Trust (93 page)

But
Trust
too wound on and on. All around me writers of my generation were publishing; I was not. I held it as an article of faith that if you had not attained print by twenty-five, you were inexorably marked by a scarlet F—for Folly, for Futility, for Failure. It was a wretched and envious time. I knew a writer my own age, as confident as he was industrious, who had recently completed a novel in six weeks. I was determined to emulate his feat. I threw the already massive
Trust
into a drawer and started a fresh manuscript—my second "first" novel; in a month and a half it was done. It had exhausted me, but I was also relieved and elated: I had finally finished a novel. It disappeared decades ago—lost, I believe, in the dust of a London publisher's cellar. A carbon copy (how obsolete these words are!) may be languishing in my own cellar, but I have never troubled to look for it; dead is dead. And the speedy writer I was mimicking—or hoping to rival—never published that or any other novel.

Three years elapsed between the completion of
Trust
and its appearance in print. I filled the void by writing short stories and teaching freshman composition to engineering students; but mainly I was waiting. The editor who had accepted my manuscript explained that he would soon supply "suggestions." Secretly I dreaded these—I had labored over every syllable for all those seven years—but I was wedded to diffidence and gratitude, and clearly my unpublished condition was subordinate to the editor's will, and certainly to his more pressing preoccupations. As it happened, I had acquired an agent along the way—an agent just starting out, living obscurely in a Manhattan basement. He had read a poem of mine in a literary quarterly, had discovered that a novel was "in progress," and offered to represent me. It was in a letter to him, after six months had passed and no suggestions were forthcoming, that I complained of the editor's silence. "I see you have clay feet," the agent wrote back, reprimanding me for untoward impatience. Another twelve months followed, and still no word from the editor. At last I made an anguished appeal, and was rewarded with a reply. He was working, the editor said, on an important book by a professor at Harvard (his name was Henry Kissinger); nevertheless he would set aside half an hour for me. He hadn't been neglectful of my manuscript, he assured me—on the contrary, for an entire year he had been compiling a long list of notes for the improvement of my novel.

The publisher's offices struck me as industrial—so many elevators, so many corridors, so many mazes and cubicles. I found the cubicle I had been directed to and looked in. There sat the editor, with a typewriter on an open leaf beside him; there on a big littered desk lay the familiar box containing my manuscript. I watched him insert a sheet of yellow paper into the machine and begin to type. "Come in," he said, seeing me hesitant in the doorway. I continued to watch him type, and all at once understood that there was no long list of notes; there had never been any notes at all; he was at that moment conjuring a handful of impromptu comments out of the air. For this I had been kept in a vise of anxiety for a year and a half.

Not long afterward, the editor, a young man still in his thirties, fell dead of a heart attack on the tennis court. Another editor took his place, and quickly put before me the first hundred pages of
Trust,
scribbled all over in red pencil. The famous suggestions! A meek petitioner facing power, I knew by now that I must succumb—I must please the new editor, or lose the chance of publication. My decision was instant. I declined every stroke of his red pencil. I believed in Art; I believed, above all, in the autonomy of Art; and for the sake of this sacral conviction I chose my novel's oblivion. Better oblivion than an alien fingerprint! To my astonishment, the new editor agreed to publish
Trust
exactly as I had written it. His name was David Segal, and like the editor who had hoodwinked me, he too died young. As for the hoodwinker, I long refused the ameliorative
de mortuis nil nisi bonum:
of the dead let nothing bad be said. Yet David Segal, as long as he lived, was wont to dismiss the good I repeatedly said of him: "You think I'm a great editor," he accused me, "because I never edited you."

Why did I believe in Art, and in the autonomy of Art, and in the sacred character of the dedicated writer? All this derived, in part, from ambition—a species of ambition that itself derived from the last trickles of the nineteenth century leaching into the twentieth. The nineteenth century did not stop abruptly in the year 1901, with the death of Queen Victoria, or the assassination of President McKinley, or the formulation of the quantum theory, or the inauguration of Picasso's Blue Period. In mores especially, the nineteenth century lingered on—even through the Modernist eruptions of the twenties—into the thirties and forties, and into a portion of the fifties. In the forties song sheets could still be bought in stationery shops, and "patterns" for sewing dresses at home were still on sale in department stores. Secretaries wore felt hats to the office, and the rare women executives wore them
in
the office. Little girls were reading the social archaisms of the Bobbsey Twins series, and boys were immersed in the plucky if antiquated adventures of the Hardy Boys. Tabloids published one-page daily fictions called "short shorts"; big-circulation magazines unfailingly published stories. And literary ambition earnestly divided high from low, serious from popular, fiction from journalism, and novelists from the general run of mankind. (Nor was "mankind" regarded as gender-biased.) Literary writers frowned on commercial success as the antithesis of artistic probity. T. S. Eliot (despite the vastness of his own success) was the archbishop of High Art, that immaculate altar, and in his vatic wake Lionel Trilling was similarly pained by the juxtaposition of literature and money (his worship of Hemingway notwithstanding). Bohemianism meant living apart, living for art, despising Babbitry.

All these attitudes and atmospheres fell away no earlier than sixty or seventy years into the twentieth century: it took that long for nineteenth-century literary sensibilities to ebb. Modernism hardly contradicted these impressions; it confirmed and augmented them. But by the 1970s, the novel as the holy vessel of imagination (itself having deposed poetry) was undone. Magazines dropped fiction. Notions of journalism as the equal of imaginative writing took hold (the "nonfiction novel," pioneered by Truman Capote, replicated by Norman Mailer). Bohemians who had been willing enough to endure the romantic penury of cold-water walkups while sneering at popular entertainment were displaced by beatniks who were themselves popular entertainment. Walt Whitman was transmogrified into Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. From
beat
you were to infer
beatific,
and the New Age of faux mysticism (via hallucinogens) had begun. New theories leveled the literary terrain—so that, visiting Yale a decade or so ago, I was startled to encounter a young professor of English deconstructing a hamburger advertisement with the same gravity as an earlier professoriat would have devoted to a discussion of
Paradise Lost.

With such radical (and representative) changes in the culture, and with High Art in the form of the novel having lost its centrality, the nature of ambition too was bound to alter. This is not to say that young writers today are no longer driven—and some may even be possessed—by the strenuous forces of literary ambition. Zeal, after all, is a constant, and so must be the pool, or the sea, of born writers. But the great engines of technology lure striving talents to television and Hollywood, or to the lighter varieties of theater, or (especially) to the prompt gratifications and high-velocity fame of the magazines, where topical articles generate buzz and gather no moss. The sworn novelists, who, despite the devourings of the hour, continue to revere the novel (the novel as moss, with its leisurely accretions of character and incident, its disclosures of secrets, its landscapes and cityscapes and mindscapes, its idiosyncratic particularisms of language and insight)—these sworn novelists remain on the scene, if not on the rise.

Still, there is a difference. The altars are gone. The priests are dead. Writers and artists of all kinds are no longer publicly or privately abashed by the rewards of commerce. The arbiters of literary culture have either departed (few remember Irving Howe, say, or Randall Jarrell) or have devolved into popular celebrities, half sage, half buffoon.

When I began
Trust,
close to fifty years ago, ambition meant what James Joyce had pronounced it to be, in a mantra that has inflamed generations:
silence, exile, and cunning.
Silence and exile were self-explanatory: the novelist was to be shut away in belief—self-belief, perhaps—and also in the monkish conviction that Literature was All. But cunning implied something more than mere guile. It hinted at power, power sublime and supernal, the holy power of language and its cadences—the sentence, the phrase, and ultimately, primordially, the word: the germ of being. As chosen sibyl of the word, I was scornful of so-called writers who produced "drafts," in the shape of an imperfect spew to be returned to later, in order, as one novelist described it, "to polish the verbal surface." The verbal surface! The word could no more be defined by its surface than the sea could be fathomed by its coastline; and I could no more abandon a sentence, even temporarily, than I could skip a substantial interval of breathing with a promise to make up for it afterward. Until the sentence, the phrase, the word, were as satisfactorily woven as the weaver's shuttle could thread them, I would not tread further: in Henry James's formulation, "the finer thread, the tighter weave." Or recall Jacob's struggle with the angel: "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." Until I felt its nimbus, I would not let any cluster of words go.

It was slow work, and it owed more to Henry James than it did to the angel of Genesis. I kept on my writing table (a Worn old hand-me-down, three feet by one and a half, that I had acquired at age eight) a copy of
The Ambassadors,
as a kind of talisman. I kept it there not so much for the sake of James's late prose (though it often seemed that his penchant for intrusively interlocutory adverbs seeped into my fountain pen's rubber ink-bulb) as for the scent of ambition: the worldliness of his characters, the visual brilliance of his long scenes, the seductiveness of his betrayals, the veiled innocence of his young women, the subtlety of his moral conundrums, and not least his debt to human possibility, and also to human taint. His muse was tragic; and so was mine. What James felt in his worship of Balzac was what I suffered in my fealty to James: Balzac appeared to him "so multitudinous, so complex, so far-spreading, so suggestive, so portentous—...such misty edges and far reverberations—that the imagination, oppressed and overwhelmed, shrinks from any attempt to grasp it whole." Yet it was just this multitudinousness, this complexity, this far-spreadingness I was after. I named my novel
Trust
with biting intent: it was to denote a vast and cynical irony. I meant to map every species of i/i'strust—between parent and child; between husband and wife; between lovers; between Europe and America; between Christians and Jews; between God and man; in politics and in history. Before the term "Holocaust" was put to use or even known, the death camps entered
Trust;
in 1957, scarcely a decade after the ovens had cooled, who could fail to address them? (Many did.) Enoch Vand, my protagonist's stepfather, confronting the goddess Geopolitica, records the names of the victims in masses of ledgers:

And he could not confess for the sake of whom or what he dug down deep in those awesome volumes, sifting their name-burdened and number-laden leaves as soil is spaded and weighed in search of sunken graves and bones time-turned to stone—he could not say or tell.... Enoch leaned brooding among the paper remnants of the damned: the lists and questionnaires, the numbers and their nemeses; every table spread with the worms' feast; the room a registry and bursary for smoke and cinders. Over it all his goddess hung. If she wore a pair of bucklers for her breasts, they gleamed for him and shimmered sound like struck cymbals; if slow vein-blood drooped like pendants from her gored ears, they seemed to him jewels more gradual than pearls—she formed herself out of the slaughter, the scarves and winds of smoke met to make her hair, the cinders clustered to make her thighs; she was war, death, blood, perpetual misbirths; she came up enlightened from that slaughter like a swimmer from the towering water-wall with his glorified face; she came up an angel from that slaughter and the fire-whitened cinders of those names. She came up Europa.

And elsewhere, the meditation of a refugee from Vienna, reduced in exile to a servant:

Grit is one of the eternals. The chimneys heave their laden bladders, the grit is spawned out of a domestic cloud in the lowest air, the black footless ants appear on the sill. Brush away, mop away, empty buckets with zeal; grit returns. Everything is flux; grit is forever. Futility is day after day. Time is not what we suppose, moments in an infinite queue, but rather a heavy sense that we have been here before, only with hope, and are here again, only without it. "Your luck will not change," says Time, "give up, the world has concerns of its own," says Time, "woe cannot be shared," says Time, "regret above all is terrifyingly individual." And Time says, "Take no comfort in your metaphysics of the immortality of the race. When your species has evolved out of recognition grit will be unspoiled. There will always be grit. It alone endures. It is greater than humanity."

But it is not greater than humanity; it is the same. We join the particles in their dance on the sill. It is the magnificent Criminal plan, to shove us into the side of a hill, mulch us until we are dissolved into something more useful but less spectacular than before, and send us out again in the form of a cinder for some churl of a descendant to catch in his eye, cursing.... Who can revere a universe which will take that lovely marvel, man (after all the fierce mathematics that went into him, aeons of fish straining toward the dry, gill into lung, paw into the violinist's and the dentist's hand), and turn him into a carbon speck?