My Generation (39 page)

The Nile is the ancient mother-river of the Western world, and it is impossible to conceive of her failure to survive these present vicissitudes. Although what man has done in the past twenty years may appear inexplicably thoughtless, and vainglorious, too—interrupting that immemorial ebb and flow, shattering a rhythm that existed eons before man himself appeared on these seductive banks—one feels that it does not really spell the end,
although much cruel injury has been done. Human beings are both resilient and ingenious in crisis—never more so than when guiltily surveying the harm that they have inflicted themselves—and one can conceive of the unhurried pace of Egyptian time allowing men to forestall more ruin and even perhaps to rectify some (though certainly not all) of the damage that may now seem beyond repair. Finally, there might be controlled hereon the Nile one of the worst of the pollutions of man: the aimless proliferation of his own peripatetic self.

Toward the end of our trip, stopping to view the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes, I recall a typical Flaubertian animadversion. “The colossi,” he wrote, “are very big, but as far as being impressive is concerned, no….Think of the number of bourgeois stares they have received! Each person has made his little remark and gone his way.” This sour putdown inevitably causes me to think of the hordes of tourists who stream past the colossi on their way to or from the Valley of the Kings. As a fragment of one of these hordes, but momentarily detached, I stand at midday on top of the towering cliff overlooking the enormous Temple of Deir el Bahari, certainly the dominating man-made presence in this valley of temples and tombs. Far below on the desert floor, dozens of buses and vans are disgorging their human cargo. The visitors represent nearly every nationality in the world, and as they proceed up and down the terraces ascending to the colonnade at the temple's upper level, they seem an orderly but overwhelming mass, almost numberless; they remind me of the throngs of Disneyland or, even more claustrophobically, as I go down and move among them, of the mob of which I was a gawking young member at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It is fortunate that they—or I should say, we—have been barred permanently from many of the tombs, for it has been demonstrated that the acid exhalations of our breath combined with our million-footed shuffling in the dust has caused irreparable damage already. But people keep coming in ever increasing legions, and it may be that these very numbers, uncontrolled, will soon prove to be more injurious to Egypt than the High Dam.

This is not an alarmist view—it is based on solid evidence—but even so, the situation might change for the better through a strict and systematic program of regulation. Prince Aga Khan, who has made a study of the tourist crisis, believes that a rigorous policy on the part of the Egyptian government would, in not too long a time, finally restrain this runaway influx of
travelers, lessening the attrition at the historic sites and making a trip to the Nile a happier event for everyone, including the Egyptians. The policy would commence not only with the limiting of permits for the building of hotels and boats but with supervision—through expert architectural advice—of the construction of these boats and hotels, so as to avoid such atrocities as the hostelry the Russians put up at Aswan or the oversize Sheraton barges. Hotels and tourist villages would be developed in conformity with local traditions and landscape and, just as importantly, be decentralized. They would be moved away from the already preposterously engorged centers of Luxor and Aswan. Such measures would benefit both the tourist and the less economically prosperous population of the backward areas. The sites themselves would undergo drastic changes and management: rotation of tourist groups according to seasonal timetables in order to avoid overlapping and overcrowding; modernization of access roads; installation of advanced systems of dust and humidity control in the tombs, along with better superintendence and better lighting. These are strenuous measures, but in the opinion of the prince, neither impossible to implement nor economically unfeasible; the vast sums of money that tourists bring to Egypt (and which now seem to benefit Egyptian antiquities in only the most marginal way) should be sufficient to pay for such a program, with much left over. But the need is immediate.

How many trips in the world does one really want to make again? For me, not many. But I could go back to the Nile over and over, as if in mysterious return homeward, or in quest for some ancestral memory that has been only partially and tantalizingly revealed to me—as at that interval when one passes from sleep to waking. On the last evening aboard the
Abu Simbel
there comes to me a moment when I know the reason why I shall always want to come back to this river. Moored to the riverbank at the edge of a small village, the boat is peaceful, all energies unwound; at dusk, alone, I go up on deck and feel in my bones the chill of the coming night. In the village I see a nondescript street, children, a camel, a minaret. Far back on the river two feluccas rest as if foundered immovably upon a sandbar; the light around them is pearl-gray, aqueous, and they seem to hover so delicately on the river that it is as if they were suspended in some nearly incorporeal substance, like gauze or mist. With their furled sails, they are utterly motionless; they are like the boats on an antique china plate of my childhood. As
the light fades from the sky and the stars appear, the village is silhouetted against the faintest pink of the setting sun. I am aware of only two sounds: the clinking of a bell, perhaps on some cow or donkey, and now the voice of a muezzin from the minaret, intoning the Koran's summons in dark and monotonous gutturals. It is then, in a quick flood of recognition, that I feel certain that
I have been here before
, in some other century. But as the sensation disappears, almost as swiftly as it comes, I ponder whether this instant of déjà vu means anything at all; after all, I am a skeptic about mystical experiences. Nonetheless, the feeling persists, I cannot quite shake it off—nor do I want to. And so I remain there in the dusk, listening to the soft muttering of the muezzin and gazing at the distant feluccas miraculously afloat in the air. And then I wonder how many others—hypnotized like me by this river and the burden of its history, and by the drama of the death along its shores and waters, and eternal rebirth in all—might have known the same epiphany.

[
GEO
, September 1981.]

W
hen, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.

I was at that time sharing a cheap apartment with a fellow graduate from Duke University, a Southerner like myself. It was a rather gloomy basement affair far up Lexington Avenue near Ninety-fourth Street. I was reading gluttonously and eclectically in those days—novels and poetry (ancient and modern), plays, works of history, anything—but I was also doing a certain amount of tentative, fledgling writing. The first novel had not yet revealed itself in my imagination, and so most of my energies were taken up with short stories. The short story possessed considerably more prestige then than now; certainly, largely because of an abundance of magazines, the short
story had far greater readership, and I thought that I would make my mark in this less demanding art form while the novel-to-be germinated in my brain. This, of course, was a terrible delusion. The short story, whatever its handicaps, is one of the most demanding of all literary mediums and my early attempts proved to be pedestrian and uninspired. The rejection slips began to come back with burdensome regularity.

Yet plainly there was talent signaling its need to find a voice, and the voice was heard. An extremely gifted teacher, Hiram Haydn, was conducting a writing course at the New School for Social Research, and I enrolled. Haydn was a pedagogue in the older, nonpejorative sense of the word, which is to say a man who could establish a warm rapport with young students. He had a fine ear for language, and something about my efforts, groping and unformed as they were, caught his fancy and led him to an encouragement that both embarrassed and pleased me.

Hiram Haydn was also an editor in a book publishing house. He said that he felt my talents might be better suited to the novel and suggested that I start in right away, adding that his firm would underwrite my venture to the extent of a $100 option. While hardly a bonanza, this was not nearly as paltry as it might sound. One hundred dollars could last a frugal young bachelor quite a longtime in 1947. More importantly, it was a note of confidence that spurred my hungry ambition to gain glory and, perhaps, even a fortune. The only drawback now—and it was a considerable one—was that I had no idea as to how I would go about starting a novel, which suddenly seemed as menacing a challenge as all the ranges and peaks of the Himalayas. What, I would ask myself, pacing my damp Lexington Avenue basement, just what in God's name am I going to write about? There can be nothing quite so painful as the doubts of a young writer, exquisitely aware of the disparity between his capabilities and his ambition—aware of the ghosts of Tolstoy, Melville, Hawthorne, Joyce, Flaubert, cautionary presences crowding around his writing table.

That winter, between Christmas and New Year's Day, a monumental blizzard engulfed New York City. The greatest snowfall in sixty years. During that snowbound time two things occurred that precipitated me into actual work on my novel, as opposed to dreaming. The first of these was my receipt of a letter from my father in my hometown in Virginia (after three days the mail had begun to arrive through the drifts), telling me of the suicide
of a young girl, my age, who had been the source of my earliest and most aching infatuation. Beautiful, sweet, and tortured, she had grown up in a family filled with discord and strife. I was appalled and haunted by the news of her death. I had never so much as held her hand, yet the feeling I had felt for her from a distance had from time to time verged on that lunacy which only adolescent passion can produce. The knowledge of this foreshortened life was something that burdened me painfully all through those cold post-Christmas days.

Yet I continued to read in my obsessed way, and the book which I then began—and which became the turning point in my struggle to get started—was Robert Penn Warren's
All the King's Men
. I was staggered by such talent. No work since that of Faulkner had so impressed me—impressed by its sheer marvelousness of language, its vivid characters, its narrative authority, and the sense of truly felt and realized life. It was a book that thrilled me, challenged me, and filled me with hope for my own possibilities as a writer. And so it was that soon after finishing
All the King's Men
, I began to see the first imperfect outline of the novel—then untitled—which would become
Lie Down in Darkness
. I would write about a young girl of twenty-two who committed suicide. I would begin the story as the family in Virginia assembled for the funeral, awaiting the train that returned her body from the scene of her death in New York City. The locale of the book, a small city of the Virginia Tidewater, was my own birthplace, a community so familiar to me that it was like part of my bloodstream.

And so even as the book began to take shape in my brain I became excited by the story's rich possibilities—the weather and the landscape of the Tidewater, against which the characters began to define themselves: father, mother, sister, and the girl herself, all doomed by fatal hostility and misunderstanding, all helpless victims of a domestic tragedy. In writing such a story—like Flaubert in
Madame Bovary
, which I passionately admired—I would also be able to anatomize bourgeois family life of the kind that I knew so well, the WASP world of the modern urban South. It was a formidable task, I knew, for a man of my age and inexperience, but I felt up to it, and I plunged in with happy abandon, modeling my first paragraphs on—what else?—the opening chapter of
All the King's Men
. Any reader who wishes to compare the first long passage of
Lie Down in Darkness
with the rhythms and the insistent observation and the point of view of the beginning pages of
Warren's book will without difficulty see the influence, which only demonstrates that it may not always be a bad thing for a young writer to emulate a master, even in an obvious way.

Lie Down in Darkness
also owes an enormous debt to William Faulkner, who is of course both the god and the demon of all Southern writers who followed him. Writers as disparate as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy have expressed their despair at laboring in the shadow of such a colossus, and I felt a similar measliness. Yet, although even at the outset I doubted that I could rid myself wholly of Faulkner's influence, I knew that the book could not possibly have real merit, could not accrue unto itself the lasting power and beauty I wanted it to have, unless the voice I developed in telling this story became singular, striking, somehow uniquely my own. And so then, after I had completed the first forty pages or so (all of which I was satisfied with and which remain intact in the final version), there began a wrestling match between myself and my own demon—which is to say, that part of my literary consciousness which too often has let me be indolent and imitative, false to my true vision of reality, responsive to facile echoes rather than the inner voice.

It is difficult if not impossible for a writer in his early twenties to be entirely original, to acquire a voice that is all his own, but I was plainly wise enough to know that I had to make the attempt. It was not only Faulkner. I had to deafen myself to echoes of Scott Fitzgerald, always so easy and seductive, rid my syntax of the sonorities of Conrad and Thomas Wolfe, cut out wayward moments of Hemingway attitudinizing, above all, be myself. This of course did not mean that the sounds of other writers could not and did not occasionally intrude upon the precincts of my own style—T. S. Eliot, who was also a great influence at the time, showed definitively how the resonance of other voices could be a virtue—but it did mean, nonetheless, the beginning of a quest for freshness and originality. I found the quest incredibly difficult, so completely taxing that after those forty pages I began contemplating giving up the book. There seemed no way at all that I—a man who had not even published a short story—could reconcile all the formidably complex components of my vision, all of the elements of character and prose rhythms and dialogue and revelation of character, and out of this reconciliation produce that splendid artifact called a novel. And so, after a fine start—I quit.

I went down to Durham, North Carolina, where I had gone to college,
and there took a tiny backstreet apartment, which I shared with a very neurotic cocker spaniel. Here I tried to write again. I toyed with the novel but it simply would not move or grow; the dispirited letters I wrote to Hiram Haydn must have told him that his one hundred dollars had gone down the drain. But plainly he was not to be discouraged, for after a whole year had gone by he wrote me from New York suggesting that my energies might be recharged if I once again moved north. It seemed a reasonable idea, and so in the summer of 1949, after transferring ownership of my spaniel to a professor of philosophy at Duke, I came back to the metropolis, still so impecunious that I had to take a cheap room far away from Manhattan's sweet dazzle, in the heart of Flatbush. (I stayed there only a month or so but it was an invaluable experience, demonstrating the serendipitous manner in which life often works to a writer's advantage: that month's residence provided the inspiration for a novel I wrote much later,
Sophie's Choice
.) In Brooklyn, too, I was unable to write a word.

But salvation from all my dammed-up torment came soon, in the form of two loving friends I had met earlier in the city. Sigrid de Lima, a writer who had also been in Haydn's class, and her mother, Agnes, recognized my plight and invited me to live in their fine old rambling house up the Hudson in the hills behind Nyack. There, in an atmosphere of faith and affection and charity (a homelike ambience which I plainly needed and whose benison I have never been able to repay), I collected my wits and with a now-or-never spirit set forth to capture the beast which had so long eluded me.

And as I began to discipline and harness myself, began for the first time to examine as coldly and as clinically as I could the tough problems which before this I had refused to face, I had a fine revelation. I realized that what had been lacking in my novelist's vision was really a sense of architecture—a symmetry, perhaps unobtrusive but always there, without which a novel sprawls, becoming a self-indulged octopus. It was a matter of form, and up until now this was an issue that out of laziness or fear, perhaps both, I had tried to avoid. I did not have to construct a diagram or a “plot”—this I have never done. I merely had to keep aware, as I progressed with the narrative in flashback after flashback (using the funeral as the framework for the entire story), that my heroine, Peyton Loftis, would always be seen as if through the minds of the other characters; never once would I enter her consciousness.

Further, she would be observed at progressive stages of her life, from
childhood to early adulthood, always with certain ceremonials as a backdrop—country-club dance, a Christmas dinner, a football game, a wedding—and each of these ceremonials would not only illuminate the tensions and conflicts between Peyton and her family but provide all the atmosphere I needed to make vivid and real the upper-middle-class Virginia milieu I had set out to describe. Only at the end of the book, toward which the entire story was building—in Peyton's Molly Bloom–like monologue—would I finally enter her mind, and I hoped this passage would be all the more powerful because it was suddenly and intensely “interior,” and personal. This, at any rate, was the scheme which I evolved, and from then on the writing of the book, while never easy (what writing is?), took on a brisk, self-generating quality in which I was able to command all other aspects of the story—dialogue, description, wordplay—to my own satisfaction, at least.

I completed
Lie Down in Darkness
on a spring evening in 1951 in a room on West Eighty-eighth Street in Manhattan, where I had moved after my liberating year in Rockland County. I finished Peyton's monologue last (having already written the ultimate scenes), and if to the present-day reader the passage has an added sense of doom and desperation, this may be because, a few months before, I had been called back by the Marine Corps to serve in the Korean War. Thus I think I had, like Peyton, only meager hopes for survival. I was twenty-five years old and—like Peyton—was much too young to die. But I survived, happy beyond my craziest dreams at the generally good reviews and at the fact that
Lie Down in Darkness
even reached the best-seller list. This was on the same list as two other first novels which, said
Time
magazine later on that year, expressed like mine a depressing and negative trend in American letters:
From Here to Eternity
and
The Catcher in the Rye
.

[
Hartford Courant Magazine
, January 3, 1982.]