Algren at Sea (41 page)

There is only a spacious guest room that has no guests. Dominated by a suit of medieval armor wearing its helmet
affronté.

On the fleshless intellectual Montherlant, the stance of an Eastern potentate looks weird enough. But in adapting it to Hugh Hefner it becomes a downright riot. The image of Dick Nixon being kind to a puppy is less preposterous, as Nixon may actually have liked the pup.

Hefner doesn't like his bunnies. Whenever a man perverts love to moneymaking, he builds resentment against the money-maker.

“What are you doing to me, Little Baby?” I once heard a procurer complain to his girl, “Why did you make a pimp out of a nice guy like me?”

I was brought to myself by the falling of a shadow. A dark-haired girl with a taut, wan look, was standing over me, fully dressed.

I did not have to ask who she was.

“Hello, Connie,” I said.

“It wasn't five-thirty,” she told me in a low voice; “it was a quarter to six. He slapped me at a quarter to six.”

“I read something about it,” I assured her. She didn't seem to hear.

“He didn't slap me because I was high. He slapped me because I lost my job.”

“What did you do?”

“I walked along the lake up to North. It's where I used to go swimming when I was a kid. I started to walk back to my old neighborhood. Then I remembered everybody I knew was gone—what was the use? What was the use of anything? I didn't even belong to a neighborhood any more. Before I got back to the room I had it in mind—if he wasn't there, that was it.”

“And?”

“He wasn't there.”

That Hefner's entertainments pretend to taste but come no closer than a ludicrous vulgarity is merely a local circumstance. But, as a stage whereon young Americans are revealed as lacking any way of bestowing themselves upon the world, it is disturbing.

For those who cannot bestow themselves become severed not only from the world but from themselves. And in such severance, whether that of Connie Petrie or of Hugh Hefner, each takes his own: measures against his deprivation.

Each devises his own vengeance.

 

The winter day falls with a colder light today than the light that once fell between the blinds of a
Sommerhaus.

It was always summer in the
Sommerhaus.
A grandfatherly light came down on the world that year and slanted between the blinds of the little old-world cottage; when many grandchildren ran in and out before dinner. But I was the only one of the many to whom my grandfather confided the name of the inventor of the Father & Son Cigar.

And the farm boy from Black Oak who worked for McCormick Reaper himself became a grandfather who had no
Sommerhaus.
He became an old man lying on a Westside bed with his wife and son looking down at him.

They saw his right hand take the fingers of his left, feeling something had gone wrong with the machinery of that hand; that had to be fixed with his right.

They saw him pass from life into death still trying to fix the machinery of everything. His old woman saw him go, and his son saw him go. Yet neither mother nor son wept for the father's death.

So it was that the son knew that, for all his fixing, the old man had not been able to fix anything after all.

Tricks Out of Times Long Gone

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the anecdotes herein related have been told, here and there, before: in
Cavalier
,
Dial
,
Dude
,
Gent
and the
New York Herald Tribune
.

 

And to Miss Kamala Rao and Mr. S. D. Punekar, for their assistance, the author expresses his thanks.

An essay on Ernest Hemingway was a labor to which I felt compelled. Everyone else was acting so compulsively I had to do something compulsive too or I wouldn't get invited to any more parties. How is a writer to make The Hot Center unless he mills around where The Center is simmering?

Since Hemingway once announced to me that “it is now 0230 hours,” I can make trouble for anyone who asks me to wait in the hall. I don't have to know what hour 0230 is to be on time for dinner.

But after dinner some stiff is certain to ask—in the tone of a bonds-man recognizing a bail-jumper—“Well! What are you up to
now
? What's
next
?”

“Nothing, my key-shift is stuck,” would serve as an answer but a short chop to the ear would serve better. Yet that would only confirm his suspicion that I must be dealing with half a deck—otherwise I'd be in a respectable field. Such as Criticism.

He assumes that the critic and the novelist are cats of the same litter though of various stripe; actually they are hostile breeds dammed in the same basket.

“We are oppressed at being men,” Dostoevsky wrote, “and contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized Man.”

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy—yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.

He demands that perilous voyages be taken and storms be endured but himself stays on the dock. He reminds us that the proper study of mankind is man yet keeps his own distance from men and women. The
goodness of his intention is ‘lent expression, while his conscience is afforded ease, by the practice of Criticism. The risk of becoming identified with the objects of his compassion is obviated by his sagacity.

Yet the greater the creative man's sagacity, the less is his creativity. It is easy to replace art by profundity. Present examples of those whose harsh artistry has flattened into smooth profundity are Arthur Miller, John Hersey, Saul Bellow and Paul Goodman. (Although the latter had no art to start.) Their maps are drawn; their risks have been taken.

This is why nobody raps a critic's door unannounced after midnight: there's a Thinker in there but he's on a tight schedule. He drives a well-lighted route, strapped in by a safety-belt, and stops only at well-behaved motels. And there's nothing to drink in the house anyhow.

But if you're entertaining friends and the aquarium is closed, rap the novelist's disorderly lair—“You in there! What are you up to now? What's next?”

You-In-There doesn't know what he's up to at midnight, 0230 hours, nor upon the gong of noon. He drives a collision course, lights out, along an untraveled way. The risks he assumes are the kind for which he is wished failure by most; and particularly by those who never take any. Their most urgent need is to be able to say “We were right after all.” Meaning that the man's failure will be all his own doing.

Yet the man's risks succeeding, he gains cheers from the same gallery. “We were right after all” now means that they have a claim on his triumph because they've been with him all along.

The practice of fiction involves the writer, personally, directly, and whether he would or no, with multitudes: that's the basket
he's
dammed in. The Practice of Criticism is a means of remaining personally uninvolved: that's
his
basket.

Benign critics there are. I know of at least one who would prefer to get the best from a living writer than to get the best of him. He makes allowances, in writers of the past, for those flaws which scar all human effort that has nobility.

But we are not concerned here with benignity. Our problem is the middle-aged youth, so convinced the world owes him a refund, he is too timid to damn and too stingy to applaud. Mediocrity is never passive; it avenges itself for its deprivation:

“All these reviewers inhabit much the same intellectual milieu, and what they have in common, apart from talent and intelligence, is an attitude
toward books and an idea about the proper way to discuss them,” one commentator promises proper subscribers to a new review—“a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. Books are too important to permit of charitable indulgence. A book for them [The
Milieu
People] is, quite simply, an occasion to do some writing of their own.”

Such injunction against charitable indulgence of creative work, combined with a concession of dependence upon the work of others for something to write about, is not only to demand damages where no injury has been inflicted, but to demand them arrogantly. Talent can spring up anywhere; but it is never dependent. Unsolicited opinions should not be telephoned collect.

The injunction also illustrates the ancestral conflict between the artist's view of the world and that of the Establishment. To the artist, the landscape of commercial enterprise has always been a chamber of mirages by which the true world is perverted; and the
Milieu-Man
, the critic, has, traditionally, been the artist's apologist.

But to Business, Government, Church, Military, TV, Press and Hollywood, the world which feeds, clothes, arms and amuses men is the one real world; the artist is the distorter.

The
Milieu-Man
has now, by and large, become the Establishment's apologist. Whose proof, that the Establishment's reality
is
real, is that the Establishment
works
: that nowhere before has the artist been so widely benefacted. In no other age, no other land nor other season than our own, has the artist been more generously patronized.

Yet he must remain hostile or be untrue. For the Establishment lives in the third-person; the artist in the first. The devastation we have seen, and the dehumanization threatening, prove that the Establishment not only works but that it works too well.

In such a world the writer's single usefulness has come to be the man who lives by no image, let his flaws show naked as they may. For, however disastrous to human values a civilization geared to technology may seem to him, he's in it all the same. And the best he can do, by strength, luck or sheer stubbornness, is to stand in ironic affiliation to it.

The Impossible Generalized Man, The Sagacious Impossibility, either at the levers of a commercial publishing house or a chair of English Literature, cannot risk such irony.

Nor is this to quarrel with the just and necessary function of criticism:
how many times Hemingway might have pressed the trigger before releasing it is just what is needed for a fuller understanding of
Farewell to Arms
. Dedicating oneself to a chronological breakdown of the accidents Hemingway sustained, from the time he skinned a knee in 1904 to the time a chandelier fell on him in 1938, shows us that the proper study of mankind
is
man. Anybody who can merge criticism with autopsy is the boy for me. And
Harper's
will pay for it if you type it neatly.

Publish or perish
is now the cry of the Ph.D., running head-and-head with another Ph.D. for the widest desk in the Department of Humanities. He'd
better
get attention in print. So; by adapting the attention-getting devices of television to criticism, he can entrench himself in a hard-bought chairmanship.
¹⁵
We understand, when
Time
anoints some persevering wheel as “a dedicated critic,” the meaning is that the man has devised a literary image that keeps the paperback stock moving in The Village bookstores as well as hard-cover stock in the suburbs.