The Adding Machine (11 page)

Could this proliferation of competitive angles precipitate a revival of old-time potlatches? The potlatch was a competitive destruction of property carried out until one contestant was rained and frequently died of shame on the spot. It is interesting to consider American tycoons sitting on this game — blowing up their factories and mines and oil wells, burning their crops and sloshing oil on their beaches, irradiating their land, irrigating with salt water, letting the frozen food rot, burning Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, original Rembrandts, destroying Greek statues with air hammers ... the American team drops atom bombs on America while China and Russia match us bomb for bomb on their own ground.

The potlatch was invented by the Northwest Coast Indians in the area that is now British Columbia, and it occupied most of their time. Objects destroyed at these uncomfortable occasions included salmon oil, blankets, and coppers. Salmon oil poured on an open fire at the center of the room frequently singed honored guests in the front row, who were obliged by protocol to evince no signs of displeasure. The coppers were engraved shields of thin copper about three feet by two feet, and are now highly valued as curios.

A copper receives its value from the number of potlatches it has weathered: THIS IS THE GREAT COPPER BEFORE WHICH OTHER COPPERS PISS THEMSELVES LIKE BITCH DOGS.’ And cowardly coppers shrink back, losing value. You see, a potent copper like this represents so many value units, just as modern art objects may derive value from a series of competitive manipulations: this soup can represents fifty burnt kitchen chairs, twenty urinals, and a Wyeth pig. Competitive over-inflation of values could lead
to La Chute de l’Art;
a total collapse of the art market. Imagine the artist
Bourse
where all the painters stand by their pictures — frenzied phone calls from broker to collector ... ‘Your margin’s wiped out, B.J. You gotta cover with the gilt-edge stuff — you know what I mean: Monets, Renoirs, Rembrandts, Picassos .. ,’ And then: PICASSO SLUMPS SHARPLY AS HIS ENTIRE OUTPUT IS DUMPED ON THE MARKET BY FRANTIC DEALERS ... As an artist falls off the Board he is obligated by the Board of Health to surrender his pictures to the public incinerator. What art and what artists would survive the holocaust? And how’s this for an angle, B.J.? Now this ART grabs you by the balls, see? It hits you in the stomach and dampens your eyes. So the artist gets behind his picture like Punch and Judy and reaches right out through it and grabs a critic by his lapels or slugs him in the guts and sprays him with tear gas. Lots of ways you can slant this. Dead cows in the grass. Dogs leap out of a picture. Vernissage guests savagely clubbed’ by picture cops. It finally gets so that pictures of dangerous animals, electric chairs, riots, fires, and explosions have the gallery to themselves. Will cows in the grass make a comeback? A critic was gored yesterday. Another drowned in a Monet river and a Bacon exhibition has given rise to unfavorable mutations ...

What has happened here? Art has become literal and returned to its magical function of making it happen, after a long exile in the realms of imagination where its appetite for happenings has become inordinate. Now suddenly art makes its lethal eruption into the so-called real world. Writing and painting were in the beginning and the word was written image. Now painters paint a future before it is written, having outstripped the retarded twin, writing, and left it back there with the ABC’s. Will writing catch up?

A writer who writes a book about a virgin soil epidemic, impregnating his pages with the virus described .. . this book about Poland in a typhus epidemic has typhus lice concealed in the bindings, to be released as book-of-the-month-club ladies turn the pages. Mektoub. It is written. Others have radioactive pages dusted lightly with botulism. The reader is no longer safely reading about sharks while she belches out chocolate fumes; on the page is a powerful shark attractant. Others scorn such crude tricks and rely on the powers of magic — potent spells and curses, often firmed by human sacrifice, flutter from these pestilent pages.

‘Beauty kills. Beauty is the murderer,’ in the words of Gregory Corso, and painting is reunited with its stupid brother, writing, in books done entirely in pictographs. And by now all books are scented with the appropriate odors and readers are provided with scent bottles for renewal... Musky Ozone, Rain on Horseflesh, Empty Locker Rooms... Finally comes the Master of the Empty Page, which can only be by initiates ...

LA CHUTE DU MOT.
.. what survives the literalization of art is the timeless ever-changing world of magic caught in the painter’s brash, or the writer’s words, bits of vivid and vanishing detail in space any number of painters can dance on the end of a brash, and the writer makes a soundless bow and disappears into the alphabet.

In writing the old-style novel, there was a more or less clear-cut technology and aim. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had plot, it had chapters that maintained suspense, one chapter ending with a suspense situation which led to another chapter on a different character, then back to the suspense situation, building to a climax. The aim was basically to entertain the readers and to sell books. Critics still criticize authors for not writing novels of this sort, even when the novelist is not attempting to do so. Now painting and writing are split into schools and movements. The technology and aim of one movement may be quite different from those of another — if you are doing mobiles, the silkscreen technology of Pop Art is of no use.

Now consider some writers who have said something about the technology of writing. Other writers may not say anything directly, but their concepts of aim and technology may be implicit in the work that is done. I have previously mentioned Graham Greene; he is frankly horrified at the thought of formulating a technology of writing. ‘Evelyn Waugh was my very good friend, but we never discussed
writing.’
This is the English game, of course; talk about the weather, talk about anything so long as it isn’t important. Not much help from Mr Greene — go to Downside, become a bad Catholic and talk about the weather. He definitely does represent the Gatsby point of view.

There are some do’s and don’ts. The sound of the first sentence often determines if anyone will read the book or not. Here’s a really atrocious first sentence: ‘Herr that unpronounceable name, Hereditary Commander and Chief of the Fleet of Droco, Fisher of the Western Seas, leader in sacrifice, an oracle of the stars, spread his wings and brought them together again in an astonishing thunderclap’. First of all, he has an incomprehensible if not unpronounceable name, he has too many titles, and he already has wings. It’s all right if he has wings, but you’ve got to lead up to it.

Now to quote another first sentence, this time one that makes it: ‘Jon Ominar,’ (easy to pronounce) ‘Emperor of the East’, (only got one title) ‘reclined in his garden, watching a man being prepared for slow impalement.’

Hemingway has quite a lot to say about writing. He started writing of course as a journalist, which he considered very valuable training. He says use short words and short sentences, although he doesn’t always do this by any means. He uses short words, but in very long sentences sometimes. He said to look at the person or object in front of you and transcribe what you see. He also developed a number of exercises, like describing a scene from a viewpoint, then removing the viewpoint and leaving the description. It’s as if I described everyone in my class from this viewpoint, then removed myself and just left the description. Take out the ‘I’. What his technology boils down to, however, is how to write Hemingway.

The same thing is true of Kerouac and Wolfe. Kerouac had the idea that the first draft was always the best. You should just let the mind flow and type away, and never change it. Well, that’s all right for him, but it’s not my way of writing. I told him that. I revise. It’s how to write Kerouac. And Wolfe is much the same.

Hemingway has been admired and praised by critics for things that he did not do.
The Sun Also Rises
has been acclaimed as the definitive statement of the Lost Generation. It wasn’t. There’s more of the 1920’s in one page of Fitzgerald than in the whole of Hemingway. That wasn’t what Hemingway was doing, and he can’t be criticized for that. He wasn’t evoking a period the way Fitzgerald was.

Hemingway has been described as a master of dialogue. He isn’t. No one talks like people talk in Hemingway’s novels except people in Hemingway’s novels. John O’Hara, not nearly as good a writer, is much more a master of dialogue than Hemingway. You know when you read John O’Hara that that’s something he actually heard someone say.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say that there’s nothing in Hemingway except Hemingway, but that’s really the way I feel about it. It’s not exactly a criticism, because that’s what Hemingway was doing. Hemingway had such a distinctive style that he was trapped in it forever. Nevertheless I think Hemingway came closer to writing himself in present time, closer to writing his life and death, than any other writer. Of course Mishima wrote about
hara kiri
and then later committed it. A French writer of detective stories wrote ‘Then he walked across the room, opened the window, and jumped out.’ After typing these lines, he walked across the room, opened the window, and jumped out. Well, that’s cheating. I mean, Hemingway wrote his death as a character, not as an actor. The difference being, anybody can write ‘And then he shot himself and then shoot himself, if he is prepared to do this. I’m talking about someone who writes ‘And then he was shot’ and is himself shot by someone else. That’s the trick.

All his life Hemingway was plagued by strange incidents. A skylight fell on him in Paris, he broke his toe kicking a gate in, he gaffed a shark and while shooting it in the head with his Colt Woodsman .22, with which he could unerringly shatter wine bottles at 100 feet, the gaff broke and he shot himself in both legs. A lady hunter nearly blew his head off with a shotgun. Several auto accidents; concussion after concussion. The
picadors
are at work.

Hemingway could smell death. He suddenly left a chateau which he said had the stink of death about it, and after he left, the chateau was bombed and several people killed. And he could smell death on others. I have already related incidents.

Hemingway wrote himself as a character. He wrote his life and death so closely that he had to be stopped before he found out what he was doing and wrote about that. There is the moment when the bull looks speculatively from the cape to the matador. The bull is learning. The matador must kill him quick. Two plane crashes in a row, both near Kilimanjaro. The matador has to smash his head against the window of a burning plane. Otherwise he would have found out why two planes crashed near Kilimanjaro; he wrote it. He wrote it in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro,
where Death is the pilot. ‘He was pointing now, white white white as far as the eye can see ahead, the snows of Kilimanjaro.’ That’s the last line.

He who writes death as the pilot of a small plane in Africa should beware of small planes in Africa, especially in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. But it was written, and he stepped right into his own writing. The brain damage he sustained butting his way out of the burning plane led to a hopeless depression and eventually to his suicide. He put both barrels of a 12 gauge shotgun, No. ‘heavy duck load, against his forehead and tripped both triggers. Fix yourself on that: ‘White white white as far as the eye can see ahead... the snows of Kilimanjaro.’

And unlike the French detective writer, Hemingway wasn’t cheating by the act of suicide. He was dead already.

Now suppose you had all the works of a particular writer and could only take some with you, which would be the first you’d throw away? I would get rid of No Man is an Island,
Across the River and into the Trees, The Green Hills of Africa, and Death in the Afternoon
. In
Across the River
etc. he was writing himself close, but it was not good — not good at all. It is just about the worst of Hemingway’s books.

But I would certainly keep
The Snows of Kilimanjaro,
which remains one of the greatest stories about death ever written, because he wrote his own death in that story. Perhaps he was too much of an egoist to write anything else.

Hemingway talks about looking at what is in front of you. Well, a young man who wanted to learn how to write went fishing with Papa Hemingway and asked him about writing. Papa replied, ‘Try to figure out why I cussed you out ten minutes ago and how the sun looked on the side of that marlin I just caught.’ But between Hemingway’s eyes and the object, falls the shadow of Hemingway.

Korzybski says the creative process takes place when you look at an object or a process in silence. And this I think is especially true of dialogue. If you can look at a character without talking, from inner silence, then your character will talk, and you get realistic dialogue. Take something that you actually heard someone say, then let him say that and look at him; pretty soon he’ll say some more in the same lines. I remember this amazing used car salesman, from Houston. He was the one who told me ‘You know all a Jew wants to do is doddle a Christian girl, you know that yourself.’ Well, I didn’t say anything, but if I sat him down right here, he could say a lot more along the same lines, I’m sure.

But Hemingway didn’t give his characters a chance to talk. He always talked for them, and they all talk Hemingway. Take
The Killers;
it reads well, a good story, and very carefully assembled. The dialogue sounds good, but how good is it? Here are the two killers waiting around for the Swede, gassing meantime with the counterman in this diner.

And then they’re leaving, they’re deciding whether they’re going to kill the counterman or not.