My Generation (40 page)

T
here was a time in my life when Indianapolis figured very large as an influence on me. About two hundred years ago—it was 1951, to be exact—I finished my first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
. In those post–World War II years there was a reverent, I should say almost
worshipful
, aura that surrounded the writing and publishing of novels. This is not to say that even today the novel as a literary form has lost cachet or distinction (though there are critics who would argue that position), but in those days to be a young novelist was a little like being a rock star in our time. The grand figures of the previous generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell—were still very much alive, and we young hopefuls were determined to emulate these heroes and stake our claim to literary glory. The first among the newcomers to make his mark was Truman Capote, whose brilliant tales and lovely novel
Other Voices, Other Rooms
filled me, his exact contemporary, with inordinate envy. Soon after this came
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer, a writer of such obvious and prodigious gifts that it took the breath away. Following on Mailer's triumph was James Jones's monumental
From Here to Eternity
, which was quickly succeeded by that classic which forever crystallized the soul of the American adolescent,
The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger. I don't think it was vainglory on my part, as I was writing my own novel and was watching these fine books appear one after another, to consider myself an authentic
member of the same generation and to want to make
Lie Down in Darkness
a worthy companion to those works.

I wrote the first pages of
Lie Down in Darkness
while I was living in New York City in the basement of a brownstone on upper Lexington Avenue. It was the winter of 1947. I was twenty-three years old and had just been fired from my job as junior editor with the McGraw-Hill Book Company—a fiasco I described much later in another book of mine,
Sophie's Choice
. There was a blizzard raging outside—it's still memorialized in weather annals as the greatest New York blizzard of the century—and those opening pages were written in passion and in the incomparable assurance of youth, and were never later touched or revised.

After the blizzard subsided I had a stack of manuscript pages and a burning desire to see them amplified with a full-fledged novel. But I sensed that I needed guidance and, even more than guidance, encouragement. I had heard of a lively and interesting class in fiction writing at the New School for Social Research, and I enrolled in this class, conducted by an engaging, scholarly teacher named Hiram Haydn. He was the ideal preceptor for a writing course, strict and no-nonsense regarding the substance of one's text, quick to detect softness or sloppiness or sentimentality, yet eager to find and nurture those radiant beams of true talent that occasionally appear in such a class. I was enormously pleased when I realized that he liked my work and, beyond that, thrilled that through him I was able to establish a publishing connection. For, as it turned out, Haydn had just been hired as New York editor of the Indianapolis-based house of Bobbs-Merrill. It also turned out that he had been given the authority to sign up for book contracts those among his students who he felt had literary promise. I sensed in Hiram an enormous zeal and idealism, a man determined to transform Bobbs-Merrill from a rather commercial enterprise, one whose chief previous glory had been the perennially huge best-seller
The Joy of Cooking
, into a publishing house that would honor and nurture good writing. And so I was flabbergasted and filled with joy when he offered me an option on my first novel and a check for an amount that was somewhat modest in those days, even by Indiana standards—one hundred dollars.

For the next three years I struggled to complete the book, moving all over the map, to North Carolina, to Brooklyn, to a small town up the Hudson River, to a cramped apartment that I shared with a young sculptor who was as poor as I was, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Money was a
major problem for me—I had next to none except for a tiny stipend from my generous father—and the income I could expect derived entirely from what Hiram could shake from the coffers of Bobbs-Merrill. This is where the word
Indianapolis
began to loom large in my destiny. Whenever, literally down to my last single dollar, resorting to pawning the Elgin wristwatch I had received on my fifteenth birthday, or going to a grocery store and trying to redeem, for a box of frozen Birds Eye peas, the coupon my sculptor friend had received upon complaining about a worm he had found in another box of peas—when, in these straits, I approached Haydn for an advance on my royalties, the reply would come, “I'll have to ask Indianapolis.” Mercifully, the response from this city was almost always favorable, ensuring my humble survival, but in any case the name
Indianapolis
acquired the quality of an incantation, rather portentous and ominous at the same time, like
Hanoi
during the time of Vietnam or
Moscow
throughout the Cold War.

The talismanic nature of Indianapolis became even more apparent somewhat later when, exhaustedly, I finished the last chapter of the book and went off as a Marine lieutenant to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where I began training for combat in the Korean War. This was a dark time indeed. Firmly believing that in September, when the book was scheduled to be published, I would be fighting the Chinese in Korea, I spent the spring and summer despairingly in the Carolina swamps, at least part of the time correcting the galleys of
Lie Down in Darkness
. Where Indianapolis came in once again was through the views of Bobbs-Merrill's management over matters of literary taste and propriety.

That time—the late 1940s and early '50s—was a watershed period in our literature. Although some years earlier
Ulysses
had been approved by the federal courts for adult consumption, Joyce's masterpiece was virtually unique in being exempt from the scrutiny of the censors and the puritans. But in the years following World War II there began a profound if gradual change toward permitting writers to express themselves more freely, particularly in the use of the vulgar vernacular and in matters of sex. I emphasize the gradualness of the transition. For example, in
The Naked and the Dead
, published in 1948, Norman Mailer was forced to use, for the common vulgarism describing sexual intercourse, not the four-letter word but a foreshortened three-letter epithet,
fug
. Among other results, this prompted the raunchy old actress Tallulah Bankhead, upon meeting young Mailer for the first time, to say, “Oh, you're the writer who doesn't know how to spell
fuck
.” But the times were changing. The first book in American literature to employ this and other Anglo-Saxon expletives with absolute freedom was James Jones's
From Here to Eternity;
and even
The Catcher in the Rye
, published in that same year, 1951, used the word, although in a way that was intended to demonstrate its offensiveness. It's interesting, by the way, that even today
The Catcher in the Rye
is among the books most frequently yanked off the library shelves of public schools, usually at the behest of angry parents who, ironically and certainly stupidly, seem to be unaware that in this one case the word is seen by the young hero, Holden Caulfield, as objectionable.

But what about
Lie Down in Darkness
, also published in that turning-point year of 1951? As it developed, while I was with the Marines in North Carolina, Hiram Haydn was having trouble with Indianapolis. The powers that be at Bobbs-Merrill were getting upset over a few of the situations and the dialogue in my about-to-be-published manuscript. Unlike Mailer and Jones, I was writing of a domestic fictional milieu in which the common four-letter words were not employed frequently, at least at that time, but I had retained a few of the more or less milder dirty words, as they were called then, and several erotic situations that by present-day standards would seem amusingly tame. Nonetheless, Hiram Haydn, representing the New York office, found himself in conflict with the higher-ups in the Midwest office, and down in the Carolina boondocks I was caught in the cross fire. I remember some of Hiram's messages, which in those days, particularly because of my frequent inaccessibility, reached me by telegram. Once again the name of the capital city of Indiana took on the quality of an incantation. “Indianapolis,” the wire would read, “suggests page 221 drop the word ass. Would you consider
bottom
?” Or, “Indianapolis concerned phrase page 140
felt her up
too suggestive. Would you think of alternative?” And once I got a message that read, “Indianapolis will accept
big boobs
but will you still revise bit about
the open fly
.”

Fortunately, these strictures and reservations did no permanent damage to my text; nor did I feel that my work suffered any major violation. I mostly managed to knuckle under for Indianapolis without complaint. But what I've said does show you how, at midcentury, there still existed in certain quarters in America a point of view about free expression that was severely circumscribed, still profoundly in thrall to nineteenth-century standards and to a prudery that now seems so quaint as to be almost touching. It could
be said, of course, that we have gone over the edge; indeed, there have been some books published in recent years that I've found so scabrous and loathsome that I've yearned, at least for a moment, for a return to Victorian decorum and restraint. Yet my yearning is almost always short-lived. People, after all, are not
forced
to read garbage, which, even if it overwhelms us—or seems to at times—is preferable to censorship.

And this brings me to a consideration of what my chronicle of
Lie Down in Darkness
and its problems has been leading up to—and that is, in fact, freedom of expression in our time, and the importance of libraries to our culture, and the danger that exists to the written word, whether those words be dirty or clean, simple or sublime. For it goes without saying that the written word is in peril, and its enemies are not just the yahoos and the censors but those who dwell in the academic camp.

Let me relate what recently happened to me. If you write long enough you will inevitably suffer the misfortune of having your words subjected to scholarly scrutiny. This is much worse than getting bad reviews. Not long ago I received in the mail a two-hundred-page thesis from a graduate student at a California university that bore the following title—I quote verbatim: “
Sophie's Choice:
A Jungian Perspective.” Beneath this was the description “Prepared for Karl Kracklauer, Ph.D., for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Course ‘Therapeutic Process.' ” I will now quote from the first page of the introduction: “As Styron's Sophie is a complicated character, and because her relationships are multifaceted and equally complex, I focus primarily on a single event in Sophie's life in order to gain entry into her psyche. In analyzing Sophie I rely on Greek mythology, Greek artwork and Jungian psychology.” The important line: “In this paper I analyze the character Sophie from the
movie
‘Sophie's Choice.' ” There was a footnote to this statement that read: “Where the movie was vague I referred to the book,
Sophie's Choice
, for clarification.”

This, it seems to me, is the ultimate anti-literary story. It follows logically that I should want to say a few words about the most pro-literary of institutions, the library. After all, we're gathered here in behalf of a library. I'd like to describe how in my early life the library evolved from a forbidding place, ruled by frightening Minotaurs and guardian demons, into a refuge, the center of my soul's rescue, the friendliest place on earth.

When I was fourteen John Steinbeck's epic novel
The Grapes of Wrath
was published, to mixed reviews. While it was generally praised as a literary
achievement, there were dissenters who were profoundly offended by some of the coarsely realistic language. It should be noted that this language is totally innocuous by present-day standards, containing none of the wicked four-letter vocables that have even plopped onto the pages of the new
New Yorker
. Still, the book had created enormous protest in some quarters; like many works of the period it had been threatened by a ban in—where else?—Boston. My schoolmate Knocky Floyd had somehow briefly gotten hold of a copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
, and he told me that if I, too, could obtain the book I would find on page 232 the word
condom
. Or perhaps it was in the plural—
condoms
. It was a word that was nowhere, even in the dictionaries of those pre–World War II years, nor was another Steinbeckian sizzler, that is,
whore;
the idea of seeing these words in print made me nearly sick with desire, though in fairness to myself I also wanted to read the story of the suffering Joad family. The elderly Miss Evans, God rest her soul, was the librarian who presided over the public library in my hometown in Tidewater Virginia, and it was she whom I confronted when, on a lucky day, I managed at last to find on its shelf one of five or six already smudged and dog-eared copies of this incredibly popular book. As she finished stamping the back page she handed me the book with an intense scowl and asked me my age; when I replied fourteen, she gave a kind of squeal and began to snatch the volume away. “Unfit! Unfit!” Miss Evans cried. “Unfit for your age!” There was a tugging match that both embarrassed and horrified me—she kept repeating “Unfit!” like a malediction—and I finally let her grab the book back in triumph.

The next episode in my depraved quest for sensation took place a year later, when I was fifteen, in New York City. It was my first trip to the metropolis, a vacation at Christmastime from my Virginia prep school. I had a single goal. More than the Statue of Liberty, more than Times Square, my mind was set on one thing. On my second day I trudged through the snow past the icicle-clad lions of the New York Public Library and into the catalog room, where I thumbed through the cards in search of a volume that had been spoken of at school as one of the most erotically arousing works ever printed. I don't exaggerate when I recall my heart being in a near-critical seizure when I located the card and the name of the author, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), and the title, almost brutal in its terrifying promise,
Psychopathia Sexualis
. Every schoolboy of that time wanted to read this Germanic compendium of sexual horrors. With the scrawled Dewey decimal
number and the title in hand I made my way to the circulation desk. Miss Evans would have approved of her much younger male counterpart: his face wore a look of lordly contempt. He was tall; in those days I was short. He looked down at me as, in my changing voice, I croaked out my request; he said scathingly, “This book is for specialists. Are you a specialist in the field?”