, when he had withdrawn to his study and locked the door, slipped under that same door a single sheet of paper deliberately set aflame in order to smoke him, as it were, from his lair, all the while shouting in a powerful voice, not so much golden as a reverberating cymbal of purest brass, “Fuck you.” The plangent voice resounded even now, unpleasantly, in his mind, as he rang the doorbell to a Greenwich Village residence set in a quarter not too—nor less than—fashionable.