Picked-Up Pieces: Essays Read online

  Pascal says, “When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours.” The writer’s strength is not his own; he is a conduit who so positions himself that the world at his back flows through to the readers on the other side of the page. To keep this conduit scoured is his laborious task; to be, in the act of writing, anonymous, the end of his quest for fame.

  Beginning, then, with cunning private ambitions and a childish fascination with the implements of graphic representation, I find myself arrived, in this audible search for self-justification, at an embarrassed altruism. Beginning with the wish to make an impression, one ends wishing to erase the impression, to make of it a perfect transparency, to make of oneself a point of focus purely, as selfless as a lens. One begins by seeking celebrity and ends by feeling a terrible impatience with everything—every flattering attention, every invitation to speak and to impersonate a wise man, every hunger of the ego and of the body—an impatience with everything that clouds and clots our rapt witness to the world that surrounds and transcends us. A writer begins with his personal truth, with that obscure but vulnerable and, once lost, precious life that he lived before becoming a writer; but, those first impressions discharged—a process of years—he finds himself, though empty, still posed in the role of a writer, with it may be an expectant audience of sorts and certainly a habit of communion. It is then that he dies as a writer, and becomes an inert cultural object merely, or is born again, by re-submitting his ego, as it were, to fresh drafts of experience and refined operations of his mind. To remain interested—of American novelists, only Henry James continued in old age to advance his art; most, indeed, wrote their best novels first, or virtually first. Energy ebbs as we live; success breeds disillusion as surely as failure; the power of hope to generate action and vision lessens. Almost alone the writer can reap profit from this loss. An opportunity to sing louder from within the slackening ego is his. For his song has never been all his own: he has been its excuse as much as its source. The little tyrant’s delight in wielding a pencil always carried with it an empathy into the condition of being a pencil; more and more the writer thinks of himself as an instrument, a means whereby a time and a place make their mark. To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom—some such hope, at this more than mid-point of my life, is the reason why I write.

  *Given in New York City, in March 1964, in acceptance of the 1963 National Book Awards fiction prize, awarded to The Centaur.

  †Given in Bristol, England, in February 1969, after a dinner arranged by the Bristol Literary Society.

  ‡Given in Seoul, South Korea, in June 1970, at a conference of the International P.E.N.; the general conference theme was “Humor.”

  §Given in Adelaide, South Australia, in March 1974.

  ‖That year awarded to Australia’s Patrick White.

  aOswald Mtshali, Zulu poet. Both he and Nadine Gordimer were present at the Adelaide Festival.

  bAs, say, by Iris Murdoch, in the 1972 Blashfield Address.

  LONDON LIFE

  Notes of a Temporary Resident (for The Listener)

  January 1969

  AN AMERICAN IN LONDON, whether he has come here to work for Esso or to escape the draft, cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The monumentality of Washington, the thriving busyness of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco—all these he finds combined for his pleasure. If he is on foot, considerately designed buses and taxis offer to lift him along a maze of streets; if he has a car, the roadways, however intimidating to a pedestrian instinctively looking in the wrong direction, reveal themselves as paragons of clear marking and disciplined flow. This, surely, is a city, a civitas in the root sense, a collection of citizens whose collective life and conscience is bespoken by the wealth of parks and museums, the gracious abundance of public services. Food, for example, which in France must be won by slightly daring forays into restaurants and épiceries that have the shuttered air of brothel-fronts, is here everywhere—fresh fruit heaped for sale in the most densely trafficked streets, candy machines on trees, counters of meat in clothing stores. If the telephone booths are scarcer than an American is used to, at least the ones he finds have not been vandalized. He moves through London with no fear, as in Rome, of being cheated and with no fear, as in Paris, of being willfully misunderstood. It is not merely the English language that makes this ease, it is a language of social expectation and response that in his own country is a rather harsh dialect. He finds, in London, tickets to concerts and plays easy to come by; yet when he arrives the hall is full, or nearly. The balance between supply and demand is maintained with a reasonableness as mysterious as the opaque imbalances of Moscow. Its central institution is, I suppose, the docile, ubiquitous queue.

  In the house that I rent hangs a large map of London and environs in 1741. City blocks stop at Marylebone: the eye travels north across stippled fields to Hampstead. Paddington, St. Pancras, and Kentish Towns are villages; St. John’s Wood a matter of two or three houses. Elsewhere on the map, Brompton and Chelsea, Camberwell, Peckham, and Stepney are all distinct and full of delicately etched orchards. Why should this seem special to me? All cities grow by swallowing their satellite towns. But these have kept their names and, somehow beneath the asphalt, a sense of locality, of neighborhood. If, as everyone (or at least every American) says, London is a city one can live in, credit the variety of demi-cities within it, few of them hopelessly unfashionable or ugly, all of them with some possibilities and style. London’s genius is conglomerate; how restricted, relatively, is New York, four of its five boroughs more or less unheard-of and the Manhattanites with pretensions to respectability penned into a few dozen blocks east of lower Central Park, or clinging to several side-streets in the increasingly decadent Village, or to the once solidly middle-class West Side. And these are sizable enclaves, compared to the “good” neighborhoods of inner-core Philadelphia or Cleveland. No doubt the contrast can be overdrawn. The square miles of chimney pots and sullen slate one sees from a southbound train window match for dreariness any American ghetto. Yet some of the factors blighting American cities (their ruthless grid-plan expansion, our centuries of racial discrimination and the bitter harvest of impoverishment, the rural nostalgia that foments the flight to the suburbs) do seem to have been absent or mitigated here, and London’s long primacy has made possible a kind of civic self-confidence absent or ambiguously ironical in America, except in small towns. I have moved here from a small American town, and find familiar virtues: some things are free, some are cheap, one walks among strangers without feeling menaced, the institutions of communal existence feel accessible.

  A city, then, of sections rather than layers, where latitude mitigates pressure. The latitude of costume, for instance: it is impossible to dress too oddly for the streets. The clothes along Piccadilly are a spree for the eyes, as shameless as the underwear ads that flow past the startled standee on the Underground escalator, as hard to believe, at first sight, as the Post Office Tower. On a sunny day along Regent Street it is as if England has costumed itself for one more Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, bobbies in their helmets and bankers in their bowlers and a chorus of clowns in bell-bottomed pants and slouch hats, with powdered faces and painted doll’s eyes. The miniskirts, too (unlike the ones on Fifth Avenue, perhaps because they are shorter) have a dolly look of unassailable innocence. The spirit of comedy lurks beneath the jubilantly erotic surfaces—and after all isn’t English literature, from the Wife of Bath and Rosalind to Moll Flanders and Sara Monday, peculiarly rich in comic heroines? Women parade in everything from yak hides to cellophane—everything except the stern little uniform of black cocktail dress and single pearl strand in which the sleek matron of Park Avenue or Paris sallies fo
rth, sweet soldier, to do battle with her lover, broker, or furrier.

  The hip young men seem sad. The uncut hair, which in America does hark back to a native wildness, to Davy Crockett and the redmen, here evokes some sickly Prince Valiant—a squad of pallid, faithless Christs. The faces of the American young reflect excitement: their struggle is for the center of the world stage, and there is an impressive largeness in their dreams of revolutionizing Western morality. I do not feel that excitement here; Private Eye is an updated Tidbits, the young socialists on television have the rabid punctilio of Dracula turned commissar, and the music is all sung in an American accent. What does Dusty Springfield know about a “preacher man”? Insofar as the popular music here is not derivative, it is Elizabethan balladeering beamed back after centuries of fermentation in the Appalachians, by way of Elvis Presley. It is white man’s music, grown in the package. Beyond the luxuriance of London (all those Rolls-Royces!) and the bustling bravura of its shopping streets, there is an England a foreigner glimpses mostly on television—a soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe, John Bull counting his change as he runs for the bus. An American has difficulty understanding the technical headlines promulgated by your government of glum economists.* But even your Queen looks somehow thrifty. The television news can seem desperately local—for a fortnight this fall, one besieged man in Shropshire eclipsed Asia, Africa, and our elections. Asia, indeed, appears as remote as the moon—let the Yanks and the Reds fight over it. As to Africa, and ex-colonies elsewhere—“our commonwealth friends,” as Mr. Wilson a shade wryly terms them—they are like people with whom one was very intimate once, on a long lovely cruise, but who now are, well, embarrassing. Embarrassing, too, are all these darkish immigrants that make Mr. Powell’s eyebrows lift so high, and those marching Catholics in Londonderry (what do they want?), and the crazy Welsh (not Tom Jones and Burton, but the ones that blew up the reservoir), and those impossible French (we’d let them into our club, if we had one) and rude Herr Hochhuth … really, if we’d known the world was going to be such a nagging bore, we wouldn’t have bothered to beat the Spanish Armada.

  Marcus Cunliffe, in his biography of Washington, says of the American outlook: “In comparison with the dense, shrewd, worldly British texture from which it is derived, it is surprisingly thin, diffuse, and romantic.” True; yet, like an Andean Indian, one born to this thin air learns to breathe it and feels a slight heaviness on the chest elsewhere. There come moments when the “dense, shrewd” texture seems stifling. Two enjoyable American experiences are mailing letters and going to the movies; post offices and movie houses are central in most towns, yet rarely crowded and briskly managed. In England I have learned to dread the moment in the cinema, so stuffy with smoke, when after the short subjects the lights shockingly leap on and weary-looking girls in white insist that we purchase from them yet more sweets before being allowed, freighted with pap, to plunge back into dreamland. And in the post office, after floundering to the stamp counter past the long queues waiting to purchase licenses, receive pensions, and whatever else their life-long wrangle with the Welfare State involves, it is maddening to watch the clerk (whose clerkliness is of Gogolian intensity, the product of generations of breeding carried on with dip pens and inkwells) as he tries to balance your letter against a number of brass weights, fiddling to find the right combination, having the letter slip from its tray, replacing it, and at last like blind Justice locating a state approximating balance and then mincing out your postage to you in a series of oddly denominated stamps whose sum he frequently botches, thanks to the intrinsic awkwardness of non-decimal addition. And the way one can get a bank statement only by writing for it to the manager! And those ponderous three-prong electric plugs! Clumsiness, I suspect, is cherished as a British resource, like muddle and heroism. It forms a code, a lock, to which one needs a key. In the end, there are recesses of England that exist only for initiates. The alien moves through pleasant green hallways and anterooms, always conscious of spike fences and polished locks. Some Duchess, if memory serves, said at the funeral of our greatest Anglophile, Henry James: “Poor Mr. James. He never quite met the right people.”

  June 1969

  THE AMERICAN (ME) who last winter thrust upon the readers of The Listener his impressions of London left so much still to say that, with his homeward flight number announced for the second time and all suitcases excitedly popping their catches, he feels compelled to add a ragged postscript.

  The English National Character. Such a thing must exist, yet residing in England has not brought me closer to it. Quintessential Englishmen here, with their combed tweeds and calibrated drawls, turn out to come from Hungary or Buffalo. In conjuring up for myself the essence of Britishness, I remember men encountered far from Albion. For example, I remember A.B., with his leather-patched elbows and hideously sensible shoes, who walked miles of Manhattan, unmarried, alone, unafraid, cheerful. The bookcases of his West Side room, amid the siren-loud night and the scuttle of Puerto Rican heroin pushers, breathed of Oxford—dear little blue classics, Waugh and Powell in their pastel British jackets, and poetry volumes as thin as shingles. Over a decade has rolled by; he lives in Connecticut, has four daughters, sails boats, wears the same shoes, and takes a tolerant anthropological interest in local rites like P.-T.A. meetings and three-hour cocktail hours. America amuses him. Or I think of C.D., met in Cairo, with the same bony pink forehead and strategic, disarming stammer. He had been a professor of moral philosophy; abruptly, on some road to Damascus, he had switched to Islamic architecture and mastered Turkish, Arabic, and Russian. That morning when he took me on a tour of mosques, he brushed away begging children as one would brush away the summer midges that come between you and the page of a book. Dazed by his torrent of precise information about a succession of indistinguishably murky and friable buildings, I asked him, with an American’s naïve faith that the universe is a collection of Freudian symbols, the significance of the dome. I shall not soon forget the quality of his blue gaze as his tongue shifted gears. I had become a begging child. “The dome?” he at last said. “It has no significance. It is a dome.”

  Only in England would Donne’s assertion that no man is an island have seemed a paradox and not a commonplace. Son of an island, each man is himself an island, secure in the certainty of his own boundaries. Things foreign break upon him like waves. He is the world’s toughest traveller. What an incredible diaspora of amateur explorers, footloose second sons, dissatisfied colonels, and inquisitive ladies in hoop skirts creates and fills an Empire between Drake’s accidental circumnavigation of the globe and Scott’s doomed saunter toward the South Pole! The Africans called Mungo Park “the one who travels alone,” and the same term would apply to Livingstone, Lawrence, Doughty, Burton. The attraction between the British and the Arabs must rest in part on a common austerity, an ability to travel light.

  When did this character differentiate itself from the German character, from the Germans who cannot go anywhere except as a gang? Geographical insularity, relatively early consolidation as a nation, an underlying Celtic pawkishness, a dash of French bitters via the Normans—whatever its cause, its enforcer is the public school system that tears a lad from his mother’s still-foaming breast and plunges him into ice water. To those prophets distressed by the possibility of test-tube conception and mechanized rearing, the British national character should be a great reassurance. After the shock of his education, nothing can shake an Englishman. True, he might emerge a little woozy, and mistake a sports car for a woman, or a birch rod for a mother’s kiss. But in this kingdom of bachelors, hobbyists, and pet-lovers, a little amiable confusion is wisely allowed. Recently I took my innocent children to a British movie about a man who fell in love with an otter. Our hero is first seen morosely strolling London’s streets with one of those Nero haircuts that signify a queer as surely as a dangling handbag used to signify a prostitute. He spies an otter in a pet-shop window, buys it, and more or less marries it
. For their honeymoon they go to remotest, most picturesque Scotland, where the otter (chummily dubbed “Mitch”) eats eels in the cove. To make the abnormality of these arrangements unignorable, the plot provides a Scots lass who, though pretty as a picture and loyal to a fault, is not only denied physical satisfaction by the hero but is degradingly compelled to feign fondness for his hirsute, quadruped, amphibian little consort. Providence is not entirely a-doze, however; a burly Scots ditch-digger dispatches “Mitch” with a shovel. The man with the Nero hairdo never stops mooning, and the fade-out shows him penning the first lines of a kind of In Memoriam for Mitch, just like Tennyson for Hallam. Now, I suppose such a bestial film might be made in other countries, but only in England would it be given a U rating.

  English Women. They are wonderful. They remind me of, in America, those tall, precocious boys of education-oriented households who are given rooms of their own and plenty of time for model airplanes. Only ample neglect brings such dreamy, disdainful poise. They are masterful flirts and have the miraculously steady hands of rhinoceros hunters and of women who apply eye make-up first thing in the morning. Shaw doubted that England deserved its great men; I wonder if it deserves its women. But what land does? “You Americans,” said Lady Pynchme, “you are so romantic. You all think your little dolly is Helen of Troy.” “You mean,” said I, startled, “she’s not? What, then, is she?” “Simply a jolly good lay,” was the answer. Two things shocked me here: the dog-food ads on television and the language of the upper classes.